Jerad Bitner: Making the best things!

Drupalcon Szeged is one week away. I am glad I am attending, and I am planning on leading a Birds of a Feather (BOF) during the conference. The focus of the BOF is creativity and programming. I want to discuss the weird mix of human behavior and code. Sounds strange I know, so let me describe in more detail.

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Sometimes, you need to change the HTML markup output by some module, and you want your changes to keep whichever theme you will use. The need came up for me recently when I had to provide special markup for pages that display a webform. I had to quickly put together a module for a client, a module that would provide a template file, which I decided to name (arbitrarily) page-webform.tpl.php.

The situation may arise for you as well, so I will share my technique with you. Say you want to provide a template file for all pages that display one node of a content type with machine-readable name CONTENT_TYPE_NAME. And say you want to use a module to provide such template. Say you decide to name your module special_page. Read more →

So I just made a new beta release of Language Icons. (If you don't know the module - it's the one adding the flag icons to the language selection block to the left, as well as on translated nodes.)

The most important thing in this module is probably that it now contains an upgrade path from when it was a part of the Internationalization module suite, namely converting the i18n_icons_* site variables to languageicons_*. I think I tested it rather thoroughly and made sure I'd covered most (if not all) cases of the variable not existing or having been set, but to the old default path, etc., etc. - but there is always the off chance that something was somehow missed. So please give the beta2 a spin, and if you can do it with an update, it'd be great. And don't forget to report bugs! ;)

(Also, once this has gotten some testing, I think we're close to a final release as well. I don't know how much Jose wants done on the module before releasing 6.x-1.0 final, but there isn't really a whole lot more to do to it now, other than adding flags, of course. :))

Here's an excellent way of adding videos to your contents, thanks to Sean Effel of drupaltherapy.com for providing the screencast.  read more »

We are planning to put a CDN in front of our Drupal install. This CDN is not fancy and is not able to deal with cookies (but it's very cheap). So every anon visitor is going to be served from ANON DOMAIN (the CDN) and every logged in visitor is going to be served from LOGGEDIN DOMAIN (our servers).

This surfaces some questions, such us:

• what will happen to those visitors who are visiting the wrong domains? For example: an anon visitor visits a url from the LOGGEDIN DOMAIN or vice versa, a logged in user visits a url from the ANON DOMAIN.

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I'll be the first to admit that it took me long enough to get around to doing it but now that it's done you should too. What is the wonderful "it"? Voting to get some great looking Drupal panels in the lineup at SXSW 2009.

The good news is getting it done is simple. All you need is an easy to create account and then visit the pages for the panels and give them a high five (stars that is). And to make that easy here's a handy list of the panels being offer:

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Following up on the interest of the Drupal Semantic Web group, I'll present my ideas on the Semantic Web which will be an update of the talk I gave in Barcelona. I will also present a project which I co-started a few months ago: Neologism. The session is scheduled for Saturday 30th at 3pm.

See the session details on the drupalCon site.

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The Drupalcon Szeged 2008 schedule page is up for some time now, but we recently did quite a few changes to it. First, we added night time events, then added exhibition day information, and for a better overview, we also added the code sprint.

Several people asked us on the forums and through our contact forms to have a printer friendly version of the program. Well, we sat down, crafted and tested a printer friendly stylesheet for the schedule page, which is now up. Just try printing the schedule and you'll notice that it will only print what is required for you to know. We tested Firefox, Safari and Opera. Opera proved to be the best printer, not breaking pages in the middle of table cells, so we suggest you try that browser for best results.

Another popular request was to have a personalized schedule with sessions you voted on. For this, we modified the voting widgets, so you can cancel your votes, and added a personalized version of the program which highlights (via thicker borders and boldface) the sessions you are most interested in. Of course you can print this page, and the thicker borders and the boldface should survive the print simplification.

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A short, quick and easy tip for views theming and customization.

To customize the text or the destination path/url of a 'view more' link in Views. Add this to template.php in your phptemplate theme and add cases.

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Sun Microsystems recently launched another cool Drupal site: Sun Learning Exchange. The site enables Sun employees to easily publish rich media training content such as videos, podcasts, and documents to be accessed by all Sun employees and customers. Media can be rated, sorted, and tagged by site members and is automatically transcoded and hosted on LimeWire. The site was built with the help of our friends at Chapter Three. Sweet!

Just as the internet is bigger then 127.0.0.1,Drupal is bigger then Dries. However, every hurd needs a leader and within the Drupal community, Dries has proven that he is not just a good coder but a very wise project lead creating a very rich community around his product, not just around him.

