Lesson This Sunday? Throw me a topic!
So I've been thinking it might be time for me to stop being so lazy and actually teach one of these lessons again, especially now that I have a screencap stack worked out and can get a quality local capture. I've been personally leaning towards revisiting the jQuery lesson and getting good screen capture as that's where my head has been at a lot lately, but I want to make sure my lesson is useful to y'all.
Looking over our list of lesson ideas, it seems like we're paradoxically running low on solid lesson ideas. There's one for dealing with Calendars, which could be good, but I wanted to throw it open to the floor: what Drupal mystery would you like to see revealed? I'm happy to address general development topics or specific feature implementations, as long as I understand them. ;)
Ical feed
I'm entirely down with
I'm entirely down with jquery - what I'd really love to see, though (and forgive me if this has already been covered) is how to build a module that creates blocks, a node, menu links, and a settings page. That and some cover of .install files. Maybe even a lesson on building a new cck field type?
JQuery would be great
I'd love to get my head around implementing some of the JQuery goodness that's built into Drupal.
Last Sunday was amazing.
Last Sunday was amazing. Jquery is fantastic. AJAX/JQuery was incredible. Thanks Josh.
I would like to suggest techniques to develop Design with Drupal.
I am not talking about just themes. (tpl, PHPTemplate theme engine...) This is easy, the hard topic is design.
I am talking about web standards, Tableless based, CSS div div div, Golive, CSS, MS Expression, Editors tips, Dreamweaver, flash, prototypejs.org , Jquery, and of course photoshop to css, old and new techniques.
For example the question should be:
How a good Web Designer should work?
Which tools?
Where find resources about this topic?
I think the best teacher should be a Web Designer senior or you of course.
Drupal Community have good Web Designers.
Cheers, thanks for all and congratulations again
macm
Mario
...
Wasn't samtresler going to do this?
next week I thnk
he's been busy, so will tackle this next week.
http://www.chapterthreellc.com | http://www.outlandishjosh.com
Securing a site
In a world with more than 70% of mail content being spam, this should be, perhaps, one of today's must have lessons. Just yesterday some wise barbarian came uninvited to my site and wrecked havoc in it. I'll have to rebuild it almost from scratch. If only I knew a few things about how to secure a Drupal site, maybe it'd be harder for the black hat guys. On the other hand, I'll be more careful in this second build. Sigh.
A security lesson would be great
I too am concerned about securing Drupal, especially in light of a new cross-site scripting exploit called Jikto that was covered in the latest podcast from Security Now. I don't know enough about Drupal to know what its particular vulnerabilities are so I don't know if this latest exploit applies, but I would love to find out! And what the heck is SQL injection? If it's not appropriate for this Sunday, Josh, I would be very interested in a future Dojo class on the subject.
Not too much of an issue... yet
This is pretty much XSS that exploits the open availability of APIs for most javascript libraries and the recent phenomena of tabbed browsing. Drupal's not really at-risk because there are no important features (admin or user account stuff) which is handled via AJAX. This will be a concern going forward as many admin interfaces could benefit a lot from some asynchronous action, but you can definitely be sure that core developers will be very mindful of this. Most JS library writers are also taking steps to secure this on their end.
Still, I strongly encourage anyone who runs a site to subscribe to the security alert list.
http://www.chapterthreellc.com | http://www.outlandishjosh.com
What did they wreck?
Did they compromise an admin account, or just stink up the site in userspace?
http://www.chapterthreellc.com | http://www.outlandishjosh.com
I'd love some jQuery
I too have had my head in Javascript land for a minute now...
It would be nice to be able to "resurrect" the jQuery screen capture :P
Looks like this idea is winning out
Easter resurrection it is!
http://www.chapterthreellc.com | http://www.outlandishjosh.com
Menus
How about menu magic. Go beyond outputting primary links. Nested lists with active clasess. Sprinkle in some css and maybe some jquery?
