Heine

I am recording the final chapter today...and want to do a lively intro for the DVD, of course, afterwards :)

We're getting very close to completing the application for the Knight Foundation on our Knight Drupal Initiative proposal.

Out of curiosity, I figured I'd run it through Wordle and see what turned up.

Finally managed to update Austere theme for both Drupal 5 and 6.

It took awhile because i kept messing up the CVS tagging and branching, hence the big jump in the version... yikes! sorry. Really need to get my head around this damn CVS. I should be reading more of the Drupal Handbook.

Anyway, many thanks to Francis Pilon (of Raincity Studios) for cleaning up the code and making it conform more to Drupal coding standards.

You can grab a copy at: http://drupal.org/project/austere

Finally managed to update Austere theme for both Drupal 5 and 6.

It took awhile because i kept messing up the CVS tagging and branching, hence the big jump in the version... yikes! sorry. Really need to get my head around this damn CVS. I should be reading more of the Drupal Handbook.

Anyway, many thanks to Francis Pilon (of Raincity Studios) for cleaning up the code and making it conform more to Drupal coding standards.

You can grab a copy at: http://drupal.org/project/austere

Well, it's that time again, when all the Drupal developers do their best to get together in one location and discuss the future of the platform and the web surrounding it.  This time we'll be gathering in semi-rural Hungary... the city of Szeged.  I've not had the pleasure of visiting ANY portion of Europe yet, so the wife and I will be taking some extra time both before the convention and afterwards to see the sites of Budapest and Vienna.  I'm very excited.

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Sometimes, you need to change the HTML markup output by some module, and you want your changes to keep whichever theme you will use. The need came up for me recently when I had to provide special markup for pages that display a webform. I had to quickly put together a module for a client, a module that would provide a template file, which I decided to name (arbitrarily) page-webform.tpl.php.

The situation may arise for you as well, so I will share my technique with you. Say you want to provide a template file for all pages that display one node of a content type with machine-readable name CONTENT_TYPE_NAME. And say you want to use a module to provide such template. Say you decide to name your module special_page. Read more →

Some time ago, Kieran approached me about the possibility of running coder on patches submitted to Drupal.org.

Because of some outstanding work by Stella, and (of course) Moshe a.k.a. drush, Kieran's wish is now a possibility. The actual patch issue is here.

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The release of the SMS Framework 1.0, along with the road map for a 1.1 version, is making Drupal a more attractive platform for organizations that need powerful, decentralized data collection tools. This recent work shows that using Drupal can give you a serious foundation to integrate sms applications and tools with a website. I want to expand on Will’s recent post about building a two way SMS Gateway on a USB drive and show how Drupal can act as a data hub for collecting data and messaging via sms.

We are interested in this because tools that can integrate with sms like this will be especially helpful for international development agencies with on the ground operations. For example, this functionality could allow an election monitoring organization to use sms to track reports from observers at polling stations or help a public heath organization to monitor when patients take medicine via sms messages sent from personal or public cell phones. It could even assist a disaster response organization to track the status of its team on the ground team through their handsets.

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Drupalcon Szeged is one week away. I am glad I am attending, and I am planning on leading a Birds of a Feather (BOF) during the conference. The focus of the BOF is creativity and programming. I want to discuss the weird mix of human behavior and code. Sounds strange I know, so let me describe in more detail.

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So I just made a new beta release of Language Icons. (If you don't know the module - it's the one adding the flag icons to the language selection block to the left, as well as on translated nodes.)

The most important thing in this module is probably that it now contains an upgrade path from when it was a part of the Internationalization module suite, namely converting the i18n_icons_* site variables to languageicons_*. I think I tested it rather thoroughly and made sure I'd covered most (if not all) cases of the variable not existing or having been set, but to the old default path, etc., etc. - but there is always the off chance that something was somehow missed. So please give the beta2 a spin, and if you can do it with an update, it'd be great. And don't forget to report bugs! ;)

(Also, once this has gotten some testing, I think we're close to a final release as well. I don't know how much Jose wants done on the module before releasing 6.x-1.0 final, but there isn't really a whole lot more to do to it now, other than adding flags, of course. :))

When developing Drupal themes, there is one bit of code you type over and over again:

Where images/whatever.jpg could be a css file, or other file, but is normally an image.

However, since clean URLs in Drupal appear to make fake directories, the web browser thinks your image is located in:

When it’s not. Luckily Drupal has tools to help you in this case.

