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Matthew Saunders: When Audio Tapes Break Down
Magnetic tape isn't just dead, but it is also deteriorating.
It is breaking down, falling apart, and what was once thought to be nearly permanent is proving to be extraordinarily fragile.
Audio tape was used for decades as a way to disseminate music, seminars, audio histories, speeches, news, by folklorist, in short--our culture. Hydrolysis, the breakdown of the glue that holds the little magnetic bits to the tape, is becoming more prevalent. The life span of tapes, under the best circumstances, is up to 15 before things start getting sticky. In other words anything created before 1994 has almost certainly started to lose its fidelity.
Learn By The Drop: Basic Site Configuration
Lesson Two of my special Getting Started With Drupal series of instructional videos.
This video explores the basic configuration options to consider once you have successfully installed Drupal.
Stella Power: New Releases for FAQ!
New releases of the FAQ module have been made - versions 5.x-2.12 and 6.x-1.8. This release includes a number of new features, including the ability to have multiple FAQ layouts and both short and long FAQ question texts. However the majority of the changes were small bug fixes.
The new features added include:
- #251493 - Ability to have both short and long questions.
- #299191 - Ability to have multiple FAQ layouts.
- #281827 -"An edit answer" link provided on faq page under the answer.
- #272265 - Pathauto support.
- #304210 - Configurable re-writing of faq taxonomy term links.
- #300959 - added support for multi-lingual taxonomy terms.
The new releases can be downloaded from the FAQ project page, while details on the changes can be found below:
Enjoy!
Andrew Berry: Deploy Drupal Modules and Themes with Eclipse External Tools
Eclipse, with the newly released PDT 2.0, is a very capable Drupal IDE. With code completion, automatic documentation lookups, and integrated debugging, Eclipse is very good for anyone who spends time doing Drupal code.
One issue I've run into with Eclipse when working on contributed modules is that the modules themselves aren't located within a Drupal installation. I found myself resorting to external programs or the command line to copy my changes to my development site or to my local development copy. Using Eclipse's External Tools, it's possible to deploy changes with a single click, greatly reducing the time to test modified code.
John and Cailin: using google analytics advanced segments to separate direct and organic traffic
traffic to a website can be divided into four major sources : direct, paid, organic and referrals. unsurprisingly, google analytics segments the traffic sources reports accordingly.
there is, however, a small catch. the ever growing popularity of search engines has led to an odd use case : users who use a search engine to search for exactly your domain name, instead of simply typing www.mydomain.com into their web browser. these users have just reached your site via an "organic search" and google analytics will classify them accordingly.
technically this is correct, but semantically it's troubling. the users who have reached your site by typing "mydomain" into Google have far more in common with the users that entered www.mydomain.com into their URL bar and far less in common with those users that reached your site by typing "my optimized search term" into Google. and the population of these users is not small - on one of the commercial drupal sites that i maintain these "mydomain" Google searchers account for over one third of the supposedly organic traffic.
Justin Miller: Announcing the support forums!
At last, I'm happy to announce the Code Sorcery Workshop support forums! These forums will gradually become the official support channel for our Mac products Meerkat and Pukka, as well as a place to discuss what's on your mind with regard to our website, potential future products, our services, or happenings in the Mac & Drupal communities.
The forums have been open for a week or two in unannounced form, but have quite expectedly not garnered much activity, so consider this the official "word". Feel free to go to it!
Feature Run-Down
We are using Drupal for the forum solution, which is what is used for the rest of the website as well. I'd like to take a moment to go over some of the features that this provides. In the near future, I also hope to make another post about the more technical details, such as which modules were used, what kind of custom solutions were implemented, and what administrative features are provided on the backend.
Twitter is viral
Twitter is viral -- and getting in the way already. Anyway, you can now follow me at http://twitter.com/dries.
Gábor Hojtsy: Third party service modules on drupal.org: it makes a lot of sense
The most exciting move in Acquia for me so far just happened a few days ago. We rolled out what was called "Big tent" internally, and means much wider support for all Drupal 6 sites. As Dries points out in his blog post, we used to support our Acquia Drupal distribution via forums, tickets and phone support. However, we found that virtually all sites will use other modules, custom code and themes, tweaks to existing code. This was not surprising, but took some time to figure out how we could handle in our support organization.
