Drupal

Sat, Sep 5, 2009 by Jonathan

My first experience with the Quiz module was amusing, to say the least. A project, which I had just finished, required registered users to be able to take different quizzes and successfully complete them in order to receive a certificate. I turned to the quiz module to avoid any custom coding. Overall, I was able to do what I needed. However, below I have listed three issues I had ran into:

1. No import/export of quizzes.

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Our research group at the University of Michigan has been working on the "related modules" block for Drupal.org for more than 2 years now. We have published 2 papers on this project so far:

1) Assessment of Conversation Co-mentions as a Resource for Software Module Recommendation. Will be presented at ACM Recommender System Conference'09

2) Conversation Pivots and Double Pivots. Presented at ACM Computer Human Interaction Conference'08

Cantine: 151, passage Montmartre, Passage des Panoramas, 75002 Paris, France

I just attended a very interesting session at Drupalcon Paris called Paying for the plumbing. It's a panel involving Allie Micka (Advantage Labs), Angie Byron (Lullabot), Karen Stevenson (Lullabot and recently a freelancer), Tiffany Farriss (Palantir relatively new to Drupal but a long lived company), Eric Gunderson (Development Seed).

Some choice quotes on coordination and business of open source

After some introductions and Allie saying that she didn't want to hear the same old tired platitudes (which was a brilliant start to the session) we got into some discussion with the panel and the audience. Here are a few quotes and paraphrases of what people had to say.

Tiffany Farriss of Palantir gave the perspective that we should

Budget in 10% to every project for "patching."

I assume "patching" means communicating with the module maintainer and re-rolling the patch and making it awesome.

Which is a decent point, we do need to kind of just do this as part of our normal business, but that doesn't pay for the big things nor the "plumbing" but just for incremental improvements.

Further, Tiffany said:

Require all your code to be GPL and tell clients you're going to release it and announce it as best you can.

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One of the things I am always being asked by clients is how to reduce the number of clicks users have to do to get to the information they want.
If you are using views then one way to do this is to go to

admin/build/views/edit/[viewname] > Fields > add field : Node:Body - exclude from display. Then order the fields so this is at the top. In Fields > Node: Title > tick [Output this field as a link] > Link path: [view_node] > Alt text: [body] > Update > Save.

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Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/merlinofchaos/the-chaos-tools-suite

This is the modal test module. You can create the .info file that goes with it.
<?php
/**
* Implementation of hook_menu().
*/
function modal_test_menu() {
$items = array();

$items['modal_test'] = array(
'title' => 'Modal test',
'access callback' => TRUE,
'page callback' => 'modal_test_page',
);

$items['modal_test/form'] = array(
'title' => 'AJAX modal dialog',
'access callback' => TRUE,
'page callback' => 'modal_test_popup',
'type' => MENU_CALLBACK,
);

Greetings from Drupalcon Paris!

Today, September 4, 2009, from 2:30 to 3:30, Trellon will be presenting a session with Gary Love of Hearst Digitial News to talk about 29-95.com. This web site is an interesting example of what you can do with Drupal in publishing, and we are going to be providing a case study of how it came together, the technology behind it, and some of the business challenges the Houston Chronicle faced in conceptualizing and deploying the site. You can expect to receive slides and notes from the session on trellon.com afterwards. Michael Haggerty, Trellon's CEO and Chief Internet Strategist, and Marc Ingram, Trellon's Technical Lead, will be speaking along with Gary as part of the session.

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Presentation on the Aegir hosting system that makes managing thousands of Drupal sites easy

There have already been two sessions about Aegir at DrupalCon Paris (Roel's Aegir: Build Once, Deploy Often session session showing examples of Aegir in action and Jeff's talk about Open Atrium, Aegir, and Features), as well as many productive conversations. I'm excited to add to this with my presentation tomorrow - Automate Your Site Troubles Away with the Aegir Hosting System - happening at 9:00 am in the Gulbenkian room.

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Teaser: 

In case you missed it - OpenPublish Version 1.5 is now available for download.

In case you missed it, Phase2 Technology released OpenPublish version 1.5 yesterday. It includes the latest upgrades of Drupal modules likePanels3, cck, devel, imagecache, feedapi and mollom. And, it comes bundled with the Acquia Network module, which is a great option for support. Version 1.5 also has two neat options for content monetization: Quantcast and Contenture. Quantcast lets publishers tag their site, analyze audience and thus get the most effective advertisements.

