Google Docs Templates

Google Docs recently added over 300 templates for a variety of business documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Need templates for a calendar, a letter, a resume, or even Avery-compatible labels? You’re good to go.

My favorites are in the eclectic “Miscellaneous” section, where you’ll find templates for athletes, parents, wedding or event planners, wine nerds, screenwriters — even “animal guardians”.

Cool new resource and a neat idea. Yet another reason for MS Office to keep an eye on its dwindling lunch.

I’m looking forward to spending some time with these, because I’m a huge GDocs nerd. Can’t wait until you can edit Google Documents via your iPhone. That’s when the game really changes.

Merlin Mann

Google Docs Templates

Google Docs recently added over 300 templates for a variety of business documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Need templates for a calendar, a letter, a resume, or even Avery-compatible labels? You’re good to go.

My favorites are in the eclectic “Miscellaneous” section, where you’ll find templates for athletes, parents, wedding or event planners, wine nerds, screenwriters — even “animal guardians”.

Cool new resource and a neat idea. Yet another reason for MS Office to keep an eye on its dwindling lunch.

I’m looking forward to spending some time with these, because I’m a huge GDocs nerd. Can’t wait until you can edit Google Documents via your iPhone. That’s when the game really changes.

Merlin Mann

MLive.com
New dean joins MSU College of Law
MLive.com, MI - 11 hours ago
Joan Howarth began July 1 as dean of the MSU law school, coming from the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada Las Vegas where she had ...(author unknown)

With an automated testing framework in core, Drupal is now far along the road to a practice of Test-driven development. But there's one thing missing: a complete, in-depth, up-to-date tutorial on how to actually write these tests. Although there is the SimpleTest Automator module to help you create these tests through the user interface, it is currently imperfect and under development, so this post will be a tutorial on writing these tests manually.

Testing resources

Here's just a general list of resources we should keep handy while writing our test:

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(author unknown)

Drupal is in the running as a finalist for the SourceForge 2008 Community awards in 5 categories. Voting ends on Friday.

1. Best project
2. Best project for Enterprise
3. Best project for Educators
4. Best Tool or Utility for Developers
5. Most Likely to Change the World

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Amazon

The 1.0 release of the SMS Framework is now available for download from Drupal.org. The project has come a long way since it’s initial development release last summer and is now ready for use. Numerous fixes and functionality improvements have turned the SMS Framework into a robust tool for integrating SMS and Drupal.

This release introduces a rewritten SMS user module, which allows your users to provide and confirm their mobile information. Thanks to Tylor from Raincity Studios an SMS receive module and a gateway module for Mobile Muse are included in version 1.0. Expect to see more gateway modules with receiving support in future releases.

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(author unknown)

I do most of my work using ssh and other command line tools, such as vim and screen. This is the environment I am most comfortable and productive in. However, this is not always an option working on client sites. Some do not have ssh enabled for various reasons, including hosting restrictions (e.g. shared hosting) or security concerns and workplace policies.

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Now that CCK and Views have release candidates for Drupal 6, it's the perfect time to start hammering down on the list of modules that haven't been ported yet. This video demonstrates how anyone with basic copy/paste/modify PHP skills can help port Drupal modules. Really! It's not nearly as bad as you think. :)

Topics covered include:

• How to tell the module portage status of your Drupal site with the Upgrade Status module.
• How to perform basic community research to determine the actual porting status of your modules.
• Overview of the amazing Coder module and how to configure it.
• Where to find more information about changes between Drupal versions.
• How to use Coder module to convert a simple module from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6, step by step.
• How to test to ensure the porting status was a success.

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(author unknown)

A new bill, The Orphan Works Act of 2008, is currently making its way through congress, and it threatens to take away copyright protection from unregistered works. This includes virtually all open source software.

Essentially, the bill (as I understand it -- and I'm not a lawyer) will modify copyright law such that if the owner of a work can not be found by "reasonable search", anyone can use the work for whatever they want, regardless of the author's intentions, or the license the work was released under.

This means companies could ignore the GPL, or any other open source license, simply by claiming they couldn't find the author. If a copyright holder decides to sue, the infringing party just has to show proof that they performed a "reasonable search".

The bill requires anyone who wants to maintain their copyright to register it (presumably for a fee) in a database with the following information:

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One of my most popular Drupal modules - Global Redirect - has just had an update from 1.2 to 1.3. This update includes several fixes for the following:

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Shared by jbrauer
Consilio Executive Mentorship website (author unknown)

Shared by jbrauer
Computed Field Module for Drupal content management system (author unknown)

From the early days, Drupal had the ability to embed PHP code in its content. This provides flexibility and functionality, most importantly, nodes and blocks can contain dynamically fetched data from the database using custom queries and displayed them in other content. This is an easy approach to get such data without writing a module. All you need to do is assign the PHP input format filter to the node or block and paste your PHP code in it, and voila, you have dynamic content.