While there are multiple exciting sides of this story, the one I am about to tell is about the openness of our approach to this move. The story on "making the Acquia Network Connector modules available separate to Acquia Drupal" quickly morphed into publishing them on drupal.org, since that made most sense.
Third party service modules on drupal.org: it makes a lot of sense
The most exciting move in Acquia for me so far just happened a few days ago. We rolled out what was called "Big tent" internally, and means much wider support for all Drupal 6 sites. As Dries points out in his blog post, we used to support our Acquia Drupal distribution via forums, tickets and phone support. However, we found that virtually all sites will use other modules, custom code and themes, tweaks to existing code. This was not surprising, but took some time to figure out how we could handle in our support organization.
While there are multiple exciting sides of this story, the one I am about to tell is about the openness of our approach to this move. The story on "making the Acquia Network Connector modules available separate to Acquia Drupal" quickly morphed into publishing them on drupal.org, since that made most sense.
Sometimes in conversations, we had problems explaining that Acquia Drupal is really only some open source components packaged together, and you can get most of them on drupal.org. There is nothing proprietary in there, and it is just built to help you start off with Drupal quickly. While our connector modules were open source all along, hosting them on drupal.org helps us get through our message even more naturally. And it would be foolish to just think about our messaging.
By hosting our module there, drupal.org helps us inform people not using Acquia Drupal that their module might be outdated. We don't need to duplicate that infrastructure and in fact can invest work into improving that (eg. help upgrade Drupal.org to Drupal 6, help fix project module issues), which benefit the whole community. The module also opens its issue queue to everyone who is trying the module out. This worked well with the open Acquia Marina theme (although admittedly that is much more general purpose then single-service connector modules are).
Hosting on Drupal.org also helps people scrutinize our source code and commits/changes with the usual tools they use for drupal.org, as well as use the same deployment and source code management strategies they employed for other modules. If we'd setup a public subversion repository for this module, we'd put more work on the site manager's shoulders when updates and changes come around.
All-in-all, while I have seen some negative voices about single-service connector modules being hosted "on community resources", especially, when using the particular service requires payment, I think our approach helps improve these community resources, as well as let site maintainers work with our service easier, which is a win-win result after all.
Similar service integration modules on drupal.org where payment is a requirement include CampaingMonitor, Workhabit's CDN2 Video, one of the two editions of Mollom, the recently announced Kaltura integration module and so on. There are also modules integrating with commercial products (where you'd buy a product instead of subscribing to a service) of course. Most of these can be found in the Third-party integration category on drupal.org.
Acquia: Acquia Joins Red Hat Exchange Bringing Social Publishing Expertise to the Open Source Ecosystem
Drupal service provider joins leading vendors to advance the reach of open source computing
Acquia Joins Red Hat Exchange Bringing Social Publishing Expertise to the Open Source Ecosystem
Drupal service provider joins leading vendors to advance the reach of open source computing
Dries Buytaert: Acquia supports everything Drupal 6
Last year, Acquia opened for business, offering commercial support for a defined software distribution called Acquia Drupal. One could purchase commercial support for all the modules in Acquia Drupal. As I mentioned last week in my 2009 predictions for Drupal, one of the things we learned relatively fast is that people wanted more than just Acquia Drupal. They wanted support for all modules, themes and custom code.
No surprise, but when we set out to build Acquia little more than a year ago, we weren't quite sure how we'd go about supporting everything with the limited resources we had available. We have since learned and grew a lot, and we decided that we're finally ready to start providing technical support for all of Drupal 6.x -- not just Acquia Drupal but all modules and themes available on drupal.org, as well as custom code.
Acquia supports everything Drupal 6
Last year, Acquia opened for business, offering commercial support for a defined software distribution called Acquia Drupal. One could purchase commercial support for all the modules in Acquia Drupal. As I mentioned last week in my 2009 predictions for Drupal, one of the things we learned relatively fast is that people wanted more than just Acquia Drupal. They wanted support for all modules, themes and custom code.
