Heine

I just contributed a new Drupal module called Service Attachments. It basically finds related content for nodes on others sites like YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, ... It's actually implemented as a small "framework" so you can plugin in your own services.

When do you need this? Well, when you want to enrich your nodes with content from other sites and you don't want to go through the process of searching all those sites.

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Its that time again. Its that time when members of the Drupal community are franticly submitting and reviewing patches in a race to introduce great new functionality to Drupal before the Drupal 7 code freeze (coming September 1st 2009).

But, before new functionality can be introduced all that functionality needs to be documented. One can see an equally frenzied group of dedicated individuals helping document all of Drupal 7 before it ships.

If you're not a coder but want to get involved in the Drupal community in some way, getting involved with the documentation team may be your ticket to Drupal stardom. (Just ask add1sun how she became a Drupal superstar)

If that sounds good to you, perhaps the best place to start is by visiting http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team. There you will find everything you want to know about what's happening in Drupal documentation and how you can help.

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Look at the top keyword searches that bring people to my site, according to Google Analytics:

1. tom geller (O.K., that's a gimme.)
2. wamp drupal
3. drupal wamp
4. (content targeting)
5. drupal on windows
6. drupal windows

Further, about one in five requests for support sent through my site's contact form is WAMP-related.

So -- what's the story? Is it that WAMP is hopelessly messed up? Is there a vacuum of relevant information out there? (My Running Drupal on Windows using WAMP article is Hit #4 on Google.) Have you had problems running Drupal on WAMP? Does the Acquia Drupal stack installer for Windows help?

Recently Acquia solicited some feedback from us about what kind of features we though would be useful to small businesses for their upcoming product, code named "Acquia Gardens". While we typically only work with small businesses with a social mission, we often do hear from businesses looking for web development work.

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So today finally Project Flow & Tracker meets Open Atrium, and does so in style. My friends at Development Seed just told me about the new availability of the feature server code (w00t! out just a couple of days right here: http://code.developmentseed.org/featureserver/dashboard), not to mention a spanking new theme, singular,

"a minimal theme that can be rebranded quickly and simply using background images a la Twitter. The theme comes with several prepackaged backgrounds and site administrators are encouraged to upload their own."

also out just a couple of days, and which can be found at http://code.developmentseed.org/singular/dashboard . Singular and depends on the base theme Tao:  http://code.developmentseed.org/singular/dashboard (also fresh meat!).

So we will be diving right in. Here are the steps we will be taking, so hang on to your mice, it's going to be a fun ride:

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Dries & I (well, let's just say "Acquia") are doing a little research and we want you guys to be a part of it. We're looking down the road and evaluating a variety of new things to add to our product offerings. We're interested in your feedback because we want to be sure build what you actually want, vs. what we imagine you want.

So help us get it right by taking our little survey. You should be able to complete it in under 5 minutes.

Now as much as we'd like to think you'd do this because you love Dries, Drupal & Acquia, I'm sure more of you will talk to us if we give away some loot. So as a bonus for taking the survey, you can choose to enter our contest where one lucky duck will receive for FREE their choice of either of two award prizes:

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The top priority in the Drupal documentation roadmap that was published earlier this summer was to reorganize the information architecture (IA) of the handbooks to make them easier to use and maintain. Becca Scollan volunteered to take the lead and she has been researching and building out a plan of attack. We are now at a good stage to start doing some work that the whole community can engage in. Instead of trying to tackle the whole thing, our first foray will be limited to the Theming Guide handbook only. We are going to begin looking at and tagging our existing content with an eye towards a new way of thinking about it. We have added some new vocabularies to just the pages in the theming handbook and we need folks to go through and assign terms. Instead of just random tagging, we need to keep some overall concepts in mind. There are guidelines that can be referred to, so that the terms we use will be most useful for the following steps in the process.

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The code freeze for Drupal 7.x is looming large on the horizon. From that point on we will be limited in what kinds of changes we can get into Drupal core. For some the code freeze is a time of relief: it means we are down to bug fixes and the final release should be coming soon. For others it is a hard time - bug fixing isn't always as fun as adding new features.

So, as we head into feature freeze it seemed like a good time to run some statistics on who has been contributing the most to Drupal 7.x so far.

Following on from previous times that I've run these stats, I've published documentation of the process to get the data on groups.drupal.org. This time I went straight to the commit messages stored in database tables on drupal.org This has the benefit of counting new files as well as old files (the last times I did this it only counted changes to existing files).

So, who are the top 10 people based on the number of times their name is in a commit message?

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In case you are going the Drupalcon Paris, we have the option to meet in person since I was able to get in as well. But be sure to talk to your boss / yourself and convince him or her that presence in person is a great way to align with the community, but sponsoring the con is the best way to get more out of it; love, a better conference for all, potential employees and most of all prospects.