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(author unknown)

Yay! I wanted this to happen long ago, but by delaying we managed to get Views, CCK and OG to all roll release candidates on the same day!

Release announcement here: http://drupal.org/node/277856

(author unknown)

Filed under: OS, Mac 101

Sharing screen grabs and screencasts is a great way to show someone exactly how to do something with their Macs. You've got several choices for screencast software (here's a list of posts in our screencast category), but snapping a simple screen grab is much simpler.

Using Apple's Grab application you have a few options:

1. Shift + Command + 3 produces a snapshot of the whole screen
2. Shift + Command + 4 produces a crosshair that you can drag over a specific area of your screen
3. Shift + Command + 4 followed by the space bar turns the crosshair into a camera

Number three will let you grab a single window. The problem is that it includes that window's shadow, which you might not want. Fortunately, MacOSXHints has described how to exclude the shadow. A single line typed in the Terminal will get the job done.

That's great and all, but for some real fun, take a screenshot of a collegue's desktop, move all his desktop icons onto his hard drive, set your screenshot as the desktop image and feign ignorace while he clicks furiously on his "icons." You're welcome.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Dave Caolo

I recently made my first alpha release of the Drupal Memetracker module. You can download it from the project page on the Drupal community site.

An screenshot from the latest code:

A quick refresher on what my project is all about taken from my original proposal to Google Summer of Code.

memetracker = smart aggregator:

An aggregator is software like Drupal Planet or PlanetPlanet that aggregates related content from many sources to display in a central location. But current aggregators are dumb. The dumb aggregator knows no better than to pull in new content and order it chronologically.

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(author unknown)

Web Content Management System Trainer (Corvallis, OR)

Oregon State University department is looking to fill a 1-year, half-time, temporary information technology consultant position to design and deliver training and support in the use of Drupal web content management system, and to assist in migrating web sites to this system in a systematic and timely manner. Specific duties are:

-Design and deliver Drupal workshops within the state of Oregon and participate in other training activities.

-Consult with individual faculty and staff about Drupal, page design, and website design.

-Develop online training materials in support of Drupal integration.

-Respond to requests for help on specific website design and maintenance issues.

Required Qualifications:
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field and at least one-year experience in design and delivery of workshops and other forms of training in a technical context, or equivalent education and experience. Strong web site and page design skills. Demonstrated customer service orientation, excellent organizational, interpersonal and communication skills, and the ability to perform self-directed work. Telecommuting may be possible for some aspects of the position, but applicant must be willing to travel as needed to deliver training events around the state of Oregon.

Preferred Qualifications:
Familiarity with Drupal CMS, XHTML, CSS, multimedia, and graphic arts skills a plus. Experience designing online help modules and providing technology consultation/training support in a higher education context desirable.

If interested, please submit cover letter and resume to the reply to address (see Craigslisting at
http://corvallis.craigslist.org/web/707921727.html).

Position closes: 07/20/2008

Location: Corvallis, OR
Compensation: $16.00 per hour
This is a part-time job.

Willamette Valley / Western Oregonhinojosu

A3 Atlantis is my newest contribution to the Drupal community. Designed from the ground up to be fast, elegant, and search engine friendly, this theme features a stunning visual design, beautiful typography, and a standards-compliant code base.

A3 Atlantis was designed exclusively for Drupal, and is licensed under the GPL.

This free Drupal theme is currently available for Drupal 5, and a 6.x version is in the pipeline. I also plan to release some additional variants of this theme in the near future.

Check out the project page, or take the live demo for a test drive!

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(author unknown)

Hey folks,

I feel compelled to announce this. Please Please Please read this post if you have done any multilingual drupal development.

Do not use t() outside of a hook or before locale gets to build its cache

I was asked to do some profiling on a colleague’s site, and I found this little doozy in the location_views module:

http://drupal.org/node/253813

The offending line is:

define('LOCATION_VIEWS_UNKNOWN', t('unknown'));

Okay, so what is the problem? When drupal starts up, it runs through many “bootstrappping states”:

Booting Drupal’s locale module

The last one is:

case DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL: require_once './includes/common.inc'; _drupal_bootstrap_full(); break; }

Now let’s look at the end of _drupal_bootstap_full:

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(author unknown)

In presentations I usually point out that Drupal is three things:

1. A content management system: The forms you fill out, the buttons you click, and the content work with. The stuff you interact with every day while you manage your site.
2. A content management framework: The low-level APIs that let you extend and modify Drupal to make it do everything from ratings to image galleries to your dishes.
3. A community: The thousands of documentation writers, developers, testers, support providers, designers, and evangelists from all over the world, working together to make Drupal a better platform every single day.

It's this third point I'd like to talk a little more about today, by providing some insights into the general Drupal community philosophies that guide our interactions with one another, and as a result, the growth and direction of the Drupal project as a whole.

The Drupal community has several core philosophies, some of which are documented, others of which you just kind of pick up from spending enough time watching various interactions on the forums, on issue queues, and on the mailing lists. Here's a brief guide, for the uninitiated.

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