In this post, we describe some of the issues facing large or complex software projects using Drupal's CCK content type extension facilities. We then propose a remedy in the form of CoCKTaiL, a high-level language for CCK types and associated UI elements and relations. Tools and potential applications will be described in future work.

Drupal's Content Construction Kit (CCK) is a powerful feature, much loved by Drupal developers, who use it to rapidly define data types and relations for applications. Using a UI, developers can easily create new content types by specifying fields, UI widgets, relations, and more.

The ability to interactively create new types and supporting UI's is a great timesaver in the early stages of many Drupal development projects.

For larger projects, however, the nature of the design and implementation process for CCK types leads to difficulties in evolving and maintaining projects which include CCK components, and these difficulties contribute to the lifecycle cost of large Drupal applications.

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Acquia has been selected as a finalist in the Collaboration and Social Networking category for the 2008 MITX Technology Awards. This is the fifth year MITX has offered the awards to recognize innovative companies and technologies in the New England region across nine categories:

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I ran into an annoying problem today where members of a certain administrative role could not edit nodes on a Drupal site.

I checked the following:

• The role had administer nodes, which should have given members the ability to edit any node.
• The role had the edit foo permission and the edit own foo permission.
• I tried getting rid of edit own foo in case it was conflicting with edit foo.
• I reset the node_access table.
• I emptied the cache.

Nonetheless, some nodes were editable, and some were not. Normally Drupal is very robust, and I just couldn't figure out why things were not working.

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Distributed search and oauth
* research and compare distributed search modules
* document use cases for distributed search
* design and start implementation of oauth enabled distributed search

User / Profile search
* current profile module and user-as-node (CCK) approaches
* research and compare existing user-search modules
* investigate combining different search methods for different
fields (e.g. soundex or metaphon for names, geo for location, full
text for expertise) - present via Faceted search?

Additional strategies for full-text search
* Example: different approaches for handling punctuation, stemming,
phrases (NLP handling of phrases?), stop words
* need to let preprocess, e.g., know if it is being called in
indexing or retrieval

Search testing / benchmarking
* Examine existing tests, prioritize additional test development
* Examine benchmarking frameworks, write/extend if required

Many folk don't know that the ACLU has a TV series called "The Freedom Files". Season 2 can be seen on PBS stations throughout the country. Episodes can also be viewed online at aclu.tv which we re-launched for the new season recently.

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One of the interesting new opportunities - and thus pitfalls until you understand them - is Drupal 6's built in block caching. As a developer, I'm generally used to creating hook_block by just specifying the 'info' data in hook_block, and letting the other options be set by the admin via the blocks page. However, you can't set the caching level there, and more troublesome, you can't change the caching level of a block once it's been put into your site.

That can be a real problem, given that the default for the cache flag is 'BLOCK_CACHE_PER_ROLE'. If the block in question is customized to a user, then Bob's going to see George's data, and that's no good. Additional problems result with javascript or css that are linked to the block - if drupal_add_js or drupal_add_css are invoked in the block, their effects aren't included in the cache.

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Jeff Robbins interview Earl Miles about his work on Views, Panels, Node Queue, Drupal core, and so much more.

This Drupal Amazon EC2 AMI builds on our first released drupal Ec2 Ami.

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The Sydney Morning Herald has a nice article about Lullabot that came out yesterday. James Walker and I did an interview with the newspaper as part of the media blitz surrounding Lullabot's workshops in Melbourne Australia last month. The article talks a bit about how Lullabot came into being, our philosophy, what we do, and (apparently) how much value we put in the hug. We try not to get too gushy about it, but I guess when it comes right down to it, I guess this really does separate us from most other companies.

By the way, the Melbourne workshops were fantastic! We're in the middle of another week of Drupal workshops in Minneapolis right now. And Toronto is coming up next month. Three countries in three months. I think that makes us global!

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Have a great idea that can lower technical barriers in Drupal? Want to help provide powerful tools for digital publication? Have a way to encourage people to improve their communities by supporting the free exchange of information and ideas?

Want a GRANT to make it happen?

Digital publishing can help people improve their communities by giving them tools to connect people and ideas.

The Knight Drupal Initiative is a grant program designed to foster development in the Drupal project. Knight Foundation is a Miami-based non-profit grant making organization. Since 1950, the foundation has invested more than $300 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression worldwide.

Anybody who wishes to apply for funding can start the process at http://groups.drupal.org/knight-drupal-initiative by reviewing the guidelines and submitting an application. Your project must be Drupal-specific. You don't have to be a US resident to apply, but there may be cases where, due to US regulations, funding may not be available in specific countries.

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What is one of the best tips to get out of the creative slump? Need to find that extra juice for your Drupal theme?

It may be simple, but I love to use Flickr for my inspiration!