Dutch Open Projects became a silver sponsor some time ago, and so should you! Now I do not know how the economic downtime is hitting on you, but in the Netherlands this crisis is only bringing more companies towards using Drupal. It used to be true, that people choose Drupal for the quality and stayed for the (lack of) costs, but there is a complete new mantra now: come for the lack of costs and stay for the quality!

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Drupal, the highly popular Content Managment System (CMS), is about to beef up its black book with a new module called “Socialize”. Socialize was developed by Gigya, a startup out of Alta Vista, CA specializing in the social media realm, and our good friends, Acquia, a company that specializes in custom Drupal installation.
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Socialize is designed to complement Drupal’s social publishing features and allows any Drupal site to add powerful social features, including publishing any content and user activity outside of the site and onto social sites. This new dynamic increases interactivity and viral pushes.

This new module also allows webmasters to setup a login system that allows users to authenticate using Facebook or MySpace through Facebook Connect and MySpaceID standards, or the username and password from any OpenID provider. This will allow users to register for a new social site without having to fill out the new account information. The new Drupal module, Socialize, is only helping the Drupal community grow in the direction of the ever-popular social optimization.

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If you want to get screenshots of a web page, what do you do? You might want them to illustrate a new theme or to display in a gallery of your work.

Now that I've switched to using a Mac I was exploring Mac alternatives for this. One great one was Skitch, which lets you easily grab screen shots and mark them up. But what if you want to show more than you can see in your window, like to display a fairly tall web page?

I just found a great new tool, webkit2png. It works on any Mac with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or later. Just download the file, pull up a terminal window, and type something like:

python /Users/karen/screenshots/webkit2png http://www.drupal.org

... and you end up with three screenshots of the site, a full size shot, a thumbnail, and a shot clipped to just show what you can normally see in a window. The results for Drupal are posted below (who knew the front page was that long!!)

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If you want to get screenshots of a web page, what do you do? You might want them to illustrate a new theme or to display in a gallery of your work.

Now that I've switched to using a Mac I was exploring Mac alternatives for this. One great one was Skitch, which lets you easily grab screen shots and mark them up. But what if you want to show more than you can see in your window, like to display a fairly tall web page?

I just found a great new tool, webkit2png. It works on any Mac with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or later. Just download the file, pull up a terminal window, and type something like:

python /Users/karen/screenshots/webkit2png http://www.drupal.org

... and you end up with three screenshots of the site, a full size shot, a thumbnail, and a shot clipped to just show what you can normally see in a window. The results for Drupal are posted below (who knew the front page was that long!!)

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Back in March 2008, I blogged about a much-needed redesign soon to be deployed onto Drupal.com, to replace the oh-so-embarrassing placeholder page I've had there for years. I'm happy to announce that -- thanks in large measure to the great design and development work of the good folks at Development Seed -- the new and much improved Drupal.com has been launched.

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I've been working on customizing CiviCRM for my kids school. I documented how i exposed relationship information on a profile view in this blog post. In the past week i've also exposed "activities" and "a multiple record custom group" via profiles which i'll describe in this blog post. All this work was done via civicrm hooks and custom templates and run on CiviCRM v2.2.8. You can download the code from here. In this blog post i'll discuss two features that i've implemented: Scheduling Parent Teacher Conferences and Managing Extended Care.

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I recently came upon an article by Matt Johnson talking about the dangers of querying CCK tables directly. Due to shifting data within the CCK schema depending on a number of factors, directly querying tables can be hazardous if not done correctly. It’s easy to forget this until you’ve done a site where you’ve written dozens of queries directly against CCK tables, only to later change fields on your content types and have them break.

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This is a call to translators. If you're interested in translating Panels and or CTools, I am going to do a full release by the middle of next week. Any translation work you want to go out with this release should be checked into CVS by then!

Panels has only one translation and it's very old, so it is probably more or less useless. CTools has no translations at all (and I am not surprised by this).

The Drupal community in Florida has been steadily gaining momentum this year, and if the next week or so are any indication, there are no signs of slowing down.

Starting with our hugely successful DrupalCamp back in February (attended by over 100 people) to meetups in various cities since then, Florida Drupalers are starting to really get a sense of how vibrant our local Drupal community actually is.

The next week has no less than three Drupal-related events in the Sunshine State:

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Various Drupal themes now use the excellent Superfish dropdown menu navigation, including Pixturerr. But if you then customise the theme such as adding a frontpage with RELATIVE elements you can find (as in the picture) that the dropdows appear BEHIND other elements, in good old Microsoft Internet Explorer!. This is what I did to resolve the issue.
go to admin/build/themes/settings/pixturerr

we need to set the color set back to Girly Pink default

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On July 26 and 27 I participated on behalf of Acquia in a code sprint with a great group of other Drupal contributors at the Zivetch offices in Philadelphia. Aaron Winborn has already written a good summary of the event. I want to focus here on a big piece of the work that progressed but wasn't finished at the sprint: the File API Stream Wrapper Conversion patch (which weighs in at a big 230 kB and changes 54 files).

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