Mastering Drupal - drupal

Bulk image uploading and tagging with Imagex and Views Bulk Operations

greggles — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:56:41 +0000

It turns out that imagex had a security issue in it. The maintainer refused to fix it, so this module has now been unpublished. I built plupload for the same purpose - screencast coming soon!

This video shows how to use the Multiple Image Upload, Views and Views Bulk Operations modules to create a "multiple image upload and tag" tool. The View used in this video is attached as a text file which can be imported into your site using the Views import tool.

Bulk Uploading/Tagging images in Drupal - Imagex + VBO from Greg Knaddison on Vimeo.

Length:

6 minutes

Highlight Your Best Content Using the Radioactivity Module

greggles — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:32:40 +0000

This video shows how to use the Radioactivity modules and Views 6.x-2.x to create a listing of the best content on a site.

Using Drupal's Radioactivity Module to Highlight Your Best Content from Greg Knaddison on Vimeo.

Length:

10 minutes

New Drupal favorites module - let site visitors record what they like

greggles — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:34:02 +0000

The brand spanking new Favorites module is a great way for users of your site to indicate which pages on your site that they truly like. Developed by ezra-g as part of our work for the new IxDA.org, Favorites for Drupal 6.x takes over for a module that Jeff Robbins originally created.

I created this screencast to show how to enable and use the module. I hope you enjoy it!

Length:

4 minutes

HOWTO: Integrate Microsummaries with Drupal

greggles — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The Microsummary Module for Drupal makes it easy to integrate Microsummaries into your site. A relatively new technology, Microsummaries are only supported in Firefox2.x or above. When you bookmark a site that has microsummaries the bookmark becomes like a tiny dashboard about the activity on that site. This video helps explain more how to use the Microsummary module.

Length:

6 minutes

Announcing Drupal Miracle: The Step by Step Drupal 6 Tutorial Videos

greggles — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 11:18:26 +0000

Would you like to learn Drupal 6 as quickly as possible? You have already learned the basics but you would like to advance further? Or you’d rather learn the new features of Drupal 6? Then this announcement is especially for you.

How to spy on Drupal related domain names

admin — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 23:10:01 +0000

I recently found an interesting service called Mark Alert by Domain Tools.

Mark Alert by Domain Tools allows you to be alerted when someone registers a domain name with any terms or phrases in it that you specify.

Emails are sent daily and you can adjust which terms get emailed to you and which ones don't. Supported TLDs are .com, .net, .org, .biz, .us, and .info.

One set of developer tools for Drupal

chx — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 00:49:13 +0000

There are many useful editors and debuggers useable to churn out Drupal code. However, most popular IDEs are written in some non-native language, so they are so very resource intensive and because of that, so slow that I just can't use them. This includes Eclipse, Zend and Komodo. So, this article will not be about these. Neither I will write about the virtues of vi or emacs -- I use much simpler tools.

Interview with Angela Byron

admin — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 21:00:49 +0000

We interviewed Drupal core developer and Lullabot team member Angela Byron, apropos of the upcoming O'Reilly Drupal Book titled 'Practical Drupal'.

You can visit Angela Byron's drupal.org profile by clicking here.

In this interview, you will learn about the upcoming Drupal book, and how to learn Drupal most effectively.

Drupal features

chx — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 13:14:00 +0000

Let's see a brief list of the most important features of Drupal as accessible from a browser ie. not by creating and editing program files.

Node system. A node is the fundamental piece of Drupal, it holds content.
The nodes can have revisions. It's possible to track the time and the author of every change along with some log message about the change. It's possible revert to earlier revisions. There is a contributored module which shows the difference between two revisions.
Content is organized by a full, hiearchical taxonomy system. One taxonomy term can be applied to many nodes and one node can belong to many taxonomy terms. Taxonomy terms can form a tree (or an even complex structure where a term can have multiple parents) and several such trees can exist, we call them vocabularies. Every term provides an RSS feed of the nodes belonging to it.
Can aggregate RSS feeds.
Search enginge friendleness. It's not just that the system does not use ? in most paths but the webmaster can set a visitor- and search engine alias for every page.
Distributed authentication. Drupal system can trust each other and with contributed modules you can authenticate against LDAP, OpenID etc.
Role and permission based user management. Each role can contain any number of permissions and the user can be in any number of roles and gets the sum of the permissions belonging to these roles.

I already mentioned contributed modules, named two extremely important ones in the history and some more in the features section. More than a thousand of those can be found at drupal.org/project/Modules. It's impossible to list all of them, a few more examples from the most popular modules: image, event, gallery, ecommerce and calendar (I guess the names make trivial what these do). One more important module is i18n -- while Drupal core supports the translation of the interface and there are many translation packs, you need i18n module for user supplied content translation. Drupal 6 will make big inroads to this area.

