Hello everyone, if your wireless drops or if you do not have a laptop just use your smart phone. The mobile site has a useful interface to view the schedule by day and by track.

I am hosting a BOF in room 206 at 4:15pm today, Monday to present how we created the mobile version of the DrupalCon website. The mobile version will automatically load for all webkit based smart phones.

If you’re a customer at our new Drupal theme store, you may have noticed there are some pretty cool things going on behind the scenes! Our FusionDrupalThemes.com store is a much more comprehensive, user friendly, and streamlined experience than on TopNotchThemes.com.

With the help of Derek Wright (dww) of 3281d.com and others, we’ve got a pretty amazing back end (ahem) that allows us to run our own “mini drupal.org” in terms of creating code projects, releases from version control, integrated issue queues, and then selling it all with Ubercart!

The site makes extensive use of the Project suite of modules, Organic Groups, Views, Panels, several node access modules, lots of add-on Ubercart modules, and of course – theming with Fusion.

read more

Trellon is a virtual environment where “the office” is an internet chat room, and the team is spread across physical locations including Washington DC, California, Paris, and Australia. It’s a working environment that presents unique challenges. How do we maintain code standards? Coordinate teams of developers? Provide general oversight of projects? To succeed we’ve leveraged powerful open source tools and created rigorous processes for developing world class Drupal websites, and at Drupalcon Copenhagen this August we will share these practices with you!

read more

Jeremy Andrews (aka Jeremy) of Tag1 Consulting has been involved with Drupal for over nine years. He ran KernelTrap.org, which was one of the first Drupal websites that we receiving a lot of traffic. Andrews has continued to be involved with performance and scalability, and he talks about some of the work that he's doing with Examiner.com and Drupal 7 to figure out a lot of the tools and techniques to make the site scalable and performant. He talks about MongoDB, and some of the other scalability improvements of Drupal 7. While there are a lot of scalability improvements to Drupal 7, the performance has taken a hit and they're in the process of figuring out the best practices in that area as well including writing a module to integrate with RRDtool, the round-robin database tool that is used for tracking time-series data.

read more

This article is the second of a four part series. It was born out of the DrupalCon San Francisco session by the same name and has been fleshed out through internal interviews with Ryan at Commerce Guys. We use the material to help the whole team understand how Drupal Commerce will improve the way we build sites on Drupal 7, and we hope it whets your appetite, too!

Check out part one first if you missed it for points covering our API and UI development principles.

read more

HaitiAidMap.org launched this past week with a large data update. The site maps hundreds of projects in Haiti being run by dozens of NGOs operating on the ground. This visual linking of project data to organizations, clusters, and communes is key for InterAction – the NGO coordinating body running the site and collecting and cleaning all the data – as they work to improve coordination and resource allocation while transparently showing where external organizations are operating in the country.

The site focuses on showing project density across the whole country, allowing users to quickly filter by "cluster" (the issue area a program focuses on), and changing out base layer maps to show terrain maps and earthquake magnitude maps for added context. You can jump directly to a cluster, commune, or organization page from the front page.

read more

(This is part 3 of a comparison of Joomla! and Drupal in the enterprise. See parts 1 and 2 of Joomla! and Drupal in the Enterprise.)

Drupal and Joomla! benefit from sizable and energetic communities with high coding standards, and both platforms have clear and well-documented guidelines for extending the functionality of the core software.

Joomla! has guided those who customize and extend the core product to employ the model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern. MVC is a widely-known object-oriented programming pattern and it provides developers with a framework for separating data access from business logic and data presentation.

Drupal does not employ object-oriented programming in the strict sense. Instead, developers can add their own functionality via a set of hooks that are available via the Drupal API.

read more

I'd like to pick your brains if you'll allow me, any ideas/tips/experiences about this would be most welcome:

One of the sites I'm working on needs some mass emailing functionality. The site will involve primarily user-generated content, with nodes representing events, all location-based. We'd like users to be able to subscribe to email notifications (probably daily or weekly digest) of every event created within a specified range from their zip code.

There are a bunch of different ways this could be done, but the main question I don't know much about is whether it's better to use standard Drupal modules like Notifications or Messaging, or better to integrate with a 3rd party mail service like MailChimp or Constant Contact. I imagine with the latter it's easier to send in bulk, less likely for mail to get filtered as spam, easier to track metrics and clickthroughs, etc... but maybe a lot more difficult to set up (or maybe not).

Has anyone done anything like this, where the mail that gets sent out is customized for each user? Any suggestions of how that might be done, or which services are best/worst?

In terms of the email-generation algorithm itself, I'm thinking there are a few ways...

read more

On Thursday, July 15th, Chris Frey gave the Waterloo Region Drupal Users Group a presentation about the Git version control system. I've uploaded a video of the presentation to archive.org. To get the slides and scripts, you can use Git:

$ git clone http://foursquare.net/intro_to/.git intro_to_git

read more

Brought to you by:

Join us as we talk with Stephanie Pakrul (aka stephthegeek) about Skinr, Fusion, and some new services from Top Notch Themes that allow people to implement, share, and test custom Fusion themes.

