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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David Goode is a new addition to Development Seed and to the Drupal community. He'll be working with us this summer until he goes off to college in the fall. I think we'll be able to make him a full Drupal convert by then : )

One module that has frequently been put forward as a candidate for improvement in Drupal is the search module. Two reasons for this are its ranking system, which can be less than ideal, and its tendency to bog sites down and slow load times since it indexes and searches on the same SQL database that the site uses for all other operations. However, there is another option that's available to Drupal users: Solr. Running on its own Java daemon, Solr is a well-established, fast, and powerful indexing and search implementation accessed over HTTP. What it isn't is fully integrated with Drupal - yet.

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I finally found some time to commit the "big pile" of shareomatic module code into the Drupal CVS tree.

I must say that I was positively surprised by the release process one has to go trough in order to release a Drupal Module. It reminded me of the release process we use internally :)

It's so nice to have many theming sites. Provided they are Drupal themer sites:
Although some of their demos have the "Mambo license" menu item running, which is quite frankly not a testament to their understanding of Drupal. However, starting off from a ported theme could still be nice, those buying Drupal themes might not want to fiddle as much customizing the theme further.
However, starting off from a ported theme, with invalid xHTML and almost none of the detail will give you frustration and the customer service would be better off noneixsting because then it'd be at least clear what's on. There is one thing to do with TemplateMonster: avoid. Support those who work with Drupal, for Drupal!

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I've been doing some statistical analysis of Drupal sites in preparation for a new site I'm launching. The results are very interesting. Here are some version statistics, based on 1,370 Drupal sites with accessible changelog.txt files.

In case you're wondering about the freshness of this data, the majority of sites surveyed were launched in the last 12 months, including sites published as recently as 2 weeks ago. The version numbers recorded reflect the Drupal version the site is running today.

The URLs were collected from DrupalSites.net, the largest public database of Drupal sites. Their list is constantly updated with user-submitted sites (with more than 1000 new sites added in the last year), and in theory, should be statistically neutral, as the motivational factor for publicizing a site is not dependent on which version of Drupal you use.

I have verified these results against some creative Google searches, and the numbers correlate very well. I have high confidence in the accuracy of these numbers as an overall representation of the Drupal install base.

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Looks like people are finally realizing the enormous business opportunities lying in doing themes for Drupal sites. There is the http://www.topnotchthemes.com/ team building truly nice themes with support for common modules, knowing Drupals ins and outs.

At the same time http://www.templatemonster.com/ is picking up Drupal in their CMS section, selling Drupal themes for all kinds of focus areas. Although some of their demos have the "Mambo license" menu item running, which is quite frankly not a testament to their understanding of Drupal. However, starting off from a ported theme could still be nice, those buying Drupal themes might not want to fiddle as much customizing the theme further (update: and there are possibly other problems my soft blogging style did not uncover here, see: http://www.drupal4hu.com/node/146 and http://www.drupal4hu.com/node/141 for notes).

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Working on a site using the jstabs module this evening I came across a bit of a challenge passing named anchors to the #redirect element of a form. The desired url for redirection in this case was /user/myuser#profile-tab-7.

Asking in #drupal led to the following tidbit from chx. (This is one of the many reasons Drupal is wonderful since Google searching didn't produce results and my experiments and requests of friends didn't produce the answer.) Anyway the challenge is that #redirect causes the form to call drupal_form_redirect() which in turn calls drupal_goto(). The drupal_goto() function takes the path, query and fragment as it's first three arguments.

drupal_goto($path = '', $query = NULL, $fragment = NULL, $http_response_code = 302)

How then to pass these from #redirect. Putting the values in a string doesn't cut it as the special characters end up getting encoded in the URL and it doesn't work. The answer chx pointed out is to use array() to pass the values. The resulting code ends up looking like this:

      $form['#redirect'] = array('user/' .$user->uid, NULL, 'tabs-profile-7 ');

On May 27 and 28th, the third NetSquared will take place in San Jose California. The idea behind NetSquared is to explore the use of the Web and emerging technologies to foster social change.

Our mission is to spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations. There's a whole new generation of online tools available – tools that make it easier than ever before to collaborate, share information and mobilize support. These tools include blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasting, and more. Some people describe them as "Web 2.0"; we call them the social web, because their power comes from the relationships they enable.

I have been asked to present on Drupal as it relates to social change and the non-profit community. My background is heavily rooted in the non-profit world, having worked for various arts based non-profit companies. I also studied arts, technology, theatre, and non-profit management at Virginia Tech. My presentation will occur on the 27th between 4:45 and 5:45 pm.

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Expert in Drupal? Totally new to it? Wanting to really dig into Drupal for a day or two?

A DrupalCamp is being planned. One, maybe two days of code, design, chat, sharing, testing, patching, learning, maybe showing off a little, laughing.

Have a thought on what it should look like? When it should happen? What we might do? Edit the wiki!

See you there! (Where ever that might be.)

With all the excitement surrounding cloud computing, and specifically Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Beta service, I decided it was time to give it a try myself. Without much personal background in the new service, I found that there are an overwhelming number of pages talking about EC2, and even Drupal on EC2, but didn't locate a simple guide to quickly get me up and running. Having now spent a few hours today learning the basics, I'm jotting down these quick notes to help the next person interested in trying the same, and in the hopes of attracting useful tips from other AWS users.

