Planet Drupal

I’ve been working with the Drupal community on design projects for coming up to 12 months now - a splash in the ocean compared to many in the Drupal community but long enough to get a feel for how things work.

The ‘paid’ time I have left on the d7ux project is almost run out and I’m left feeling frustrated - not just by the work that I’d like to be able to continue to do on the Drupal 7 User Experience, but also by the great potential for building a critical mass of great designers and UX people in the Drupal community and the different types of activities that could spur this on, and the impact this could have on Drupal adoption and sustainability as an Open Source software project. So much opportunity, so little resource.

Despite the fact that I think there are probably a contingent within the Drupal community who are hoping that Mark & I are just going to go away once we stop getting paid for d7ux, the fact is that this is unlikely to happen any time soon. For various reasons and in various ways, I think we’re both kind of hooked on Drupal, or at least it’s amazing community.

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Maarten Verbaarschot volunteered to take on a Microproject (thanks Maarten!) and for the past few weeks he has been working on interface design for a Media Library for Drupal. There is a great discussion going on in the Drupal.org issue queue that you might want to take a look at.

Maarten is currently working on the third iteration of these wireframes but he’d really love it if you can take a look and give him some feedback - anyone who has ever added an image to a web page should be able to have a say on this interface, so don’t hold back!

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I have been using FrontPage SlideShow from JoomlaWorks on a number of sites, and would recommend it as a good CSS/PHP route to building a featured slide section that links to promoted content, articles, blog posts, groups, etc. One problem is that it is not free, the cost is around $35 for a license to use it on 5 to 10 domains. A second problem is highlighted by the example of releasing an installation profile for Drupal. We can release all of the code under GPL for the project except for FPSS. So, I began working on a conversion of our FPSS slides into Views Slideshow views.

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First of all, I’d like to say hello fellow drupalers! This is my first post here, (and also my first ever blog post!) since Greg opened up drupaler.co.uk as a collaborative blog for Drupal developers.

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One of our little helpers (Daniel Harris) launched a wiki page to get more detailed info on what you would actually like to eat during the conference itself.

Please have a look and add your wishes. Of course, it has to be something that a great deal of people would eat too.

By doing this, we can then do our very best to be able to offer the most of your wishes possible during the conference, so you like what you see and eat.

First of all a BIG THANK YOU to everyone who has helped us so far with preparing, organizing and spreading the word about DrupalCon Paris 2009, all over Europe and even internationally.

This is your event! You are the community. You are the ones who represent Drupal and we want to have you, the representatives, join us in Paris.
So we need your help to spread the word even “louder” and make the DrupalCon even more Drupalicious, for you.

Because:

• you, the community, are the core!
• you, the community, make the decisions
• you, the community, decide where Drupal is going.

Here some carrots, that will lead your way to Paris in September:

FileField Paths has just hit version 1.3.

The biggest change in this latest version is an improved modular system allowing for better integration options, demonstrated with support for two new modules, the Image module and the Comment Upload module.

Other changes include improved support for the ImageField Crop module, Dutch and Danish translations and various bug fixes.

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At the core of all the hype around "social networking," and "social media," is the fact that "social" websites allow members of a website to connect with each and develop relationships without needing the administrators or content editors to mediate these connections. This from the "build and they'll come," school of design and strategy. In any case, even though Drupal is a fundamentally social platform, there is no user-to-user relationship support in the core of Drupal.Read More >>>

The weekend of June 27th and 28th saw over 200 Drupalers, including myself, flock to Denver for the annual DrupalCamp Colorado. Trellon was proud to sponsor the event. The fact that number of attendees doubled since last year shows the growth and momentum surrounding Drupal. This year, the event was combined with an Ubercamp- a gathering of Ubercart developers and enthusiasts.Read More >>>

Drupalcamp Colorado 2009 has come and gone. The event garnered over 200 participants - at least half of which came from out of State. Over 40 sessions (if you include BOFs and the opening and closing sessions) occurred over the two days ranging from pure business to the highly technical. Ubercart was heavily presented with Ubercamp partnering with Drupalcamp. The camp was followed by a media sprint.

pingVision presented in quite a few sessions:

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Vivek Kundra, the CIO of the United States, unveiled the new IT spending dashboards at usaspending.gov earlier this week. Tim O'Reilly has all the details in his blog post titled Radical transparency: the new federal IT dashboard. In short, the dashboards are designed to help CIOs of individual government agencies get a handle on the effectiveness of government IT spending. The site was built with Drupal.

This is a fundamental change in the way government is going to be run, and it is great to see Drupal play a small role in that. Great stuff!

Your workspace is your castle eh? Just thought I’d share my workspace with you, mind you this is just the Summer office, but it ain’t half bad!

I've just released a new module (fanfare) which seems to work pretty well. I have a couple of silly bug fixes to put up tonight (knew I should've called it "beta") but other than that it works great. It's called Node Reference Variables:
http://drupal.org/project/nodereference_variables

All it does is present a load of stuff (depending on other contrib modules installed and some admin options) via the hook_preprocess_node() preprocess hook for themers to use to do cool theming stuff with Node Reference CCK fields. Main feature I'm using is the jQuery UI tabs it provides.

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After some feedback from possible participants, we have a new date for our D7 file system, images and media sprint.

The sprint will now run on Sunday-Monday July 26-27 at the Zivtech offices in Philadelphia.

Also, Aaron Winborn will be joining drewish (a.k.a. Andrew Morton) and some Zivtech hackers for the sprint. Anyone else looking for an excuse to visit Philadelphia and hack on core is most welcome.

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Kat Bailey posted a very kind review of my Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery book.

From the review:

The book aims to get people with little to no knowledge of Drupal or JavaScript up to speed with creating really awesome functionality, really fast. In fact, its title almost belies the breadth of its scope: although the use of jQuery in Drupal 6 is the one topic that it covers exhaustively, it doesn't skip over any of the basic tools or concepts required to get going with Drupal, and so it would work pretty well as a first Drupal book for any aspiring front-end Drupaler. It covers everything from the ultra-utra-basic ("what is CSS?", "what is a Drupal block?") to Drupal JavaScript Behaviors (and everything else in drupal.js), to JavaScript Theming, to AJAX, to building modules with AJAX functionality, to jQuery syntax, effects, and even writing jQuery plugins!

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Ever wanted to show your Drupal contact form at every page using a Block? You can now by using the Contact form blocks module.

Stephanie Pakrul and Chris Fassnacht from Top Notch Themes discussed Return on Investment and Ubercart. These are my notes from the presentation. I also took video that is broken up into four pieces at the end of this post. I was at the back of the room, so the sound is a little quiet. Hopefully it is still helpful.

They started out by talking about the strongest feature of Ubercart is its automatic integration with Drupal. That makes things relatively easy for the developer.

75% of users make a judgement about your company based on the design of a site. Business metrics can improve drastically with a good design. Quite simply good design can improve your conversion rate and improving you conversion rate is the investment that keeps on giving.

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Because of a bug in the Drupal 7 PostgreSQL chain (either in PDO or the database) BIGINT handling is not fixed in today's Drupal 6 release. And you wonder why I hate that database.