Feed aggregator

Florida DrupalCamp 2010 held just outside of Orlando was the largest Drupal-related gathering the Sunshine state has ever seen. The February 20-21 event pulled in more than 175 attendees from Florida and the US, more than $5,000 in sponsorships, and generated a lot of interest in regional community building throughout Florida. Anecdotal input and a formal survey indicate the weekend was an unqualified success. In the spirit of open-source, this case study provides other DrupalCamp organizers insight into planning and organizing a worthwhile DrupalCamp, from early planning through follow-up participant surveys.

FDC10 was the culmination of a strong effort by the Florida Drupal User's Group, local companies, and generous sponsors. It was unique in many ways, including the number and diversity of the participants as well as how the event was organized. The weekend was less of a "barcamp" style event and more of a mini-DrupalCon, with almost all sessions pre-determined, and several generous sponsorships covering plenty of food and swag for all attendees who paid a minimal registration fee of $5.

The weekend featured a full day of sessions divided into three tracks based on experience level, including one dedicated to beginners to introduce users to the Drupal platform and sow the seeds for growing the community. The second day was Coding for A Cause, a coding sprint among 40 volunteer developers of all skill levels that built operational sites for two deserving, PR-savvy, Florida not-for profit organizations.

read more

BookTeller.com is a subscription-based online library for animated and narrated children's books, available in both English and Chinese. Currently, there are over 200 books available for subscribers and more are being added. Its goals are to help parents and educators teach children how to read and to get them reading more often by giving them books that are both engaging and fun.

Besides being an online library, it is also a platform for authors and publishers who wish to transform their work into animated books and to monetize them. For that, we have a revenue sharing program and a team of award-winning animators to help out with the animation.

The consumer-facing website is used for, among other things, showcasing what books are in the library and to handle registrations/payments. The books are accessed via a client reader based on Adobe's AIR platform, which must be downloaded and installed.

The following is our experience in building out the website using Drupal. I hope it is useful as another example of what's possible.

read more

Drupal E-commerce with Ubercart 2.x, by George Papadongonas and Yiannis Doxaras, is a new title from Packt Publishing. It is aimed at business owners and ordinary Drupal users without development expertise who want to create, administer and design their own online shop. This is the first title that deals with Ubercart 2.x, providing non-technical users with information about how to sell shippable goods, downloadable products, recurring memberships, and event tickets, as well as enable other complex interactions using various contributed Drupal modules. As a reader of drupal.org, you can receive a 15% or 20% discount (see below) and benefit the Drupal Association!

read more

2010 is here and its time for another Summer of Code, courtesy of Google! For those who don't know, Summer of Code is an amazing program in which student developers are paid a stipend by Google in exchange for working on open source projects along with mentors from those projects. Drupal has benefited enormously from Summer of Code over the years. Many of our most productive and well-known members are former Summer of Code students, including Drupal 7 core maintainer Angela Byron (webchick), Drupal 6 core maintainer G?bor Hojtsy and many many more. For more information see the Summer of Code FAQ.

2010 marks Drupal's sixth year being accepted as a mentoring organization. Last year we successfully completed 21 student projects and it would be great to match or even surpass that this year, but there are two things we need to make that happen - Students and Mentors!

read more

On Saturday, April 17th, the weekend before DrupalCon San Francisco, I'm helping to organize the very first Drupal core developer summit. The goal of the Drupal core developer summit is to talk about ways we can improve Drupal core, and the core development processes, all while having a good time socializing with fellow core developers. Meeting in person for a full day and having more focused time to brainstorm about just core, should be really valuable. We can come up with plans to get Drupal 7 released, and we can get initial alignment on Drupal 8.

