I have my hands in many parts of Drupal and for some time now I make concious effort to make sure things would go fine if I disappear or something. Not that I want to leave the Drupal project, not at all, but you never know what happens.

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Now a week after one hell of a week with the drupal elite in washington DC - wow what a week -
Drupalcon are more like rock festival than a nerd gettogether with out the tents and way to many shitty bands (and yeah offcourse i miss at least 4 of the sessions)

This was my 6 Drupalcon since i went to brussels a couple of years ago, and to say it nicely WTF! 1300 - 1400 drupal lovers in one place! - we were 200 in brussels and i thought wow were many who wanna share the drupal love, boy we surely have grown.

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Now that the Drupal.org redesign is underway, Neil Drumm is currently collecting suggestions for what a revamped Drupal Association website might look like.

The current website was created in a few days back when the Drupal Association was first founded in 2006, and hasn't really received a great deal of attention since then (shoemaker's children, and all that). The current site's content can basically be distilled into three things:

1. Outdated news you already heard somewhere else first.
2. Give us money.
3. Legal mumbo jumbo.

Unfortunately, there is very little emphasis on "awesome stuff the Drupal Association is working on and how you can help." That's something I think we need to change, to both help give the community assurances that their money is being spent wisely, and also to give the larger Drupal community on-ramps to directly help the Drupal Association members achieve their mission of supporting the Drupal project.

Here's a wireframe I came up with at Way Too Late O'Clock that needs a whole bunch of work but is one approach:

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Lesson Twelve of my special Getting Started With Drupal series of instructional videos.

This lesson focuses on socializing your content by allowing your site visitors to easily share and rate site content. Automatic sharing links for sites like Facebook, Delicious, Digg and others are generated by the Service Links module. A star based rating system for nodes is powered by the Fivestar module which also requires the Voting API module.

Copyright 2009, Robert Safuto, Some Rights Reserved. Please visit Learn By The Drop to comment, subscribe or explore additional content not available via the RSS Feed.

I just made it back from DC and I must say it feels good to be back home in Shanghai. I won't go through the usual review of sessions and congratulations; enough people already gave that kind of feedback for everybody to know it was a blast. This was my first event of that kind and I had the opportunity to chat with a lot of smart people of the industry; a lot of good things came out of it, including the common need for resources related to project management. I hope to find more people interested in helping on that very issue and in the meantime I will do my best to help initiatives such as The CivicActions Estimating Worksheet (thanks a lot Gregory Heller to enlighten me on this) and my very own Project Management tool aka "Ren" (人) that I plan to release soon. I'll try to sum up what I think would be a good direction to head to.  read more »

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Every now and then a post comes up on Drupal Planet, or somewhere else in the Drupal community describing how the Global Redirect module (GR) is the key to improving your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and how it will increase your search engine rankings. But don't be swayed by the SEO voodoo, most sites will see little to no benefit from GR.

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I've had some clients not wanting the uber cool password strength checking in Drupal 6. Well, here's a very short tip how to disable this.

Just add the following in some javascript (your theme, your module, ...)

<script language="javascript">
// disabling password security check
Drupal.behaviors.password = function(context) {
  return;
}
</script>

Hooray for behaviors!

Password checking in Drupal 6

This is a quick tip for people running scripts (or cron) with a lot of node_load.

If you call node_load, it does some static caching keeping the node object for the duration of the script to save some calls to the database.

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Is there any other activity more popular on the Internet than searching? Probably not. In fact, I’d be willing to double-down on that wager (I’m on the side of searching being the most popular if it wasn’t obvious).

What’s that number one site on the nets? Oh yeah, it’s Google - and they do search.

So, this simply means one thing. Your focus on Drupal search should be close to number one. The default search in Drupal works okay, and just a bit beyond, if you’re searching for “cool” and “cool” stuff exists. However, searching for “cool” doesn’t cut it when “coolness” is the title for all your cool nodes. Your users pretty much have to hit the right words spot on.

