Planet Drupal

We've been quite busy with Display Suite since the first release. A lot of issues have been fixed and fieldgroups integration, the number one feature request by anyone out there, is almost done. We also created two new, rather small - but cool - modules which integrate perfectly with DS.

• ND location: integrates with the location and Gmap modules. All location properties will be exposed as separate fields and you get an extra field which opens the marker info window on google maps, ideal for an overview page. We'll add a few other cool goodies to make this module rock even harder than it already does.
• Views displays: all variables in the views.tpl.php are now 'fields' which you can put in the default set of regions. Extra fields/data are now very ease to add to your views displays.

You can see the power when combining these 2 modules in this short screencast. You can also click around on our demo site, still on the same URL, at http://demo.customsource.be/location.

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 I recently received an email asking me how to bring a Drupal site back online after taking it offline for site maintenance. For those of you who haven't done this yet you can take your site offline (and put it back online) by going to /admin/settings/site-maintenance. If you take your site offline for maintenance, then log out of the site you will get the "Site off-line message" indicated in your settings. To get back into your site all you need to do is go to /user/login. There you will be presented with the login form that you can complete in order to gain entry to your site.

It's important to understand that unless you specifically set the permission for "administer site configuration" under the system module then only user #1 can manage the maintenance status of the site. If you do want to grant this access to another user then you will also probably want to grant access to "access administration pages" as well. A screenshot of the appropriate section of the user permissions page (/admin/user/permissions) is included below.

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Workflows are a basic building block of business applications. While the Workflow module provides a good base to start building workflows in Drupal, it has not kept up with the rise in complexity of Drupal application requirements.

Central to a workflow is the notion of state transition: when does a "Job Bid" node move from state "Proposed" to state "Accepted" or "Rejected"? Who can trigger this transition? There are obviously n2 possible transitions for an n-state workflow, making what is commonly called a state transition matrix.

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A recent request from a client was to improve the Views 2 exposed taxonomy filter so that it intelligently hides taxonomy terms which aren't related to any of the content returned by the View query. As anybody who has spent time poking about in Views vast configuration panel will know, this isn't possible through the existing Taxonomy handler.

Stackoverflow.com had a few posts from users requesting the same functionality, and replies from others saying it wasn't possible with Views 2. Well the good news is: it is possible, right now, without hacking Views.

As a member of the organizing team, I am happy to invite you to the Drupal Dev Days (aka DrupalCamp Germany 2010), which will take place on May 8th and 9t in Munich. We already announced the event on many German-speaking channels, but I would like to invite those of you who might be coming from further away.

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Ixis worked with Manchester based agency Worship Digital to produce a great multi-media based community site for the legendary Haçienda club brand in Manchester (UK).

The project included the usual News section for promoting upcoming activities and history of the nightclub, and alongside this an events area which allowed pinning an event on the world map using a custom Drupal CCK field.

MAPLight.org is a Drupal site I’ve been working with for quite awhile. Their upgrade to Drupal 6 and redesign launched last week. We worked with Chapter Three for design and theming; and MAPLight’s excellent team for the idea, research, and quite detail-oriented QA. It is already getting some mentions in the media.

Both money and legislative data sources have modules to pull the same source data into your database. OpenSecrets Open Data for donations to U.S. Congress; Legislature for votes and more from GovTrack.us. MAPLight’s research is available in an API.

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When using PHP functions such as array_map and preg_replace_callback, you are forced to pass in a single-parameter callback function, making it impossible to send additional context information to the callback. But it ain't necessarily so.

Function objects, aka Functors, are here to help.

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I have an interesting problem, on a data migration project I'm currently working on. I'm importing a large amount of legacy data into Drupal, using the awesome Migrate module (and friends). Migrate is a great tool for the job, but one of its limitations is that it requires the legacy database tables to have non-composite integer primary keys. Unfortunately, most of the tables I'm working with have primary keys that are either composite (i.e. the key is a combination of two or more columns), or non-integer (i.e. strings), or both.

Table with composite primary key.

