Planet Drupal
DrupalCon Washington DC; March 4 - 7 2009: DrupalCon DC Session Submission Deadline Is December 10th
The last day to submit sessions proposals for DrupalCon DC will be December 10th, so if you'd like to present but haven't yet submitted your idea, please submit your session in the next three weeks.
There's been an amazing turnout for sessions proposals - 98 sessions have been submitted so far and touch on a great variety of topics. In the weeks after the deadline, we'll work with a volunteer committee (more on the to come) to go through the proposals - and in conjunction with the votes each has received - select the best sessions for each track, merge ones that overlap, and ensure that each track has good depth and representation.
In January, we'll post the final schedule online. We know many of you need to show your boss an official schedule before registering and many are anxious to see a final schedule so you can plan ahead and make sure you get the most out of DrupalCon, so we'll get the final schedule posted well before DrupalCon. If you have a last minute session idea, we have plenty of space for BoF sessions which will be scheduled on the fly.
Joshua Brauer: Komodo vs. Coda
At the risk of starting the vim vs. emacs sort of flame war I'm curious what folks think about Komodo IDE vs. Coda for general use. I've been using Komodo for about a year and liking it but faced with two pretty equal prices for upgrading vs moving to Coda I'm starting to look at how I really use Komodo.
Development Seed: Washington, DC Drupal Meetup Tonight
The November DC Drupal Meetup will take place tonight at 7:00 pm at Stetson’s. So far two people have volunteered to give a five minute lightening presentation. Jeff will talk about the new module Nice Map, which allows you to make good looking maps like you can see here. Ian will discuss the strategies we’ve implemented to more efficiently build websites. Anyone is welcome and everyone is encouraged to give a lightening presentation. If you’d like to present, please post your topic here and come ready to talk tonight.
DC Drupal meetups are for all levels of Drupal developers and users, so don’t be shy if you’re a newbie. These meetups are great opportunities to learn more about Drupal and what you can do with it, meet developers working with the platform, and meet users to hear about their experiences working with Drupal. You can find more details about the meetup in the Washington, DC Drupal group. Hope to see you tonight!
Linux.com: Interview: Angela Byron, top Drupal developer and evangelist
Stéphane Corlosquet: The awakening of the Irish Drupal community
The first Irish Drupal meetup happened in Galway in January 07. Since then, Alan and myself have tried to convinced the Drupal users based in Dublin to get together and organize a Drupal event in Dublin. It was great to have this happen last Saturday with such a high number of attendees: 74 people! Thanks to Stella and Heather for all the marketing work!
All sorts of people came out to the event: folks from Google, IBM, Ericsson, some civil servants, many students from the various Dublin universities and freelance developers. We even had people visiting from the UK. Some were experts in PHP or other languages and were interested in learning about Drupal itself in order to contribute their expertise in coding and security. Some others were keen on creating new ties with the Open Source world in general. The gender ratio was better balanced than the regular 10% that we have come to expect at Drupal events.
Bert Boerland: Dutch political party Groenlinks on Drupal
Recently I saw that the Groenlinks.nl site is running Drupal. Grenlinks (greenleft, (wiki-entry) is a left winged political party in the Netherlands. GroenLinks is the party behind the Motie Vendrk (Dutch) that states that if an Open Source en proprietary product are equally good, the government has to choose the Open Source product.(Yes, we have to make Open Source products /worse/ to get picked above proprietary software ).
Development Seed: Knight Pulse Beta Site Launches on Drupal
This week the Knight Foundation launched its latest Drupal project Knight Pulse. The Knight Foundation works on a broad range of issues related to innovative media work and improving access to information for people and communities. Knight Pulse is a new community site designed to bring everyone involved in the work Knight sponsors together to talk and learn from each other.
Dries Buytaert: British Council using Drupal
English Online is an initiative created by the British Council to encourage the learning of English in China.
In good Drupal style, the site boasts a number of social networking features such as personal profiles, blogs and forums to connect a community of over 60,000 users. Users can customize content in Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional and English. Other features include video, newsletters, an events calendar, as well as a mobile version of the site at http://m.englishonline.org.cn.
The site, developed by Brightlemon, was also referenced in Gordon Brown’s recent visit to China.