To make it lively and fun, we'll do a series of 10 minute lightning talks. In addition to the lightning talks, we'll have a number of meatier discussions and breakout sessions in smaller groups. The lightning talks will take the format: "How to make X more awesome?" where X can be anything in Drupal core. The idea behind the lightning talks is to educate core contributors about problems that need to be fixed, to present foundations for solutions, and to bootstrap collaboration. The original plan was to have 16 lightning talks, but based on feedback, I'm now leaning towards more breakout sessions and fewer lightning talks. On Sunday, the day after the Drupal core developer summit, there will be a code lounge where longer breakout sessions can be held too. Suggestions welcome as we can still made adjustments. Read on to learn more about how to attend.

read more

Automated testing has greatly improved the Drupal core development process. With automated testing over 24,500 unique core patches have been reviewed, and almost 19,000 test assertions are now run against every core patch. The result has been faster development cycle, more stable releases, and the ability to add features more quickly to Drupal core.

The benefits of automated testing are now available for contributed module developers and Drupal site owners through the addition of new functionality to the qa.drupal.org and the automated testing framework (PIFR) that integrates with Drupal core.

The leaders of the Drupal quality assurance project are holding a webinar and sprint to help contributed module developers and Drupal site owners benefit from this automated testing.

• Webinar: April 1st, 1PM EST (Webinar registration)
• Sprint: Sunday, April 18th, Drupalcon San Francisco, 9AM, Coder Lounge

read more

DrupalCon 2010 is in sight! In less than 30 days over 2,000 Drupal fans will descend upon the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco.

The final schedule has been posted, so get ready to plan your DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 experience. Sign-in, and then sign-up for your favorite sessions! http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/schedule

This year, the hottest sessions at DrupalCon will cover topics such as: Whitehouse.gov's use of Drupal, Facebook applications, Twitter integration, iPhone apps and Web services, cloud computing, e-commerce, the latest trends in Web design, how to get started with Drupal, and much, much more. All sessions fall into one of six tracks including First Impressions, Design & Usability, Code-Free Success, Technical Details, Leveraging Drupal for Business, and Providing Professional Drupal Services.

Registration for DrupalCon San Francisco is only $195 through March 25. After that, it goes up to $225. All attendees will be able to participate in three full days of sessions and seminars led by the best and brightest minds in the Drupal community.

Register at https://sf2010.drupal.org/registration

We would like to extend a huge thank you to the DrupalCon 2010 sponsors. This event wouldn't be as amazing without their support.

read more

Our second Drupal 7 alpha version was released just over a month ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the third alpha version of Drupal 7.x for your further testing and feedback. The first alpha announcement provided a comprehensive list of improvements made since Drupal 6.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 7 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

The release notes contain a list of the biggest changes. The most notable change for developers is Drupal 7 now ships with jQuery 1.4 and jQuery UI 1.8. We've also fixed a number of critical issues since the previous alpha, most importantly one that caused passwords to be stored in plain-text under certain conditions. Oops. :P This is a great time to reiterate...

This alpha version should not be used for production sites. We've resolved most errors reported so far, but there are outstanding known issues (including security issues) and most likely some problems that have not been reported as of yet. It is expected that there will be a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. You can help us reach the final release date sooner by testing this alpha and providing feedback.

read more

Brazen Careerist is a premier Generation Y career-based social network. Our goal is to help shift job seeker's and the recruiter's approaches to focus on social strengths and ideas instead of just experience. We have been using Drupal for almost two years to help us scale and add social features rapidly. Using it as a platform has been crucial to our success and will continue to be in the foreseeable future.

Most recently, we gave our users new and powerful ways to participate in idea-based conversations. We also rolled out innovative integrations with external social-networking sites and revolutionary ways to display your online resume. We'd like to showcase some of these new features to the Drupal community, and hopefully get some more great ideas from you guys!

read more

The Drupal.org redesign continues to progress. This is great news and a morale boost for everyone involved.

Since our front page post on February 3...

• Over 20 enthusiastic new volunteers have come forward to lend their expertise.
• Several experienced professional Drupal project managers have been added to the project management team
• We have produced two new theming documentation. This will help the theme implementation teams standardize their implementations. See details further on.
• Contributors can sign into the new *.staging.drupal.org subsites (groups, association, api, localize, etc.) in additional to the main site now.
• We continue to need expert resources with knowledge of drupal.org data sources to assist with custom Solr development
• Trellon has checked in an alpha dashboard and we now have a beta version of the main Download and Extend page.

