Drupal Blogs

If you are using Ubercart to do ecommerce with Drupal, be sure to use one of the mainstream payment gatways: Authorize.net or Paypal.

While Ubercart does support a number of alternative payment gateways, he dangers in going with these alternatives are significant. Here's an example of a single day where two of the less well known Ubercart payment modules were exposed as having flaws that allows people to checkout without needing to pay:

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With the release of WordPress 3, there's a whole new set of discussions about Drupal vs. WordPress.

I'm going to try and explain my views on UX in Drupal, once again using the lego analogy.

First, I propose that you need a defined purpose to build great UX. WordPress focuses on blogging, and thus has an excellent blogging product.

With WP3, they've even integrated their version of multisite / Aegir out of the box. BuddyPress is an example of a product that sits on top of this base infrastructure. So now WP does blogs as well as multi-user social groups / communities.

In Drupal, we've optimized for a big box of lego. And there are a LOT of pieces in there. Pirate bits, space ship bits, viking bits. And lots of blocks that fit together pretty well if you're creative and pick through looking for ones that match in colour and so on.

I could talk about the WYSIWYG editor that ships with WP as an example. They took the base piece, customized it, and now have a rich text editor piece that fits exactly into the blogging product. It's not even a block! It can't get re-used easily with all these pirate bits! Sometimes, it's OK to plug in that perfectly shaped lego piece that isn't really a block at all.

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Jim Berry (aka solotandem) is the father of Jimmy "Boombatower" Berry and talks about the Grammar Parser module, which is used in the API module and Coder Upgrade portion of the Coder module. Berry is also the author of the Deadwood module to help upgrade modules from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6, and this functionality has been improved with the Grammar Parser and migrated into the Coder upgrade module for upgrading modules from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7.

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While working on our last project I realized that we haven't used breadcrumbs in a theme for a while (well that is not entirely really true, we use them a lot for the admin section). We came across of what we first thought was a bug; the breadcrumbs weren't following the primary links herarchy and were only displaying the "Home" link.

Google here we go, search... search... read... read... read more... and after a lot of trial and error I found the the solution: Custom Breadcrumbs and Menu Breadcrumb.

Now that you have these modules installed and enabled... sorry, what? Not ready yet? Ok, let me know when you're ready... (Meanwhile, Alberto is doing important research) ........................... Huh, what was that? Installation completed? Great, then let's continue.

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Acquia recently wrapped up its latest internal development sprint. One new development that was announced is the fact that Drupal Gardens is now protected by Mollom's spam protection services.

What does this mean for Drupal Gardens users? Just what you'd think. You receive the best spam protection available on the web from Mollom. There is no setup, no hassle, and no cost.

What does this mean for developers? A great example of how to provide Mollom to your customers, in the form of the Mollom API module for Drupal. The Mollom API module was developed by Jacob Singh and Gábor Hojtsy from Acquia. The Mollom API module uses Mollom's Reseller API to automatically provision the service and to programmatically obtain public and private keys for each Drupal Gardens site.

Clickability, a proprietary SaaS platform for content management, has compared SaaS to Open Source. Not only is the comparison inaccurate, it omits the downsides of SaaS and frankly, they are comparing apples to oranges. Open Source is a licensing and development model, SaaS is a software delivery model. Either they are distorting things on purpose, or they don't understand Open Source at all. In other words, time to look at some good ol' FUD and to share my take on Open Source versus SaaS.

To give you a sample of their comparison, take Clickability's take on integration:

Screenshot taken from Clickability's SaaS vs Open Source comparison.

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Drupal 7 is almost stable. You maybe tempted to download it now and install it. By all means do! its great! But if you're installing Drupal on a PostgreSQL database, you'll run into a message like this:

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A Drupal 5 version of this module is also available. If you would like this patch to be committed to Drupal core, please do not leave a comment on this page—please instead add your comment to Drupal issue #455092.

This is a drop-in replacement for the system.module of Drupal 6.17 which makes your Drupal 6 site use less memory and may even make it faster. A test I ran in a development environment with a stock Drupal 6 installation suggested that I got:

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I’ll be giving a 90-minute session on Theming with Fusion tomorrow, Thursday June 17th at 10am Pacific. You need to register online for this session through WebEx. Thanks again to our partner Acquia for inviting us to present and hosting this session.

I’m very excited because this will be our first detailed presentation on Fusion theming, and apparently you are too because over 600 are registered already!

The session will be recorded and posted online by Acquia. There will be a quick demo to get things started, then I’ll walk through a higher level overview with some code and site examples, and then we’ll do some live walkthroughs. Bring your questions for the Q&A!

I’ll be using this demo site for part of tomorrow’s session, and you can grab your own copy of the site along with a hosted sandbox by signing up for free with WebEnabled.

I hope you’ll join us!

It has been entirely too long since I've posted anything on my blog. Blame the wonderful spring weather we've enjoyed in Toronto or the workload of late. However true those two things are, I shouldn't go this long without posting anything.

So, to ease myself into publishing again I bring you one of my twice yearly posts encouraging you to attend the next Drupalcon.

In case you haven't heard the next Drupalcon is August 23-27th 2010 in Copenhagen Denmark. Tickets are available NOW and only €249 until June 28th.

If you've never attended a Drupalcon you're missing out. If you've only attended a North American Drupalcon, I encourage you to go to Europe and enjoy an entirely different atmosphere. Either way this may be the Drupalcon to attend. The King of Denmark will be putting on one heck of a show and it may prove to be the most social Drupalcon ever (with technical and business aspects ever present).

Full disclosure: I won't be attending.