Acquia supports everything Drupal 6
Last year, Acquia opened for business, offering commercial support for a defined software distribution called Acquia Drupal. One could purchase commercial support for all the modules in Acquia Drupal. As I mentioned last week in my 2009 predictions for Drupal, one of the things we learned relatively fast is that people wanted more than just Acquia Drupal. They wanted support for all modules, themes and custom code.
No surprise, but when we set out to build Acquia little more than a year ago, we weren't quite sure how we'd go about supporting everything with the limited resources we had available. We have since learned and grew a lot, and we decided that we're finally ready to start providing technical support for all of Drupal 6.x -- not just Acquia Drupal but all modules and themes available on drupal.org, as well as custom code.
So last week we rolled out a big release of the Acquia Network, the new Acquia Network connector (available from drupal.org, see Gabor's blog post for details), a 156 page "Getting Started Guide" on Drupal, and a ton of new content on our website. Starting today, we're ready to give many more customers what they want: support for everything Drupal 6.
We'll continue to tweak and experiment with our offering in 2009 so we didn't make a big deal out of this change (i.e. no press release, no analyst briefings). However, I wanted to bring this to your attention because I'm really excited about it. It means it will be easier for us to help take Drupal to the enterprise, and that Acquia will contribute to more and different parts of the Drupal project.
While Acquia Drupal no longer defines our support boundaries, it is still a great on-ramp for people getting started with Drupal. We are continuing to invest in Acquia Drupal so watch this space for more Acquia Drupal announcements.
Kudos to the entire Acquia team for making this milestone happen. Thanks!
CivicActions: "Drupal For Education And E-Learning" Book Review
Drupal for Education and E-learning is a must-have for any teacher, school or education institution considering a new school website, or technology-centric project in the classroom. Whether the reader has heard of Drupal or not, the book provides valuable insights, empowering ideas and simple instructions to help get any teacher or school on their way to having a powerful, useful and valuable learning resource.
"Drupal For Education And E-Learning" Book Review
Drupal for Education and E-learning is a must-have for any teacher, school or education institution considering a new school website, or technology-centric project in the classroom. Whether the reader has heard of Drupal or not, the book provides valuable insights, empowering ideas and simple instructions to help get any teacher or school on their way to having a powerful, useful and valuable learning resource.
Brocolli cream soup
I have never done much cooking in my life. I prepare the occasional spaghetti bolognese, but that is about it. And when I say "prepare", I mean that I heat up pre-cooked bolognese sauce. Well, sue me.
Either way, to start off the new year in style, I set out to make my first soup ever. From scratch. I decided on broccoli cream soup as that is one of my favorite soups, and it only involved vegetables.
Guess what? The soup was delicious. There might be a chef in me! ;-)
2bits: Making Subversion/SVN recognize CVS Id and Revision tags
Many Drupal developers use Subversion (SVN) internally within their organization, due to its many benefits over what the Drupal project's repository uses: the dated CVS.
One annoying aspect though is that almost all Drupal files use CVS style tags, such as the $Id$ one. Subversion does not recognize these by default.
Bryan Ruby: Gadgetopia's Deane Barker becomes a Drupal newbie
During the past couple years I've had some brief but rewarding content management discussions with Deane Barker from Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive. Dean has worked with quite a few Web content management systems over the years and appears to be most passionate to using eZ Publish. Naturally, our discussions almost always involve Dean talking about ez Publish and me talking about Drupal. Unfortunately, as I am more of a system administrator than a developer, the information I have been able to provide him about Drupal has always been limited.
Well, it looks as if Deane Barker has finally decided to get on the Drupal learning curve and find out more about this great CMS.
I’m working with Drupal for the first time on a hobby project I’m doing with Seth Gottlieb (about which you’ll hear much more later…). Adam Kalsey — Drupal ninja that he is — is advising us on the technical implementation, and he’s been a great help.
2bits: How to delay somewhat heavy operations to improve user experience
We had a need from a client where they wanted to check certain complex conditions from a relatively big decision matrix. Without going into specifics, they wanted to check a progressive set of rules for users and taking certain actions when all the conditions were met.
Checking one or two conditions is not a problem on a modern day web site, but because the rules are progressive and have to be all checked from the start every time, that involves a lot of processing, a lot of database queries and basically a lot of time.