Show notes:
Block Class module - http://drupal.org/project/block_class
Skinr module - http://drupal.org/project/skinr
Fusion module - http://drupal.org/project/fusion Read full article »

read more

Getting regular work through a firm or agency is an appealing prospect for many freelance web developers. One of the greatest benefits of working for an agency is having a team to work with instead of being solo on a project. It can be a good means of personal growth and development to have others working alongside you. Another perk is that you usually don’t have to deal with the client directly, which often involves educating them a lot and some occasional hand-holding. You can stick to what you love and what you’re good at and let the agency deal with administrative things like proposals, project scope, billing and customer communication. The agency does the work of looking for and securing the job, often spending many unbillable hours responding to RFPs and competing against other agencies for the work. And if the agency likes your work, you might end up in the enviable position of being sent regular, hassle-free work without needing to spend too much time and money marketing yourself.

read more

Josh Koenig (aka joshk) of Chapter Three talks about the Pantheon Project that allows you to run Drupal on a cloud infrastructure either as a Amazon EC2 machine instance or on the Rackspace Cloud. Chapter Three also has a service that is currently in private beta that provides a hosted version of Mercury on the Rackspace Cloud starting as low as $50/month. Koenig talks about some of the advantages of hosting on a cloud infrastructure as well as who the target audience is for making the leap into hosting on a cloud infrastructure.

read more

We use timestamps a lot in web development, whether using Drupal or not. Sometimes during debugging we may want to know what is the actual human readable time for a timestamp (eg. 1279566878). This is easy to achieve in Linux, without writing any PHP code.
date -d@1279566878
Simply use the command in shell and you will see something like Mon Jul 19 12:14:38 PDT 2010, which gives the human readable time for the Unix timestamp 1279566878.

Another thing we'd like to do sometimes is to change the server time and timezone. In Ubuntu, you can type the command
dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
or
tzselect
and then select the timezone you want. Or you can do so by modifying the timezone file /etc/localtime
ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Toronto /etc/localtime
This would set the timezone to America/Toronto.

To change the current server time, you may use the command
date 052018302010.15
which would set the time to May 20, 2010, 18:30:15. The format of the time string is nnddhhmmyyyy.ss where
nn: 2-digit month (01 - 12)

Download and install the Taxonomy Menu module.

Download and install the Menu Block module.

Optionally create a new parent menu where all the taxonomy-based menus will reside by going to /admin/build/menu/add. I named mine Taxonomy.

Go to /admin/content/taxonomy and click the edit vocabulary link next to your tag vocabulary

Scroll down to the Taxonomy menu fieldset

Select your new menu for the Menu Location

I use the following options:

Most of the other options are there so that you can customize the paths to the taxonomy terms if you use Views, for example.

Click Save.

Go to the block administration page at /admin/build/block and click the Add menu block tab.

read more

Someone wrote to me recently asking if I could help them set up a Drupal development environment for an outsourced dev team. I don't have time and declined the job, but continued a brief correspondence about the requested project requirements, which I thought were interesting:.

The requirements included (each a full installation of a 3rd party software package):

• Issue Tracking, Wiki, Forum
• Git repository
• Git repo server
• Git access control
• Hudson (Continuous Integration)
• Selenium
• SimpleTest
• JMeter
• Capistrano
• Drupal Mercury (includes EC2, Varnish)
• Image resizing software
• rsync

Whoa.

This is the list of tools that you'll find by googling "best practices development environment" or something like that. But it's massive tool creep. Several problems I see here:

read more

DrupalCon is the biannual gathering of the world's top Drupal contributors and businesses, which makes it a great place for introductions - not just to the people present but also to Drupal itself. DrupalCon Copenhagen is no exception, with various pre-conference trainings and an entire introductory session track designed to help newcomers get up and running with Drupal.

We've benefited a lot in past years from sessions at DrupalCons introducing various Drupal modules and broader topics like internationalization, the semantic web, and project management strategies. This year Ryan will be present to introduce Drupal's core content type creation features. He'll present a "then" and "now" session that focuses primarily on using the new Fields system in Drupal 7 but also demonstrates the same functionality using CCK on Drupal 6. Other sessions include introductions to Drupal 7 (by webchick, no less!), various community oriented topics, internationalization, the semantic web, and using Drupal through the command line.

read more

My use case was that I had a super long blog entry that I didn't want to hog my blog's front page. So I needed to shorten it down to a certain pixel height, and add a link that would expand it completely.

First, we need a couple of jQuery bits:

read more

Continuing the comparison between Joomla! and Drupal in enterprise settings, this article addresses how each technology separates administrative functionality from public-facing content.

read more

For this site, I've been using Minnelli - a fixed-width version of Drupal 6's default Garland theme - along with the Color module to change the site's default colour set to Bluemarine as oppose to the standard Blue Lagoon.

Recently, I decided that I wanted to edit the page.tpl.php and node.tpl.php template files, but as I was using a core theme, I wasn't able to change these files. So, I created a copy of the Minelli theme directory, renamed it, and placed it into my sites/all/themes directory. As with the default Minnelli theme, my copied theme would need to use Garland as a base theme, to do this, I added the following code to its .info file:

read more

Barry Jaspan (aka bjaspan) talks about the Amazon Web Services infrastructure that he engineered for running Acquia Hosting. For more information, be sure to also check out Acquia's recent webinar on Amazon Web Services building blocks for Drupal or Japan's DrupalCon presentation titled "Challenges of hosting Drupal on Amazon Web Services (AWS)"

read more