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Here's an excellent way of adding videos to your contents, thanks to Sean Effel of drupaltherapy.com for providing the screencast.  read more »

We are planning to put a CDN in front of our Drupal install. This CDN is not fancy and is not able to deal with cookies (but it's very cheap). So every anon visitor is going to be served from ANON DOMAIN (the CDN) and every logged in visitor is going to be served from LOGGEDIN DOMAIN (our servers).

This surfaces some questions, such us:

• what will happen to those visitors who are visiting the wrong domains? For example: an anon visitor visits a url from the LOGGEDIN DOMAIN or vice versa, a logged in user visits a url from the ANON DOMAIN.

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I'll be the first to admit that it took me long enough to get around to doing it but now that it's done you should too. What is the wonderful "it"? Voting to get some great looking Drupal panels in the lineup at SXSW 2009.

The good news is getting it done is simple. All you need is an easy to create account and then visit the pages for the panels and give them a high five (stars that is). And to make that easy here's a handy list of the panels being offer:

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Following up on the interest of the Drupal Semantic Web group, I'll present my ideas on the Semantic Web which will be an update of the talk I gave in Barcelona. I will also present a project which I co-started a few months ago: Neologism. The session is scheduled for Saturday 30th at 3pm.

See the session details on the drupalCon site.

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The Drupalcon Szeged 2008 schedule page is up for some time now, but we recently did quite a few changes to it. First, we added night time events, then added exhibition day information, and for a better overview, we also added the code sprint.

Several people asked us on the forums and through our contact forms to have a printer friendly version of the program. Well, we sat down, crafted and tested a printer friendly stylesheet for the schedule page, which is now up. Just try printing the schedule and you'll notice that it will only print what is required for you to know. We tested Firefox, Safari and Opera. Opera proved to be the best printer, not breaking pages in the middle of table cells, so we suggest you try that browser for best results.

Another popular request was to have a personalized schedule with sessions you voted on. For this, we modified the voting widgets, so you can cancel your votes, and added a personalized version of the program which highlights (via thicker borders and boldface) the sessions you are most interested in. Of course you can print this page, and the thicker borders and the boldface should survive the print simplification.

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A short, quick and easy tip for views theming and customization.

To customize the text or the destination path/url of a 'view more' link in Views. Add this to template.php in your phptemplate theme and add cases.

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Sun Microsystems recently launched another cool Drupal site: Sun Learning Exchange. The site enables Sun employees to easily publish rich media training content such as videos, podcasts, and documents to be accessed by all Sun employees and customers. Media can be rated, sorted, and tagged by site members and is automatically transcoded and hosted on LimeWire. The site was built with the help of our friends at Chapter Three. Sweet!

Just as the internet is bigger then 127.0.0.1,Drupal is bigger then Dries. However, every hurd needs a leader and within the Drupal community, Dries has proven that he is not just a good coder but a very wise project lead creating a very rich community around his product, not just around him.

It is the community what makes an Open Source project successful, not the code perse. Bad code can be used in a creative way by a smart community, good code without a community is just same as proprietary software.

And that is why it is good to see that Dries has been chosen as a "Young Innovator". Read the press release at prweb:

"The TR35 honors young innovators for accomplishments that are poised to have a dramatic impact on the world as we know it," said Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review magazine. "We celebrate their success and look forward to their continued advancement of technology in their respective fields."

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This tutorial will be split into three parts - part 1 (this part) will explain how to set up the aggregation and import feeds, part 2 (to be published next post) will explain setting up cron to handle auto updating the feeds and will also cover using views to create some different site sections, and part 3 (to be published the post after that) will explain how to theme everything. In the tutorial I will be building a Drupal based sports news aggregation site, but you can obviously tailor this to whatever type of news items you'd like.

The goals:

• Create an aggregation site which aggregates RSS feeds and outputs them in river of news style pages with the most recent news items first.
• Create some different site sections (football and baseball) which only show news items related to that topic.
• Allow users to filter news items by source (e.g. ESPN, BBC etc.).
• Create RSS feeds of our aggregated pages which are available for our users.

You can check out the finished aggregation site (part 1) here.

The set up:
For this tutorial I'll be using the following:

• A clean install of Drupal 5.10 (using Garland)
• SimpleFeed 5.x-2.2
• Views 5.x-1.6

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