You can enhance Drupal’s default search with modules such as Porter-Stemmer (which I suggest using as your fallback search) which breaks a word like “coolness” down into its stem words - ala “cool”.

But you simply can’t beat the Apache Solr Module in terms of allowing users to narrow down exactly what they might be looking for.

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I was working today on creating a menu that is role-based. This is for the new Jones International University (http://www.jiu.edu) content management system, which is going to be Drupal-based. I was a little surprised that you can't easily do this when you're creating your individual menu items (say who gets to see what), but it's actually not too hard with a bit of PHP code added into the theme layer (in your page.tpl.php file). The current header is shown in the screenshot below:

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The Open Source Bridge is an all-volunteer, all-awesome conference that will take place in Portland, Oregon this summer, June 17-19 at the Convention Center. When OSCON fled south, did Portland cry itself to sleep? No. It organized across languages, across disciplines, and on both sides of the mighty Willamette to stage an even more impressive event.

But the success of the conference relies on real people presenting real content. That's where OpenSourcery and other development shops come in. That's right, it's time to submit proposals. We're encouraging our developers, project managers, systems administrators, and business developers to do so.

A few words about why the Open Source Bridge exists, taken from their website:

"Our primary objective will be to explore what it means to be a responsible Open Source citizen.

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Palantir is proud to announce the launch of the new Web site for Foreign Affairs, the bi-monthly journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. The site was built by Palantir in Drupal 6, with design and information architecture provided by Concentric Studio.

You can read more about Palantir's work on this project on our Web site; a more detailed technical case study is coming soon.

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Are you a website developer (or developer to be) that has worked with online content management systems other than Drupal? Have you heard about Drupal but haven't been oriented to how Drupal works? This two-hour workshop is for you.

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Selena loves Git and I love Bazaar. And like all good nerds we've spent a fair amount of time talkin' smack about the other's version control system. And I say "all good nerds" because Sam and I tend to "fight" about version control systems at DrupalCon as well (alcohol is optional, but hand waving is mandatory). See in the back row of that photo? It's Victor Kane. His new book, Leveraging Drupal, also talks about version control systems for Drupal.

After a little bit of discussion (and after I stole Selena's git slides to give a bzr talk) Selena and I decided that maybe there ought to be a conference presentation on how to choose the best version control system for your work environment.

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Hot on the heels of last week's DrupalCon party, the 'bots head down to Austin for SXSW and...

Announcing 32 Bit, a SXSW Interactive 2009 party on Monday, March 16th that Lullabot is sponsoring along with Automattic, Get Satisfaction, Gowalla, Laughing Squid, Plinky, ShoutNow, Sticker Giant, Zynga and 30 Boxes. This event is the follow-up to last year’s 16 Bit party and 2007’s 8 Bit party.

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Drupal powers some of the busiest and most high profile websites on the Internet - including MTV UK, and the recently launched Recovery.gov. However, one of key challenges was been making it scale to the exceptionally high level of traffic predicted for the Rednoseday.com site.

We were contacted by Comic Relief in October of 2007 to help transition their websites to Drupal, and jumped at the chance to work with an NGO doing such excellent work.

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We’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to develop a framework to understand and frame the Drupal7 Audience in such a way as we can successfully design for them. We thought you might be interested in seeing some of our thinking to date, so we recorded a quick chat about it in the video above. (I really should do my hair before videoing myself!)

As an overview, here is the outline of what we’re thinking:

There are three important user attributes: role, type of site, and size/complexity of the user ecosystem(number of users in the system and no. of different roles defined).

Important roles:
- end user (define here)
- editor
- site builder
- site administrator

Important site types:
- blog
- news/publishing
- groups
- events

Important ecosystems
- single user
- 2-5 users
- 5-15 users
-more than 15 users
(need to work out a way to define number of user roles as well)

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