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Examiner.com is moving to Drupal 7 and has been heavily contributing to the Drupal project. The site is looking for Examiners in the community to write about Drupal - the business of Drupal, events, interesting tidbits on Theming and Development, and so forth. It is more than OK to cross post (you retain copyright to the content but do grant Examiner.com a license to use that content) from your own blog if you already have a home you write from and, best of all, you get paid for page views. It is a great way to promote Drupal, increase your own visibility, and/or build your local Drupal community. If you're interested, contact Stacey at sharrison [at] examiner [dot] com.

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Neil Drumm (aka drumm) talks about some of the improvements to the Drupal developer reference site of api.drupal.org. The API module is the module that drives the site since it's essentially a set of regular expressions that extract the doxygen function headers and presents it in a navigable website. For Drupal 7, the API module has moved to using the Grammar Parser module, which is a programatic way to search the code based upon PHP syntax because regular expressions wouldn't scale to be able to handle object-oriented classes. Drumm talks about the process of adding classes to api.drupal.org as well as adding in support for being able to search through the code for contributed modules and projects. He started with the example module and plans on expanding it from there.

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SAN DIEGO, CA – June 10, 2010 - Drupal web development company Achieve Internet announced today that it is bringing on board Susan Rust as its new VP of Client Services.

Susan Rust was formerly a partner at Green Bird Media, a web design and development firm that specializes in Drupal-based design. With this new addition to the Achieve team, Achieve Internet significantly enhances its capabilities as a leader in the competitive web development market.

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Weird, but I haven't thought about making a poll. Luckily, since Drupal7 is still not released there is time to do changes -- and maybe revert them.

So, what do you think, should OG be renamed to Group?

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We want to make DrupalCon Copenhagen as awesome as possible. Here's an update on what we've been working on lately.

We are still working away to make DrupalCon Copenhagen as awesome as possible, but we wanted to take some time to give you an update on what we have been working on lately.

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Mark Boulton Design was selected to lead the drupal.org redesign efforts almost two years. While they went on dutifully with the process listening to feedback from the community and designing a modern home for all things Drupal(.org), and the deliverables were in on time, the actual implementation (which was on the drupal.org community in general) lagged behind a bit. I've personally been to multiple sprints where we established the base for the redesign infrastructure on many levels. The big problems are not around applying a different theme to the drupal.org site but reworking the structure and some sections for the redesign. The latest sprint which I was unfortunately unable to attend was in San Francisco, where in a surprising turn of events, it was set that drupal.org subsites should push forward with implementing the new theme and concepts even ahead of drupal.org. After all, we do not have big rearchitecture plans for these sites, so we can sidestep the biggest tasks which keep drupal.org behind. So came http://association.drupal.org/ up in the new theme shortly after.

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TopNotchThemes is gearing up for Drupal Design Camp Boston taking place this weekend June 19-20th at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Stata Center. Not only are we a Gold Sponsor at this year’s event, but our very own themer/designer, Sheena Donnelly, will be presenting a session on “Sustainable Theming with Fusion” at 11:00 am this Sunday. Sheena will discuss the pros and cons of using Fusion, and Fusion basics from a themer’s point of view, as well as how to approach creating more sustainable CSS styles in your themes.

We’ll also be manning a sponsor table during Saturday’s Job Fair so be sure to stop by and say hi to Sheena and Stacy who will be happy to answer any of your pressing Fusion questions. See you there!

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You may know that lots of delicious things have happened to Drupal's Form API in Drupal 7. (Only a geek can say "delicious" and "Form API" in the same sentence. Try it!) The finest minds in the business have been working on it, I can assure you. Give effulgentsia, fago, frando, and chx a big hug when you see them, because Form API is much improved. (Sorry to those of you I forgot to name, but THANKS!)

I'm going to do a series covering Form API changes, starting with this one. I won't attempt to cover the deep details, just the things that ordinary developers might use:

1. $form_state changes and form builder function signature changes
2. AJAX Forms changes
3. New properties (#attached and many friends)

Let me know if you have other topics to suggest.

OK, to business. This article is mostly parroted from the api.drupal.org topic: Form Generation. Thanks to Alex Bronstein (effulgentsia) for his reviews and contributions to that doc.

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If you’ve delved into some of the enhanced bookmarking magic in Firefox, you know that entering the world of the Organize Bookmarks tool provides some additional options in how you save your bookmarks.

Custom Keywords are really neat. I use them for Drupal reference all the time. It’s my preferred method for bouncing around CVS, the API, and issue queues. Typing “d6 hook_nodeapi” to double check the ops is very nice. Typing “dcm og” to start researching how og access control works save a page load.

Attached is a drupal-bookmarks.html file that will get you a leg up on the boring process of creating these bookmarks.

It includes Drupal Project, Drupal Project Issues, Drupal Project Usage, Drupal CVS Modules, Drupal CVS Core, Drupal Site search, Drupal 6 API lookup, and Drupal 7 API lookup.

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Lullabot has been running public and private Drupal workshops since 2006. We now run conferences, have a video training series, conduct on-line training, and we're continuing to expand our training into other areas.

We're looking for someone to

• Coordinate all of Lullabot's training efforts
• Help coordinate and train trainers
• Help to plan curriculum, workshops, and videos
• Help with private workshop sales and coordination
• Answer customer questions about public workshops, online workshops, and videos
• Contribute to marketing efforts
• Help come up with creative ways to expand and improve Lullabot's training

Ideal candidates will:

• Have excellent leadership skills
• Be a strong self-starter -- someone with moxie!
• Be an excellent writer and clear communicator
• Be familiar with general Drupal concepts and web technologies
• Have a valid passport and be willing to travel