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Jay just posted a blog post, called Building enterprise social communities with Drupal, sharing a white paper that we have written at Acquia. In this white paper, we answer questions like: what kind of social features Drupal supplies, why Drupal is the best choice for building a social site, what Drupal modules are useful when building a social site, and some examples of successful enterprise Drupal communities.

The reason we wrote this white paper is simple: many of the enterprise organizations that we talk to ask us these questions over and over again. Building social business sites is a very hot topic in the enterprise. The work environment in these organizations is evolving, and increasingly more, people want to connect, create, share and find people and information relevant to their work. Needless to say, not all social business sites are equal -- some are team collaboration sites, some are community sites, and others might be networking sites. They can exist behind the firewall for internal teams, or they can be external facing sites to engage with partners and customers.

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Drupal has come a long way since Acquia Marina leapt onto the scene in 2008 with an unprecedented number of theme settings. Many themes followed suit, and we were thrilled at the extra power and flexibility that these theme settings gave to Drupal users. These theme settings had come out of lots of time spent in the forums and on IRC, finding out what site builders were constantly running up against and wished they had an easy way to change. We constantly got feedback about how great they were in the Acquia themes, and how much our customers enjoyed them in our premium Drupal themes.

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I was asked to speak at this year's Career Day at our local high school, and thought it would be an awesome opportunity to skew the vision of young minds towards the possibilities that a work life in web design / development can offer. I did a similar talk a couple years ago at the last career day, and realized that in order to keep these guys from drifting off I had to make a concerted effort to break the third wall.

So, I put together this presentation that basically converts the room into a web development firm and introduces the multiple roles you can take on, all the while building out a spec for a popular web site clone (MySpace was the choice each time). I was really impressed with the kids' willingness to participate, and heard it went over pretty well.

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Plan your DrupalCon adventure by picking the sessions you want to attend!

Because DrupalCon is such a large event, and the time flies by so fast, I always recommend you put together a list of the sessions you really want to go to and keep it handy. You can start doing this now by going to the session schedule and adding sessions to your personal schedule. By signing up you'll be able to see what sessions are on what day and at what time, and come to the unfortunate realization that you can't be in three places at once.

A lot of times designers forget to make sure that their websites print out clean and readable. This means, when a user wants to archive a website as a hard copy, so they can reference it later, it can get messy. Instead of clicking some random print button on the page, most people will print by doing the most obvious: File > Print. In this blog I will explain how easy it is to theme a printed page.

Note: Some important things people print off the web are coupons and purchase orders, which is normally reminded on the web page.

The printed page will show the navigation menu system, a random blank white page, a bunch of ads, which form elements such as input boxes, and useless images. The content that most people really want is just a section on the cluttered page of ink. The solution is to clean these pages up, make it readable for even your grandmother, and most of all to save paper.

First step is to add a print.css file to all your printed pages, to do this is to add the code to your theme_name.info file.

Chris Heuer founded the Social Media Club and came to DrupalCon Paris to talk about "Social + Media: What's Needed Next." Heuer talks about the social media trends that he sees as well as how Drupal plays a part in them. He also shares some of his insights into some of the darker sides of social media, and how to best use the available tools with the highest intentions of social change.

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Join Ryan Price and Mike Anello as they talk to Trevor James (twitter.com/jamesweblabs), one of the co-authors of Drupal 6 Performance Tips from Packt Publishing. Unfortunately, Trevor's co-author, TJ Holowyachuk, was unable to take part in the interview.

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The voting is over and the Drupal Con San Fran sessions have been posted. I'm proud to say there will be a number of sessions featureing folks from Zivtech and the Philly area:

Alex - Zivtech:
http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/contractor-shop-how-make-leap

Alex - Zivtech:
http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/panel-many-flavors-drupal-t...

Alex - Zivtech:
http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/state-drupal-web-applicatio...

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There have already been a couple of glowing reviews of this book recently. But they fail to mention what is so great about it.

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Got a website with ten or more content types, and you want a neat way to promote mixed content to the front page/side bar? Here is one solution.