It is the community what makes an Open Source project successful, not the code perse. Bad code can be used in a creative way by a smart community, good code without a community is just same as proprietary software.

And that is why it is good to see that Dries has been chosen as a "Young Innovator". Read the press release at prweb:

"The TR35 honors young innovators for accomplishments that are poised to have a dramatic impact on the world as we know it," said Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review magazine. "We celebrate their success and look forward to their continued advancement of technology in their respective fields."

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This tutorial will be split into three parts - part 1 (this part) will explain how to set up the aggregation and import feeds, part 2 (to be published next post) will explain setting up cron to handle auto updating the feeds and will also cover using views to create some different site sections, and part 3 (to be published the post after that) will explain how to theme everything. In the tutorial I will be building a Drupal based sports news aggregation site, but you can obviously tailor this to whatever type of news items you'd like.

The goals:

• Create an aggregation site which aggregates RSS feeds and outputs them in river of news style pages with the most recent news items first.
• Create some different site sections (football and baseball) which only show news items related to that topic.
• Allow users to filter news items by source (e.g. ESPN, BBC etc.).
• Create RSS feeds of our aggregated pages which are available for our users.

You can check out the finished aggregation site (part 1) here.

The set up:
For this tutorial I'll be using the following:

• A clean install of Drupal 5.10 (using Garland)
• SimpleFeed 5.x-2.2
• Views 5.x-1.6

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Lukas Kahwe Smith has an awesome post titled "Open Source is not making enough rich people richer" .
Indeed, there is much talk that the VC's , the Investors and different others aren't seeing the big money fast enough, according to them that is.
Does that mean that the open source industry is going bad ? Does that mean you can't make a living when working in the Open Source industry ?

Absolutely not, as he points out there are uncountable people gaining a good living with Open Source, developers working on the different projects as their day job, system administrators managing open source platforms. We are helping out customers to implement Open Source and Free Software. And there are numerous other Drupal, Mysql, Xen, shops out there. Some have their own open source products and create a business on top of that , others are supporting popular platforms locally.

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In the previous post, we saw how to create a XHTML progress bar widget for Forms API, using theme_progress_bar. The next logical step is now to create a graphical equivalent to that progress bar, as an example for far more advanced fully graphical widgets made possible using a similar mechanism.

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The Aten Design Group website has a new look. Well, maybe not an altogether new look, but a revised look. We’ve modified the typography, adjusted the layout, and made some color changes. The blog sports a reversed color scheme, with syntax highlighting for code examples.

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To rebuild the menu in Drupal 6 you have to go to admin/build/modules.

In drupal 5 the menu is cached in the cache_menu table, so it is easy to invoke a menu-rebuild by emptying the table with a simple mysql command like TRUNCATE cache_menu;. (I have a handy script that empties all tables starting with cache_).

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Drupal’s block system is far from ideal. It was designed back in the threecolumn-era, was improved to work beyond three-columns-content-in-middle layouts, but is still unsuited for more complex layouts.

If you want real complex layouts, you will have to turn to Panels, or Panels2. Or so they say.

A client of mine, a large Dutch media company uses Drupal for all its new sites -about four, five each month-, and untill today used panels in these sites.

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We were recently approached by a client who wanted to create two sites to serve different audiences but with vast amounts of common content. The same group of people would be responsible for the upkeep of both sites and the desired solution would allow content to be shared with great ease.

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Simple bit of Drupal module code from yesterday: permissions are provided for each node type which can have attachments, providing a more granular permission set based on node type. Then, we alter any node add/edit forms and remove (using PHP's unset) the attachments part of the form based on these new permissions.

Check the code out after the break, hope its of some use somewhere. Does anyone have any thoughts on unsetting form elements like this? Is it a wise thing to do, or is there a better way?

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Finding a conference venue with good wifi for hundreds of Drupal geeks is not easy. Since these conferences grew big, it was always a challenge to work out. This year, we also started planning early on ensuring good wifi coverage for the event. Our venue has some wifi coverage, but it was not adequate in itself. We asked for cable based internet for speakers, we set aside a BoF area with switches so if you bring your ethernet cables, you'll be able to plug in and we even ordered a computer cabinet with English speaking setups for those without their laptops.

But to solve good wifi for the Drupal crowd, we needed a professional partner. Thanks to university connections, and our venue's dedicated people, we managed to strike a sponsorship deal with Cisco, so we get the equipment to set up on the broadband university network. People at the university are working hard on configuring the network for us to ensure a good experience over all days of the event.

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