Once the major blockers are cleared, we will push forward with engaging the MVP implementation volunteers that signed up last year.

Our next sprint will be on Friday, March 19th from 8am PST/4pm GMT to 12pm PST, 8PM GMT. We aim to focus on theming, and completing the search generated blocks. The sprint will be held on IRC in #drupal-infrastructure.

read more

Drupal 6.16 and 5.22, maintenance releases which fix issues reported through the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities, are now available for download. Drupal 6.16 also fixes other smaller issues.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in the Drupal 5.0 release announcement. Drupal 5 will no longer be maintained when Drupal 7 is released. Upgrading to Drupal 6 is recommended.

read more

Drupal 6 Attachment Views, by me, J. Ayen Green, is my second title from Packt Publishing. It is aimed at Drupal web site developers who want to build more functionality and interaction into their views, but aren�ft ready quite yet to take on panels. As a reader of drupal.org, you can receive a 15% discount (see below) and benefit the Drupal Association!

I wrote this to be a fun, informative, hands-on learning guide. It uses actual case study that was developed in parallel with the book�fs writing. This guide presents purposeful and interactive examples that build on each other. Clear, concise instructions and practical examples help you to learn quickly to use this exciting feature of views.

read more

Over 400 session submissions have been submitted for DrupalCon San Francisco, which will be held April 19-21, 2010. We need your help in deciding which of those sessions will be included in the conference program. Please come review the list of sessions and vote on the ones you'd like to see most.

Voting ends Monday, March 1st at 23:59 PST.

DrupalCon is a community-driven event. You've shared with us a vast array of exciting new ideas, proven recipes for success, case studies, best practices, new solutions to old problems, and other gems of knowledge. Now help us narrow down the selection. Your opinions are what shapes what happens at DrupalCon. Remember, every vote counts!

If you're a business, organization, or individual interested in helping to sponsor DrupalCon San Francisco, opportunities are still available. Contact us via the Web site, via e-mail at fundraising@drupal.com or phone at 415-894-9320 today!

read more

The Augusta Chronicle, the flagship newspaper of Morris Publishing Group, recently relaunched its website on the outstanding Drupal framework.

Morris first began using Drupal in 2005 with the launch of BlufftonToday.com, a blog-centric community website coupled with a free daily newspaper. In 2006 it adopted Drupal for both news and blogs at SavannahNow.com, the website of the Savannah Morning News. Both newspapers won Digital Edge awards for innovation in user participation.

Since then, the digital media arm of Morris Communications, Morris DigitalWorks, has developed a robust digital newspaper platform built on Drupal 6, to eventually power all 13 of its daily newspapers. Morris also uses Drupal for its radio stations and Skirt.com, a national specialty site for women.

Morris has made a commitment to make their online platform a dynamic arena for reader participation and contributions. Readers are encouraged to comment on stories and blogs, and, on some papers, are encouraged to create their own blogs on the site. Journalists are expected to post news online immediately and to interact with the public, and they need to be able to do it without learning HTML or tools such as FTP. These requirements made Drupal a natural choice.

read more

Drupal 7 is moving along nicely, and is becoming increasingly stable. We just released a second alpha release, fixing a number of critical bugs, following our initial alpha release in January. Alpha releases are to give Drupalistas something to download and test, so they can report and help fix bugs.

When will we switch to betas? We will switch to betas when the upgrade path from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 is working. Once we hit beta, we will become increasingly strict about accepting any more changes and we'll also commit to making HEAD to HEAD upgrades work.

Finally, we'll start rolling release candidates once the number of critical bugs is zero (or close to zero). To help us focus on critical bugs, we're working on adding a 'major' severity level to our ticketing system, making the options 'critical', 'major', 'normal' and 'minor'. 'Major' bugs would be really bad, but not necessarily block a release. For example, bugs that don't prevent Drupal from working, or that only affect a fraction of the Drupal population would be prioritized for fixing in follow-up releases. Critical bugs are those that badly break Drupal, or that are a major regression compared to Drupal 6.

read more

In early 2009, the Archdiocese of Saint Louis determined that it needed to upgrade its website, mostly for security concerns. After investigating a move from Joomla! 1.0.x to Joomla! 1.5.x, the Archdiocese determined it would be more cost effective and a more future-proof decision to migrate the over 49 individual Joomla! sites that comprised www.archstl.org into a single Drupal installation.