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This is a short video that shows how to use Drupal's advanced search feature on Drupal.org. Many people find searching on d.o overwhelming and often overlook a few easy ways to narrow down searches. This is the second video in a series about getting involved with Drupal and utilizing community resources that started with getting an account on Drupal.org.

Just wanted to post this quick trick I’ve been using lately to automagically hide/show useful default text field values (e.g. “Search” in the search box) using jQuery and the ultra-handy Drupal.settings() object.

Here’s the short and sweet copy/pastable jQuery code:

$(document).ready(function(){
  Drupal.settings.input_defaults = Array();
  $("input:text").focus(function() {
    var element = $(this);
    Drupal.settings.input_defaults[element.attr("id")] = element.val();
    element.val('');
  });
  $("input:text").blur(function() {
    var element = $(this);
    if (element.val() == '') {
      element.val(Drupal.settings.input_defaults[element.attr("id")]);
    }
  });
});

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Here at Trellon, clients come to us all the time to looking for solutions for making knowledge more accessible through their web sites. Given that search features are a primary tool for exposing data and that the performance of Drupal's search engine is less than optimal in certain situations, we developed a module that replaces Drupal's native search features with the Xapian search engine. And here's why we did it.

Reason

A common challenge for Drupal sites is working with documents in different formats and getting them into the search engine. Drupal does not natively index PDFs and Word documents, despite the fact they are the most commonly exchanged text formats on the Internet (outside of HTML). This presents problems for sites where content is driven by document uploads, and has lead to some sub-optimal solutions and messy UI workflow patterns in the past.

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No Matt, my brain definitely wasn't idle.. I've been thinking about these problems for the better part of the last decade. And it seems like I`m not the only one who wants this discussion.

Dries told me that as a follow up to my previous post I should write a post with solutions to the problem. Difficult as I don't have the solutions yet.. If I had them .. well :)

Fact is that different types of opensource products might require different approaches Alfresco to my knowledge has little to no contributing community , Linux distributions tend to have a big one, if not just in the form of the different open source projects they pacakge. The MySQL community is more one of documentation, helping out and bugsquashing. So my ideas aren't valuable for everybody, which is maybe why Matt Asay can't understand me, he might be looking at only one side of the picture.

There are some little things that I can suggest however.

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Hi Folks,
thanks for coming out to DrupalCamp Vancouver this past Friday and Saturday. It was great to see such a big turnout. I should give big thanks to Ariane, Dale, and Raincity's own DaveO for organizing this event.

Steve, Hubert and I spent a number of hours on top of our regularly full schedule to prepare a slightly extended version of the theming talk we gave a few months ago to the Vancouver user group.

This theming talk was booked for a double session, and while we didn't fill the entire 2 1/2 hours, we had a fun time showing our take on Drupal theming and we got to talk with a number of aspiring and experienced Drupal themers alike.

Here are the files from the talk:

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Last night more than 40 people came out on a rainy Monday night to meet other Drupal developers and talk shop. Needless to say, the energy in the room was incredible. Not only was the group big, but it was a great mix of Drupal ninjas, Drupal users, and people wanting to flex their coding muscles with the platform. This led to some great conversations that lasted well into the evening - and rolled over to some heated foosball matches. 

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One of the findings of the Drupal usability testing at UMN in February was that users like, use and like to use contextual help. Many of the participants explicitly said that they would have liked more of it during their evaluations and in debriefing.

As a developer it is difficult to anticipate where contextual help is appropriate, needed or perhaps why it's even necessary. While usability testing is possibly the only way to effectively determine exactly where contextual help is needed and useful and where it's not, I think this example might help developers understand when where and why contextual help is likely to be helpful. This is part of developing sympathy for the user.

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At last! There were a couple of sacrifices, but I’ve gone all 6.2! This is the first Leafish site to go live with Drupal 6 (although we do have a big Drupal 6 project in the works) so I’ve made some notes on the process, and a couple of hurdles I not so much overcame as simply ignored for the time being. Props to all those that have helped get the working modules below up to date.

Resources used:

• Converting 5.x modules to 6.x documentation.
• Converting 5.x themes to 6.x documentation.
• List of contributed modules status - version 6.x.
• Drupal 6 API documentation.

Read past the break to see how I got on…

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At the Vancouver DrupalCamp there were, of course, the inevitable questions about what modules people use regularly. Boris suggested at one point that people should add to the growing body of information out there about popular modules.

So here is my short list of modules i use on nearly EVERY site:

• CCK, plus various cck field modules like link, imagefield
  

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I've been active on the Boston group on groups.drupal.org and found it pretty helpful until lately when such a massive geographical area posts so much content that the articles tick by too quickly. I've also been frustrated with the way the traditional river-o-news sorting tends to put dated events in whacked out orders. So i volunteered to workk with the new Groups and Panels integration to make a cooler Boston group page.

It's pretty neat. I haven't worked with Panels in a pretty long time but its awesome how I can carve up a page into some neat new layouts. I definitely appreciate the way it can let me do information design without having to do CSS or HTML. I can sorta just drag elements around on the edit layout, tweak a few settings on each element, and through trial and error get a great looking layout.

I've had clients, and you've had them too, who fancy themselves as web designers and have years of experience making web pages with MS Word. Panels is perfect for that guy.

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