Last Monday I released a first version of Node Page Template.
This little module makes it possible to configure a page template per content type and per node. It also makes a node template suggestions based upon that page template.

Default theme function makes an Node template suggestion per content type and per node, and this adds a Page template suggestion. When 'Default' is selected, there is no additional suggestion.

More information can be found at http://drupal.org/project/node_page

Happy theming.

Last Monday I released a patch for AutomaticMenu to make it Drupal 6 compatible. While I was at it, I included i18n support, with the possibility to select a different parent menu item per language per content type. I use it at a customers site and no problems reported so far. You can find more information about the patch and the port in total at http://drupal.org/node/275889

Setup a Feature Server fast, then read about what’s coming next

In between Open Atrium beta1 and beta2, I took a detour to release the first alpha of [Feature Server][fserver]. Feature Server lets you share releases of your features, themes, and custom modules with the world and provides release notifications to users using the Drupal core Update status module whenever you roll out a new version. We've provided a simple starter theme called [Singular][singular] to help you get your own feature server branded the way you like.

It's easy to set up a Feature Server. And if you're using drush, it's fast. Really fast.

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Why the Acquia Drupal Stack is now the Drupal development stack of choice.

Drupal On-ramp - Personal experiences at Drupal events in recent months and reports from friends and colleagues indicate that the Acquia Drupal Stack Installer is really changing the installation experience for new users. This incredibly fast, painless on-ramp experience - it lets you get right into "Drupalling" without fighting with ports, permissions, or database connections - is winning over new users at Drupal Camps around the world.

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SXSW 2010 Interactive Panel Picker Voting ends tomorrow and I would sincerely appreciate all the votes that I can get before the polls close.

My proposed session, entitled Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization, covers SEO for Drupal 6: Which modules you’ll need, how to configure them, and what more you can do to get your site to the top of Google.

Three Additional Reasons You Should Vote:

1. The SXSW web site is a Drupal Site.

2. This is not only good for Drupal, but for Drupal in the greater tech community.

3. Dries Buytaert, the Drupal project founder and lead, is also a proposed speaker, so you can vote for him as well.

Please vote for my session here, and help SXSW Interactive get back to being the great technical conference that it was a few years ago!

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Ok, here I am at DrupalCon Paris blogging about Linux. WTF? Sorry, sorry, but I'm blogging this before I forget how I did it.

Note: This is written with Fedora 10 and Gnome. Apparently KDE has a desktop zoom feature which sounds like it achieves the same thing more easily. Although this is Fedora 10, I guess it should work for any Gnome desktop.

If you have a small-screened laptop or netbook (in my case, an EEE PC 901) and you want to "zoom out" your desktop and applications but can't go to a larger screen resolution, what do you do? With Gnome it's a two step process:

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For a number of months now, my personal website ran on a development version of Acquia Hosting (previously referred to with the code name Acquia Fields). There is nothing better than eating your own dog food. You have to eat a lot of it, and you have to start eating it early on. Either way, today at DrupalCon, we announced that Acquia Hosting is commercially available. In this post, I want to talk a little bit about what we have built and why we believe it matters.

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As reported in the New York Times, NowPublic, a citizen journalism website built on Drupal, was acquired by Examiner.com. Soon, one of the top-100 websites in the world will be running Drupal!Congratulations to the NowPublic team!

(Disclosure: I am an advisor to NowPublic.)

Here are the shaky videos I took yesterday from Dries' "State of Drupal" keynote. Most are on YouTube - one ended up on BlipTV because it ended up being 17 seconds longer than the 10 minute mark.

I hope you enjoy them!

Keynote 1

Keynote 2

Keynote 3

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Check out some pics and video from Dries Buytaert's keynote on the first day of Drupalcon Paris.

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Presentation on Open Atrium, building a product with Drupal, and the power of decentralized features

DrupalCon Paris has been great so far. There is a lot of fantastic work being done by the community as always, some really interesting conversations, and of course it's great to catch up with everyone in person.

A lot of people have been talking to me about Open Atrium, our open source intranet package based on Drupal. We were excited to be able to launch a new version (beta 2) of Open Atrium before the conference so we could get some solid feedback on recent improvements covered in this release, and so far we haven't been disappointed. It's really exciting to see the community's interest in Open Atrium and to hear about the ways that people are extending the core package with other features.

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