CivicActions: DrupalNews Episode 2
In this episode: KDI applications on hold, new theme coming for core, installation insurrection, events, site launches.
Podcast available here: http://drupalnews.podbean.com
Thanks to everyone for the support so far. Again, if you have any ideas for stories to cover, please let me know.
Learn By The Drop: Adding Fields With CCK
This drop shows how to add extra fields to existing content types (such as blog posts) using the Content Construction Kit (CCK) module in Drupal 6.
You can purchase an extended, high resolution version (QuickTime, 1024x768) of this lesson for only $2.99 here.
Mikkel Høgh: Preparing for Drupal 7 by changing the way to make parameters for db_query.
After attending DrupalCon in Szeged and following the new database stuff, I thought a bit about how to make the transition easier when Drupal 7 comes out.
I didn’t think that it was anything special, but Robert Douglass encouraged me to share it, so here you are:
I figured out that you can actually use the Drupal 7-style of arguments to db_query right now (more or less).
The thing is that db_query in Drupal 6 allows you to use either the classic way with an arbitrary number of extra arguments to the db_query function or arguments as an array which is the future style.
The deal is that Drupal 6 takes the arguments in order, where Drupal 7 will use array keys (so I’d have :title in my query instead of %s).
So you can use the same arguments in Drupal 6 and Drupal 7, because Drupal 6 doesn’t care about which keys you have in your arguments array.
So whithout further ado, an example query from my TSearch module (the implementation of PostgreSQL’s TSearch in Drupal):
Joshua Brauer: Views attachment display type
While doing some overhaul this weekend I had a plan to put a feature story on the front page of my blog and link to a number of shorter items in a series of blocks across the bottom of the page. This got me to thinking that James Walker, aka Walkah, had done something similar. But it turns out it's much cooler.
Mikkel Høgh: DrupalCamp 2008 slides and code
Just a public service announcement – here are my slides and the small twitter-like module I created for my “Drupal modules 101”-session.
In addition to that, you can go check out the code for my PostgreSQL TSearch module and the excellent scaffolding_example module.
CodeGobbler.com: Drupal meetup, Ireland - a big success
Today's Drupal meetup in Ireland was, in my opinion, a huge success with a turnout of 70+ Drupalers with varying levels of Drupal experience. Surprisingly, almost half of the people who attended were complete newcomers, many of whom had never even installed Drupal!
Angie Byron: Interview at OStatic
Sam Dean from OStatic sent me some questions via e-mail last week. Their website's mission statement reads:
Our goal is to increase the adoption of Open Source Software by helping users find viable projects and applications that fulfill specific needs, evaluate them against available alternatives and collaborate with their network of trusted peers.
The interview is about (what else?) Drupal, and covers things such as what Drupal is, where it's going in the future, and some of our challenges we have as a project.
You can read the interview over there if you'd like. :)
Agaric Design Collective: Use h1 for front page site name and strong for interior pages' site name display
In template.php:
<?php
/**
* Override or insert variables into the page templates.
*
* @param $vars
* An array of variables to pass to the theme template.
* @param $hook
* The name of the template being rendered ("page" in this case.)
*/
function seacoastoutright_preprocess_page(&$vars, $hook) {
Neil Drumm: Upcoming events and a podcast
Next week, I will be at the Nonprofit Software Development Summit in Oakland. I am scheduled to help out with a wide range of sessions about Drupal and political data. I have been attending this summit since its first year when CivicSpace was still young; it will be good to catch up with everyone and see what people are doing with Drupal.
Dries Buytaert: Mozilla Thunderbird using Drupal
Acquia: The S-Files: "Why can't a user edit content?"
A few days ago a user emailed with a problem about giving users the ability to edit content. The problem started with a small site that had been added to over time. Now that there were a few more pages to maintain the webmaster wanted to give access to other users to manage a few pages.
Raincity Studios: Blog in the place where you are - Placeblogger launches with News Challenge grant
Another Raincity Studios project released to the public - this one is a location based feed aggregator called Placeblogger.com.
Designed to gather a deep view of their any micro-location, readers can follow all your local content in one place or track the news in places you've lived or want to visit. Travelers can reconnoiter destinations and arrange coverage to coincide with their itinerary. I.e. blogging from Seattle on Monday, reading blogs, in NYC on Wednesday, and reading and writing Prague blogs on Friday.