New Book: Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting
Prentice Hall has just released Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting, authored by Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Käfer. This is a book to teach readers how to customize how Drupal looks, with a special focus on Drupal 6 and its new theme engine. Emma Jane and Konstantin cover everything you need to know to create great visual designs and interactivity with Drupal's behaviors, themes, and templates. They show how to style Drupal sites, make the most of its powerful templating system, build sophisticated community sites, streamline site management and build more portable and flexible themes. Also included are several case studies that walk thru the customization of everything from page templates to Web site forms.
Drupal 6.11 and 5.17 released
Download Drupal 5.17
Drupal 6.11 and 5.17, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as a critical security vulnerability, are now available for download. Drupal 6.11 also fixes performance issues with the menu cache and update status cache among 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 Drupal 5.0 release announcement.
RDF in Drupal 7 code sprint
There are only a few months left before the code freeze on September 1st. Now that Fields API has settled in core, it's time to extend it with some RDF semantics. DERI Galway is hosting an RDF in Drupal code sprint from May 11th until May 14th.
This sprint builds on Dries' ideas expressed in his recent posts Drupal, the semantic web and search and RDFa and Drupal. With RDF in the core of Drupal and RDFa output by default, it's dozens of thousands of websites which will all of a sudden start publishing their data as RDF.
So far, Stéphane Corlosquet, Florian Loretan, Benjamin Melançon and Rolf Guescini have signed up. How about you?
Some others are willing to come but cannot afford the trip until some funding is secured. To help us fund the sprint and bring more Drupal rockstars on board, please consider making a donation using the ChipIn widget on this page. The money will be used to cover flight, food and hotel costs for the sprinters. All sprinters are generously donating their time to make this happen. It would also be great to fly in a few additional people with extensive testing and Fields experience. Any excess money will be used to add more people, or will be donated to the Drupal Association.
Core patch review sprint this weekend!
Have you been looking for an excuse to play around a bit with Drupal 7, and have an interest in helping to directly shape it? Would you like to not only see how Drupal core contributors collaborate together, but become one yourself? Do you have an itch you'd like scratched and are willing to help scratch others' in return? Would you like to be exposed to new and interesting areas of Drupal you might not have otherwise experienced? Are you exceptionally good at finding faults and breaking things?
If so, drop by #drupal-dev on irc.freenode.net this weekend (April 25 and 26) for a patch review sprint! (What is a patch review sprint? / How to connect to IRC?) While somewhat informal, there will be people around all weekend to help get new patch reviewers started and to help guide seasoned contributors to important patches.
Our goal is to try and knock the core patches to review queue down to zero (or as close to it as possible) by trying out patches to see how they work, and recommending ways that they can be improved. The Patch review sprints page has more information on how patch reviews work, a handy cheat-sheet of all the commands you need, and a list of prerequisites in order to participate.
Please note that "coding skills" is not on the list of prerequisites. While people with coding skills can perform certain types of reviews better than non-coders, non-coders can also perform certain types of reviews better than coders. In short: everyone is welcome!
Hope to see you there! :)
Introducing Drupal's Google Summer of Code Students and Projects
Drupal is excited to announce that we have 18 amazing projects in this year's Google Summer of Code. This is the fifth year that Drupal has participated in the program, bringing the total investment made by Google in Drupal through the SoC to over $400,000. This investment has resulted in numerous modules and core improvements, but more importantly it has brought in many long time contributors to the drupal project and helped keep numerous other contributors engaged and active in the community.
As usual we had way more great proposals than we had slots, but for the first time we have a father-son team (Jim and Jimmy Berry) working on SoC projects! Jimmy Berry actually convinced his dad to apply. We always try and expand the Drupal family/community with each Summer of Code, but the variety in projects and students of this year takes it to a whole new level!
This year's Summer of Code projects focus on integrating Drupal with other APIs, improving and enhancing many module suites, and helping to build new functionalities that will help keep Drupal at the cutting edge of what's possible with a CMS. Most of the projects still require co-mentors, and we'll be trying to connect these students with the community in a real world setting, so if you're interested in helping out with community bonding or code review, or even if you just want to keep tabs on the SoC progress, join us over at the Summer of Code group - it's not too late for you to help out!
