Posted on behalf of dman@drupal.org:

From http://basement.greenash.net.au/soc2006/ImportExportApiModule?show_comments=1#comment_19:

Where is good for discussions? A Drupal.org thread, the issues register, or somewhere here? I'd rather keep it open than emails.

Granted you may not be ready for a code review yet :) I had a quick look and was surprised you are attacking the database directly. Wouldn't it be better to let Drupal continue to handle the serialization, and get (eg) user_load() or node_load() to instantiate the php object, and base your mappings to that structure? By digging directly at the database (clever though your structure mapping system is) you are bypassing a lot of Drupal goodness, especially once you come to node_load().

There is a discussion on the development list about some clients wanting to "push" content from a staging server to the production server.

One way to do this for content is using John VanDyk's publish and subscribe.

Another is Node Import/Export which is being written by Jeremy Epstein as part of SoC.

Those can be taking further with users and roles too being migrated from staging to production, and that can be a truly federated environment.

You can see the original discussion in this thread.

Th

Does anyone have good examples or advice for building a screen to view a history of users' searches? What information would be important on such a screen?

(I might have the opportunity to build this for work, but it is a good idea which I think should happen regardless.)

In my opinion, the use of timestamps for the representation of dates in Drupal core is problematic. It is fine for recording all events that happen now, and it is even fine for recording historical events, as long as they happened 1970 or later. They are utterly useless if you want to make a geneology site.

More disturbingly, the event module also relies on timestamps for representation of events. As far as I can tell, this is a huge limitation. The CCK date field uses the ISO 8601 standard which saves times as as string: 20060610T20:47:48+01:00. While there are lots of arguments about how the data should be persisted in the database, to me, it is clear that the ISO 8601 string is ideal for representing the date in Drupal code (unless you're doing archeology, then I've got no idea what you do with BC dates).

We have a great theme system, but we don't always make full and proper use of it from the developer side and the themer side is underdocumented. I propose we improve this situation by writing guidelines:

• When to use themable functions; building on How to write themable modules.
• What PHP is allowed in a themable function and what is not. Somewhere between print $foo and db_query() there is a hard line to be drawn.
• Notes on accessibility
• What HTML is best, including

June 28 & 29, 2006
Location: Richard Hugo House

Drupal-Camp Seattle is an opportunity to learn about the Free and Open Source Drupal Content Management System (http://www.Drupal.org). This community driven event will focus on the PHP Theme Engine theming system, theme-able functions, Drupal 4.7 modules, module development and CiviCRM.

Who Should Attend:

What Drupal sites target mobile devices and what are the programming issues involved? Do we have any documentation covering how to create Drupal sites for mobile devices? Who owns a mobile device and uses it for surfing the web? It is all new to me and I'd really appreciate some overview of where things stand. Finally, from a money perspective, does it pay to offer a mobile version of your site?

I was at the first Melbourne Meetup a few weeks back, where the topic of Drupal Training in Melbourne was briefly discussed. The general consensus is that it would be a "Good Idea".

I'm now wanting to follow up the idea with anybody else at all interested.

I see a role for End-User Training, as is being discussed elsewhere How do you train your Drupal end users?, as well as Developer Training.

Some discussion of Sydney training is going on: See here. I've had a little correspondence with Peter who is running the Sydney training.