Flickr has millions of photos, and thousands of groups to showcase amazing work.

Vandelay Design has compiled a list of 99 Flickr groups to help get you unstuck, such as:

http://flickr.com/groups/webdesign-inspiration/
http://flickr.com/groups/illustrationnow/
http://flickr.com/groups/psdtuts/
http://flickr.com/groups/photoshop/
http://flickr.com/groups/designtype/
http://flickr.com/groups/yourvector/

Inspired! That's the way we work!

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We'd like to officially welcome a new member of our theming team, Jay Wolf!

Yes, we have stolen him away from his plans for world domination, and perhaps delayed his efforts toward contributing a theme starting with every letter of the alphabet to Drupal.org. Jay has recently joined our team as a full time themer and the fruits of his labour are just starting to show.

Jay is a long time member of the Drupal community, and you may remember him from such themes as Amadou (which I have often recommended to people as an awesome theme), Barron, Celju, and Golden Hour. He'll be assisting us in turning our designs into awesome, feature rich Drupal themes.

Thanks Jay, for joining us, and for being just as picky about your CSS as we are!

At DrupalCon Sunnyvale 2007, Rasmus Lerdorf chided Drupal on spending over half of its request time on just the bootstrap process. As a GHOP Task , Cornil did a performance analysis of Drupal and found its two largest performance drains were the bootstrap process and the theming layer. Quite simply, Drupal spends too much time including code.

Drupal 6 has the beginnings of a solution. Page handlers, the most unused code in Drupal, can now be split out into conditional include files and the menu system is able to conditionally load just the file it needs for a given page request. Based on earlier benchmarks, just that code shuffling netted Drupal 6 a 20% performance boost. The downside, however, is that it does require the module author to explicitly specify file to be included, and the syntax for it is just a little bit annoying what with the file name and file path being separate keys on the menu handler.

Fortunately, Drupal 7's self-learning code registry system has just landed, which should obliterate most of the wasted bootstrap cost.

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In the spirit of the "Data Sprint," and the "Testing Sprint", Friday 5/9 through Sunday 5/11, we are meeting in what is being dubbed the "Search Sprint" at the University of Minnesota.

The good news is that CivicActions is busy! The bad news is that I had hoped to prepare more, but this date has really snuck up on me. My plane leaves tomorrow, and I've neglected preparing at all. I was asked to write this blog several weeks ago (sorry).

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In the same way that the Internet itself would not have achieved greatness without the ability to search it easily and efficiently, Drupal’s greatness will always be tied directly to the effectiveness of its core search solution. Improving core search for Drupal 7 will be no small task, however. The current implementation is both elegant but complex, robust yet inflexible. The seven coders participating in the Minnesota Search Sprint this weekend have a great challenge as well as a great opportunity. Here are some of the things we hope to achieve:

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The next Drupal Meetup is right around the corner. This coming Monday, May 12, we'll be meeting at Stetson's Bar and Restaurant at 7:00 pm to get together and talk Drupal. We'll be in the room upstairs.

As usual we'll kick off the meeting with several five minute lightening round talks. This is your chance to share your latest project or module with the group. Since this meetup is for people of all levels of Drupal expertise - including experts, newbies, those interested in becoming newbies, and users - we do ask that you focus on the big picture needs and functions and keep out the Drupal jargon.

So far, we have these talks on the schedule.

• Showcase of Green Media Toolshed: A community-powered set of tools for communications experts that allows them to create and customize group workspaces - and control the branding and urls. This is done with new advances made the to context module.
• Announcement of ChinaOSL, a two month long code camp happening this summer in Bejing

If you want to talk, post your topic here or come prepared to take over the floor.

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Two weeks ago I attended a joint Web 2.0 (conference) and Web2Open (unconference) two part session on building a social strategy for your business. Web 2.0 and social software luminaries Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff presented a session " how to have a successful social strategy" based on their extensive research and book "Groundswell".

They recommend that in order to lead a successful social strategy you should assume the role of a pragmatist. Pragmatists try to meet the company's goals, usually selling a product, as well as the needs of the community which wants complete access to the company's internal resources. In the case of Drupal.org this means carefully striking a balance between adding any set of modules the community wants on Drupal.org and respecting the time of the half dozen active members of the infrastructure team who are responsible for maintaining Drupal.org software and infrastructure.

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Yesterday the Drupal association added it's 500th paid member. 350 individuals paid 22 Euros for an individual membership and 150 organizations paid 73 Euros for an organizational membership. In total the association has received $21 448.45 from paid memberships. This revenue has allowed us to help operate events such as Drupalcon Barcelona, and Drupalcon Boston. It has also covered hardware purchases, RAM upgrades, and support contracts for those purchases. This financial support has allowed us to get ahead of Drupal.org's growth curve and ensure we have the infrastructure in place to meet a growing demand.

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