Please help me in thanking Google for their support of Drupal and all Free & Open Source Software projects, and please welcome our Summer of Code 2009 Students.
Support Drupal by Voting in the Webby People’s Choice Award Competition!
The nominations for the 13th Annual Webby Awards were recently announced, and they include a number of sites built in Drupal! Presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, the Webby Award is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. It’s like the Oscars for websites.
In addition to the juried awards, which are decided by a 650-person judging academy whose members include Internet co-inventor Vinton Cerf, R/GA’s Chief Bob Greenberg, “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, Arianna Huffington, and Harvey Weinstein, all nominees are also eligible to win a Webby People’s Voice Award, which is voted online by the global Web community.
This is where you come in! From now until April 30th, you can cast your vote at http://pv.webbyawards.com – this is a great opportunity for the community to come out, show their support, and get out the word that some of the best sites in the world are powered by Drupal. We’ve created a list of all the known Drupal sites sorted by the category in which they were nominated below; please let us know in the comments if we’ve missed any.
Winners will be announced on May 5th, 2009 and honored at a star-studded ceremony in New York City on June 8th hosted by Seth Meyers.
DrupalCon DC Website: A Conference Archive
Do you want to know what's been done and what's coming in Drupal 7, how to make your site hacker proof, or see why walkah hates Drupal? Just visit dc2009.drupalcon.org.
The videos of more than 100 presentations that were given at DrupalCon DC are now freely available from the conference website, alongside information about the speaker and about the session topic. A ton of great information was shared at DrupalCon DC, and we wanted to continue to get it out to anyone who's interested. To this end, we turned the DrupalCon DC website into a conference archive with video of each session embedded in it so that anyone who missed a session, missed the entire conference, or just learned what Drupal is last week can still benefit from the knowledge shared in Washington, DC.
Go to dc2009.drupalcon.org to watch session videos, and thanks again to the crew that recorded all of the sessions!
Drupal community hits Galway and helps three Irish charities
We're stacking up karma points during this recession: over the weekend more than sixty people gathered at the DERI Institute in Galway, Ireland to talk, learn, and exchange ideas about Drupal. Various experts in web design attended coming from all over Ireland and as far as Scotland, England and the US. The best turn out was in absolute newbies - over half of the group who had traveled from all over Ireland.
As an incentive to push the learning curves we worked together to provide 3 Irish charities: Zikomo, Rural Science Association and Shadowbox Theatre with brand spanking new websites!
The plan was conceived 5 months ago when Alan Burke (alanburke) and Stéphane Corlosquet (scor) were brainstorming what to do for the next Irish Drupal event to bring it home to Galway. They wanted to do something different and make it over 2 days to take advantage of the presentation style of a BarCamp and to include a site-building challenge. Realizing they would need a great deal of help they recruited Stella Power (stella), Heather James (heather) for their expertise from organizing the previous DrupalCamp in Dublin.
We, the organizers, were impressed by the number of people who turned up as we expected 40-50. The rooms filled up fast and we had barely enough food for everybody. Alan had the insight to have a giant kettle available to provide plenty of tea and coffee with "loads of biccies" to all the attendees.
Form Follows Fun: The Making of Digital Dollhouse
Digital Dollhouse is a virtual world where girls of all ages are empowered to become their own interior designers. Members can paint, furnish and decorate their own virtual dream houses complete with plants, pets and dolls, and even purchase and regift items in a virtual economy.
Designed and built in Drupal from the ground up, Digital Dollhouse uses Drupal as a front- and back-end engine and Flash for the primary front-end game play. Drupal was selected as a development platform because of its robust and extensible framework and excellent integration with Flash/Flex applications. The high quality and availability of third-party modules greatly helped in the decision, as well. We found that Drupal is an excellent choice for managing virtual worlds with virtual goods and currencies.
