download

When the Pear module installs, it fetches three files from cvs.php.net: PEAR.php, Archive/Tar.php, and Console/Getopt.php. The reason these files aren't included with the module is because they're licensed under the PHP License and we're not allowed to host stuff that's not licensed under the GPL in the Drupal CVS repositories. When it came time to implement this part of the installation process, I came to a fork in the road.

Traditionally, whenever I wanted to download files using PHP, I used fsockopen() and fopen(), sent the HTTP headers myself, and did the whole read into buffer then write routine. It's not a bad idea. In fact, the go-pear script does just that. However, I came across two other solutions.

With the current, stable ecommerce version, I'm putting together a site where free (price $0) file products can be downloaded without purchase. I've made it so that free file products are uploaded into an unprotected directory, and I've modified ec_file_may_download in file.module to allow these files to be downloaded with whatever permissions. This works perfectly for authenticated users, they can download these files easily, however anonymous users get redirected to a 404.

I'm running the stable version of eCommerce on Drupal 5.5 and I'm coming against some problems trying to configure it for file downloads. For example, when I try to purchase a file, it insists on asking for a shipping address. I can't seem to find the control panel to turn this off. Also, "quantity" is meaningless for file downloads, but I can't seem to figure out how to make it not ask you for that either. Are there built-in ways to handle these things? I can futz with the code myself, but I find it strange that the system wouldn't have some way to account for this kind of thing.

We are finishing up the design document for our Beta site and would like someone versed in Drupal to look it over. We don't need someone to design the site as we will be looking far and wide for competitive bids. But we do need someone local to help communicate to the Drupal designers we select our intentions in "Drupalese" and also check their work and code.

This person should really be into what our company is trying to accomplish (www.nomadsland.com) and this could evolve into a more integral role with our core team as we head towards fundraising in 2008.

[nota: actualizado coa versión oficial, unha vez resoltos os problemas do CVS]

Namentres Sergio Caridad investiga porque a producción dos arquivos dende o CVS non quere xenerar o arquivo de traducción de galego, poñemos a disposición o arquivo gl.tar.gz para descarga (gl-5.1-070501).

On November 15th Gerhard released the download statistics for all packages on Drupal.org (with formatting by Earl). Here are two charts that summarize the data and the accompanying Excel. Suggestions are welcome on how to improve them or on other ways to analyze and display the data.

1. Top 30 Packages (click thumbnail to enlarge)

These top packages are comprised of 3 versions of Drupal, 20 modules, 5 themes, and 2 videos.

2. Overall Distribution (click thumbnail to enlarge)

When looking at the distribution of downloads we see noticeable breaking points at 16, 36, and about 590, which segment packages into four classes: Tier 1 (critical), Tier 2 (very popular), Tier 3 (moderately popular), and Tier 4 (unpopular).