If there are not many takers, jquery and/or security are good topics too
my issue with menus
I'd love to know how to do more things with menus, or at least how to set up a site so that the people posting content don't have to do menu administration for every node they create. Here's the situation:
Users navigate the site with two levels of navigation (primary and secondary) The navigation bars at the top of the site visually reflect the location of the where the user is in the site. This visual indication and the breadcrumbs only work if I specify which menu item each node belongs to. This is pretty tedious, since the location in the menu structure could easily be determined by the node type.
Path alias lets the paths be created perfectly for each different content type.
The custom links module lets me add unique links for content types that might require it.
The custom breadcrumb module allows me to create breadcrumbs that are perfect. In fact, I wish the whole menu structure could just be a reflection of the breadcrumb system. It works in reverse right now, and in fact I wouldn't care which way it worked. I these these things as very similar - both describe the location of where a node "lives" - you might access the content in many different ways, but this is it's home.
So for now, as content is added, users must manually create a menu item, or the site's navigation system breaks on that node. As more and more content is added, the menu tree will keep getting bigger, making it harder to navigate. I don't really want to create menu items for every page in the site. I just want to tell the menu system that a certain branch is active when viewing a node with a certain set of qualities (node type, cck field value, taxonomy, etc).
If someone has a relatively simple system for solving this, I think we could put a good mini lesson together about creating easily maintainable navigation systems with good SEO for sites with complex structures. It would help a lot of drupal newbs, not to mention myself ;)
Multisite configuration and management tips in Drupal
Not sure its relevant to Drupal Dojo but its a challenge for most of Drupallers i guess.
There are some Tut's on the handbooks is more of relevant pre v5. Some practical lessons would be on v5 great, aswith the 5 its more advanced on that front.
some titles i can think of
Multi-Site configuation
- sharing the core modules for different sub-domains, full-domains and sub directories
Multi-Site Management tips
etc.
if its not for sunday i can be on the lessons list if you consider
thanks...
Offering to teach?
if its not for sunday i can be on the lessons list if you consider
I'm not sure it that's a typo ("it can be on the lessons list...") or if you're offering to teach such a lesson.
In either case, I think it's a good idea.
http://www.chapterthreellc.com | http://www.outlandishjosh.com
multisite +1
A multi-site tutorial would be great indeed!
Datamining and dumping large amounts of data in drupal
Hi .. I'm a CS PhD student at UCLA looking to use drupal as a front-end for some large computational biology databases.
I do a lot of back-end processing and data mining in Perl and C++ on the data outside of the drupal interface. I'm finding that things get out of sync because the database schema isn't well documented and tends to have short ambiguous names (e.g. apparently vid refers to at least two seperate things) ... so far i haven't found documentation which has a one line sentence that explains what each field is ... i'm interested in documenting the database schema better as well as writing scripts and integrating a machine learning package called MLC++ as well as some of my own Perl text mining modules with drupal
... if someone has done this i'd love a drupal dojo lesson on importing data directly into drupal without going through the CMS or I'll eventually give a dojo lesson when I figure it out if there is interest
...also if there isn't a database document ... which for every field in the database states something like: "nid - refers to a node id a unique key given for each node" ... i'll create it but would like to find a couple people willing to check it to make sure it's correct
thx
sounds like some interesting possibilities
having a clear database layout and methods for importing data from other systems would open a lot of integration possibilities, which would be great. Drupal can do a lot, but if we can't make it play nicely with others, we'll lose out on a lot of opportunities.
Go Bruins!
I looked for some
I looked for some documentation which has a one line description of every field in the database, every table in the database and their relationship to the drupal core. So far I haven't found it.
I was given these links by somebody in the infrastructure-request group
http://drupal.org/node/28046
http://drupal.org/node/70825
http://drupal.org/node/38977
I'll take what I've found so far and create my version of database annotation for the drupal mySQL schema and put it somewhere on drupal.org and hopefully it'll help others like me to understand it as well.
This will take me a couple a weeks. Then I'll spend the summer adding a lot of machine learning & text mining tools that work directly with the drupal database.
If at the end of the if summer drupal-dojo people want a tuturial on adding text mining/machine learning to drupal I can do that.
peace