The heart of Digital Dollhouse’s business model is virtual goods micro-transactions. A member can visit the online store (which Digital Dollhouse calls the “Boutique”), purchase an item and then play with it in a virtual dollhouse (which we named the “playarea”). Userpoints proved to be a robust and outstanding solution for all of our virtual currency needs. Digital Dollhouse is also greatly indebted to the developers of the Invite, Buddylist, Voting API, Ubercart and Ubercart Userpoints modules.
In 2008, Jesyca Durchin and and David Schnepp of Digital Playspace chose Exaltation of Larks, a development and design firm in Boston and Los Angeles, to lead the development of Digital Dollhouse. From the beginning, there were many indications that Digital Dollhouse would be a success.
"I Form" - Danish health magazine case study
Bonnier Publications A/S publish magazines in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Holland. All the magazines have websites, some of which are quite significant and have a large amount of traffic and reasonable revenue, while others are simple presentation sites. Altogether Bonnier Publications (BP) has more than 40 sites in five different languages.
For many years, BP has used the Java-based CMS Polopoly for all their sites, but this has not been optimal and especially programming the sites was far too slow, even for the smallest adjustments.
During the summer of 2008, BP decided that their CMS technology needed replacing to enable their editorial staff and sales departments to take full advantage of the Internet's dynamic potential. They chose Drupal CMS, and Peytz & Co. was appointed strategic partner and asked to handle the platform migration.
Book: Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery
In October of 2008, Packt Publishing launched a pilot program called RAW (Read As we Write). In the RAW program, draft versions of each chapter are released as the author writes them. The initial book chosen for the pilot was Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery.
At the end of March, Packt sent the finished book to the printers. The final version, improved by copious feedback from the Drupal community, is now available in both e-book and soft cover.
Packt typically offers a discount of 10% to all Drupal.org users (as I understand it, that offer is also good for Learning Drupal 6 Module Development). But the community's involvement has been great on this project. To say thanks, Packt is allowing me to share my discount code here. To get 15% off of the purchase price of this book, order the book from PacktPub.com and enter the following code in the promotional code box during checkout: DrupalJSjQ15.
Packt also contributes a portion of every book sale back to Drupal. So purchasing any Packt book on Drupal provides financial support for the project.
TheWrap.com Case Study
Sharon Waxman, a former Hollywood correspondent for The New York Times, has a new Hollywood News site called TheWrap.com. In 2008, Sharon and her team reviewed various content management platforms for the news site and after considering the various available options, decided to use Drupal as their content management platform.
In July 2008, Appnovation Technologies was chosen to develop the site. The site development went through various iterations of development cycle, and the site was completed in December 2008. The site was launched on January 19th.
In February, the site had over 130,000 visits and 650,000 page views. In just one month, it grew to over 240,000 unique visits and over 900,000 page views.
Vote for Drupal to be in the 2009 Webware 100
Every year, CNet goes to the people and asks what the best Web 2.0 applications and services are. The people have spoken, and Drupal has been nominated, along with 299 others. To put Drupal into the coveted top 100, we need you to vote. Voting continues until April 30, so don't wait, vote now.
Drupal won in 2007, and again in 2008. Can Drupal win in 2009? We sure hope so, but it will take your help. Please take a few seconds of your time to vote and help make Drupal a Webware 100 winner in 2009. Drupal is in the Social Networking & Publishing category.
In addition to voting you can put this fine graphic in your own blog posts encouraging others to vote for Drupal as well. Please link to either of the following:
Thank you!
Wellstone Action: A Drupal Process Case Study
Wellstone Action! is a national center for training and leadership development for the progressive movement. Founded in January 2003, Wellstone Action trains, educates, mobilizes and organizes a large network of progressive individuals and organizations.
The original Wellstone.org website was built using a proprietary CMS system. As the site aged and communications needs evolved, staff had to increasingly work around that system and it's constraints. As such, part of the motivation for a new website was to not only present information clearly, but to do so in a way that was open to evolution and improvement over time, making Drupal and ideal fit for their needs.