This upgrade/migration provides many benefits, not the least of which are a better end-user experience, a better administrative experience, and much improved page load and search indexing performance. In addition, Drupal's structure and content presentation provide much greater flexibility in design and information structure, as well as SEO (search engine optimization) than other popular CMS frameworks that were investigated.

read more

Update: Drupal 7.0 Alpha 3 is available now!

Our first Drupal 7 alpha version was released just over a month ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the second alpha version of Drupal 7.x for your further testing and feedback. The first alpha announcement provided a comprehensive list of improvements made since Drupal 6.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 7 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

The most notable change for developers is moving $form['#field'] to $form_state. This makes field forms more resilient to form_alters and debugging became a lot less tedious. Comment body became a field and new fields can be added to comments through the field UI module. And congratulations to the docs team and associated helpers for their outstanding work in enhancing and correcting lots of API documentation this release.

We've also fixed a number of issues since the previous alpha, most importantly one that caused all files to be deleted after six hours. Oops. :P This is a great time to reiterate...

It is important to note that this alpha version should not be used for production sites. We've resolved most errors reported so far, but there are outstanding known issues (including security issues) and most likely some problems that have not been reported as of yet. It is expected that there will be at least one more alpha version followed by a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. You can help us reach the final release date sooner by testing this alpha and providing feedback.

read more

From the earliest days of the Internet, many firms have tried to build community sites for medical professionals. Large sums of money were expended on technologies, and expectations around these feature-rich sites became very high.

So when a longstanding client, Jobson Healthcare Information (JHI) in New York, wanted to build a community website for America�fs 200,000 pharmacists, we at ISL Consulting took it on as a welcome challenge. Given JHI's strong position in the market ? they publish the most popular professional magazine for US pharmacists ? we knew there would be no shortage of domain expertise or marketing prowess. The question was whether Drupal would permit us to build an affordable yet world-class website with everything from e-commerce to personalized pages, an elaborate friend activity notification system and other community features medical professionals have come to expect from professional sites.

read more

Drupal 6 Performance Tips, by Trevor James and TJ Holowaychuk, is a newly-published title from Packt Publishing aimed at Drupal beginners, developers, designers, and webmasters who utilize the Drupal content management system to create robust websites. It provides crucial performance-related information for Drupal users of all experience levels, including module contributors, webmasters who simply configure and maintain Drupal websites, and even themers.

The book contains basic and advanced topics on Drupal performance that will appeal both to the Drupal novice and the advanced user or developer. With this book you will learn how to maximize and optimize your Drupal 6 framework using best practice performance solutions and tools. The book covers how to vastly improve performance through upgrades, caching, configuring and optimization using core and contributed modules.

As a reader of drupal.org, you can receive a 15% discount (see below) and benefit the Drupal Association!

read more

Can you believe that there are only 64 days left until DrupalCon San Francisco?! Starting April 17th, more than a thousand (we think it will be more than two thousand!) people will be converging at the Moscone Center in San Francisco for a great program of Drupal sessions, and we are really looking forward to seeing what happens when the community gets together at another one of these fabulous events. Session proposals have been open for almost a month and there's a lot of great stuff in there.

If you want to submit a proposal but you haven't, you still have time! Visit the session proposal page, and put your hat in the ring, but you better act fast! After Monday February 15th, we're closing session proposals so that on the 16th, we can open up community voting and let all of you tell us which of the sessions you would most like to see. Voting will continue until March 1st, 2010. If there is a session that you really want to see at DrupalCon, rally support and tell all your friends to vote.

On March 1st the DCSF planning committee will begin work on session selections. Your votes will play a huge part in which proposals get the strongest consideration. Speakers will be notified on March 5th whether their sessions have been accepted or not. The DrupalCon daily schedule will be posted on March 15th at http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/schedule.

read more