Another download category are themes. Everything that Drupal outputs can be customized by themes. Again, there are a huge number of themes downloadable from drupal.org/project/Themes. I would like to draw attention to Friends Electric and Bluebreeze.

Out of these modules and themes rise a number of popular, high traffic Drupal-based sites. Again, just a few examples:

History of Drupal

chx — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 13:11:32 +0000

The beginning of Drupal history is very well documented on Drupal.org itself, I will augment the beginning of the story.

In 1999, a University of Antwerp student, Dries Buytaert was quite interested in wireless networking, he was maintaing the relevant FAQ for Linux. Wireless networking was so new (802.11b was standardized in 1999 October) that the FAQ contained “Why would I want a wireless LAN?” to which the longish answer closed with “Not to mention the fact it will make the geek in you go nuts”. In 2000, he put this knowledge into practical use: he and Hans Snijder shared Hans' ADSL connection among eight students in their dorm. The community needed a website to share information about the status of the network, about dinner... When Dries moved out after graduation, the website moved on the Internet, it was to be named “dorp.org” after the Dutch word for “village” but Dries made a typo, so the website became “drop.org”. The focus, of course changed -- you obviously would not read this if they would have only talked about dinner. No, the group began to talk about new web technologies, such as moderation, syndication, rating, and distributed authentication. To continue the Dutch-English play with words, when the software behind the site is released in January 2001, it's named Drupal as that's the English pronunciation of the Dutch translation of drop (druppel). It's very important to note motivitation for this software: it was a technology playground for a community lead by a hardcore geek who already had quite an experience from his Linux years about what could become of an open source software written by a community. Commercial gain of any sorts was not a goal and there were no pre-determined set of features.

Writing the chronicle gets harder and harder as the years pass because so many contributors joined the community and a lot of people would deserve to get his story known. And yet, we want to keep this article somewhat short, so I will jump many years, until May 2004.

First, Zack Rosen and Neil Drumm founds CivicSpace (formerly known as Hack4Dean and then DeanSpace). The importance of DeanSpace/CivicSpace is awareness -- while Drupal is no doubt the best already, it's almost unknown to the world at this time. If we need to name one thing that changed this, then DS/CS is it. (I can't resist to mention that un the same month, at the other end of the world, in a small rural town in Hungary, Karoly Negyesi, who becomes the most active developer of Drupal for many years to come, hears about Drupal for the first time...) 2004 summer sees the foundation of Bryght in Vancouver. Bryght is one of the first Drupal consultancy companies and their team very actively participate in the community. Drupal is now poised for world domination -- James Walker, one of the Bryght founders registers drupal-world-domination.com in 2004 november 1.

In October 18, 2004 Drupal 4.5 gets released -- the changes are bigger than ever: menu becomes editable, custom profile fields get introduced, attachments are now possible, multiple input formats are possible and the UI is translatable through the administration interface and via .po files. From an enduser standpoint, not until Drupal 5.0 will see as big changes as in this release.

Let's jump again, to the first developer meeting in Antwerp, 2005 February. Screennames got faces, friendships born and the idea of the security team start, to be realized in two months. Big, serious websites began to appear using Drupal and Drupal 4.6.0 gets released in April. This is the last release for a very very long time -- it will take more than a year for another Drupal to appear. Meanwhile, there are no less than three more DrupalCons: one in Portland in 2005 August, one in Amsterdam in 2005 October and one in Vancouver 2006 February. Later on, there will only be two DrupalCons a year -- Brussels 2006 September, Sunnyvale 2007 March and Barcelona 2007 September.

In 2005 summer, Google holds the first Summer of Code, where Drupal gets 11 slots. Of the 11 students, Fabiano Parolin Sant'Ana and Angela Byron is still active (and somewhat Steven Wittens). Angie (aka webchick) becomes one of the most important contributors for Drupal, ever since we participate in SoC in the (vain) hope of scoring another win like her. Also, we get some unit testing during SoC. 2005 summer sees both CCK (by Jon Van Dyk and Jonathan Chaffer) and Views (by Earl Miles) modules committed into Drupal.org CVS. While Drupal core itself is a great community tool on one hand, on the other hand it's a clean, lean, extensible framework that lets you code pretty much any website you want, these two modules lets you create extremely complex websites without much coding: CCK lets you define custom content types and Views lets you create complx listings -- both just with a few clicks.

Since then, the most important change in Drupal -- from an enduser's point of view -- was the acceptance of jQuery JavaScript library in Drupal 5.0. True to the spirit of Drupal, this library is small, modular, fast and does things right :) This greatly helped the usability of Drupal. In 2007 november, Packt Publishing gives Drupal the best CMS award.