Wellstone Action's Drupal-powered website launched in the Spring of 2008. With roughly a year of operating perspective, we can begin to assess the overall effectiveness of the project. Accordingly, this case-study is intended to:
- Document the process used to manage this project and make decisions
- Discuss the overall success of the project (and thereby evaluate the process)
- Spark more conversation in the Drupal community about the best ways to produce the best possible results for all of our clients and their Drupal projects
How we will make Drupal 7 simple to use
The Drupal core developers have a long history of making user experience improvements. The developers have made it easier to install, to update, to internationalize, to customize, to theme, to find help, to recover from errors, and to interact. A few years ago, the Drupal project lead, Dries, wrote about The Ockham's Razor Principle of Content Management Systems which stated
Given two functionally equivalent content management systems, the simplest one should be selected.
In order to make Drupal 7 the simplest CMS to use, Mark Boulton and I have developed a user experience strategy as part of an effort previously announced by Dries. You don't have to be an expert core developer or user experience designer to help us make Drupal simpler to use. Even the simple act of reading this strategy or mentioning to someone that we are working on making Drupal easier to use can make a difference. With that in mind we have drafted strategy statements and goals which we hope to use as ’stars to sail our ship by’ on this project.
DrupalCon DC: The Numbers and the Community Behind the Conference
We finished crunching the numbers from DrupalCon DC. You can check out all the final figures – including attendance stats and financial numbers – in DrupalCon DC By the Numbers: Community, Profit, and Sustainability posted on the DrupalCon DC website. Give it a read, and please post any feedback or questions you have.
Publius Project - Harvard University Case Study
The Publius Project is an effort of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The mission of the Publius Project is to foster public dialogue and create a durable public record on the question of how the Internet should be controlled, and by whom. The project brings together a distinguished collection of Internet observers, scholars, innovators, entrepreneurs, activists, technologists, and other experts to write short essays on this topic. The Publius Project approached DharmaTech because its existing WordPress site was too limited and "blog-centric." The Publius Project needed an easy-to-use website that effectively created a forum for discussing the pressing issues revolving around how cyberspace is governed.
Mia Moran of Emtype provided the graphic design for the project. Caroline Nolan of the Berkman Center served as project coordinator for the Publius Project. Jason Hill of DharmaTech was the lead programmer and Tony Guzman of DharmaTech was the project manager.
All DrupalCon DC 2009 Session Videos are Now Online
Links to all 102 videos were made available on March 13, 2009:
- d.o - DrupalCon DC 2009 Videos
- archive.org - search for drupalcon dc
- dc2009.drupalcon.org (in the comments of each session)
A list of the 9 sessions that were not recorded can be found at:
http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/news/almost-all-session-videos-drupalcon-dc-...
If you have of a recording of any of these and/or any BoF sessions, please post them online and let everyone at d.o know. :o)
- 76 sessions (68%) were online within 24 hours
- 83 sessions (75%) were online within 48 hours
- 102 sessions (92%) were online within 5 days of the conference, including:
- 97 presentation sessions
- 4 keynote sessions
- 1 closing session
The Google Summer of Code is Back for 2009!
Earlier today, Google announced the list of organizations that have been selected for the Google Summer of Code 2009, and we are thrilled to announce that Drupal has been selected once again! This will mark the Drupal project's fifth year of participation in this fantastic program, which provides a great opportunity for the Drupal community to grow our ranks of dedicated and talented new contributors, award existing long-term contributors, and get some exciting new coding projects done at the same time! More information about the program is available in the Google Summer of Code FAQ and program timeline.
New pages and RSS feeds for security announcements
To make the impact of different security advisories and announcements easier to see, they are now separated by type.
Drupal core security advisories: http://drupal.org/security
RSS feed for Drupal core: http://drupal.org/security/rss.xml
Contributed project security advisories: http://drupal.org/security/contrib
RSS feed for contributed projects: http://drupal.org/security/contrib/rss.xml
Public service announcements: http://drupal.org/security/psa
RSS feed for announcements: http://drupal.org/security/psa/rss.xml
We encourage those using RSS readers to track security-related developments to subscribe to all three of these feeds.
All posts to each of these three forums will still be sent to the one security announcements e-mail list. To subscribe to that e-mail list, once logged in, go to your user profile page and subscribe to the security newsletter on the Edit » My newsletters tab.
All future public service announcements will only be posted to the Public service announcements page and feed.
