Drupal Feeds

As I've blogged about this before, work on localize.drupal.org's improved functionality was going on heavily in the past weeks. We launched a staging site with interface improvements almost a month ago, and kept adding small improvements on top of that.

Given all the great feedback on the new user interface, it was time to finally launch it on the live site. Here is a rundown of the most important improvements.

read more

I recently created a module that uses the Google Analytics API to capture the top ten nodes of various content types by day, week, and all time. This is a great option for any site that needs to use caching, and can’t use the Statistics module.

read more

Wed, Mar 17, 2010 by Scott

Page Content

People on a mobile device are not ‘browsing’, but rather they are looking for a specific piece of information. 
Use the clearest and simplest language instead of a discursive style for site content.

Divide pages into usable but limited size portions.

If pages are too large they will take a long time to load. There are limitations on some mobile devices as to the largest page they can accommodate. Also, we don’t want our users taking a big hit on their (sometimes) limited data plans.

On the other hand, if a page is too short then the user may require multiple page requests to read the relevant information.

Scrolling

The layout of the page should be such that the user can use a simple repeated scroll. The majority of mobile sites scroll vertically, so elements should be “stacked” in this way. Some content requires a secondary scroll, such as maps or some images, but should be avoided wherever possible.

I recently agreed to take on two new roles in the Drupal open-source project: maintainer of the core Search module, and documentation volunteer coordinator, specifically for the in-code API documentation that’s displayed on api.drupal.org. I’m excited to be part of helping Drupal 7 come together, but to make it really successful, we need your help to get Drupal 7 documented! We need to get the API and Module Update Guide documentation fixed up, so that module developers can make their modules available for Drupal 7, and we need to get the Handbook updated for Drupal 7 so that less expert users can figure out how to use it.

Pretty much anyone can help in this effort. To get you started, we have a page listing what needs to be done, and both Ariane (arianek) and I (jhodgdon) are often available on IRC (#drupal-docs or #drupal-contribute). So feel free to jump in at any time!

Also, if you’re headed for DrupalCon San Francisco in April, please consider coming for the Sunday or Thursday sprint days. We will have documentation sprints going on, and people available to get you started, point you to tasks, etc.

Thanks!

With Drupal developers becoming very popular on the job market, the demand for guidance of developers from other technologies becomes high. Last week, with the publication of the article Becoming a Drupal coder: a wise carreer move a clean document guiding to all Drupal information resources online and offline was published.

It happens to be I'm doing a presentation this week targetted at developers working with another technologies. So I decided to publish my presentation slides.

read more

The list of selected sessions has been posted for DrupalCon San Francisco. We're frantically working on ironing out a few last conflicts in the schedule and confirming a few last speakers, but you are welcome to view our selections now.

In a few days we will be allowing everyone with a DrupalCon ticket to create a personal conference schedule. You will be able to 'Sign Up' for your favorite sessions and design your ideal conference experience. If you haven't bought your ticket yet, Register now before ticket prices go up!

One of the recurring requests in the Views Bulk Operations issue queue is to create a downloadable archive of files attached to nodes. While the general case is not trivial to solve, I was recently hired by research on BLOGS to write a more specific action: create a Zip archive of all images stored in imagefields.

read more

Jacine Rodriguez of Gravitek Labs talks about the Skinr module, which is a module that allows a Drupal theme to define a set of reusable and modular CSS styles and makes them available through the user interface. The Skinr module was inspired by the Block Theme, but extended to be more flexible.

The Skinr module is the basis for Top Notch Themes' Fusion theme, which is demonstrated in some videos here. And since the recording of this podcast DrupalCon Paris, TNT has released a new website of Fusion-based themes at: http://fusiondrupalthemes.com

Make Garland Super (Keep the Garland brand) Supersede Garland (Time for something new)

Use views to create lists of content in Drupal 7. This screencast demonstrates creating a view that has multiple displays, using the whole node or just fields in the list, customizing the way fields are displayed, and changing the HTML formatting of the list using the user interface.

Video #6 in this Intro to Drupal series.

read more

We are going to perform some exciting updates on localize.drupal.org tomorrow, on March 17th, 2010, from 8am to 10am UTC (expected). In this timeframe, all of localize.drupal.org services will be down and inaccessible. None of the other drupal.org sites are affected, the main site, groups, api, etc. will be fully functional. We are sorry for any inconvenience caused, and thank you for your understanding.

This is the best book I've reviewed for Drupal yet! This is a book that is bigger than the title gives it. Drupal 6 Attachment Views by J. Ayen Green will extend your Drupal foo to at least blue belt!

read more

Here at DrupalCon planning headquarters, we are getting really excited about the event. We are getting double digit increases in registrants daily and excitement is building. As we look at our schedule it looks like the programming is going to be awesome too! It will be the biggest DrupalCon so far, in a beautiful city.

As we get closer to the conference, we have noticed that a number of you are members of the site, but have not yet bought your conference ticket. Ticket prices go up to $220 on the 26th of March, so make sure you complete this step!

Video #5 in this Intro to Drupal series, I cover how you can create content types in Drupal 7 now that the field system is in place.

read more

I'm about to meet with a group of eight or nine IT administrators in the Faculty of Science at UBC, about collaboration on areas of mutual interest via common open-source platforms. Since the adoption of Drupal at UBC has in the last few years skyrocketed, I imagine that this will be one of the first opportunities for collaboration.

Many individual and departments have of course been well-aware of the benefits of open source software, but it feels like the time is right to try for some economies of scale in terms of inter-department sharing and collaboration.

The following is a list of actions I'd like to see happening over the near term. I'd love to hear from anyone are engaged in similar projects, about things that worked, things that didn't work so well, or anything else you

read more

Hey planet,

Something strange happened where only I could see the embedded youtube video of the demo.  Sorry for the confusion.  If you were interested in a demo of the currently in progress media module, I've added a link to the demo. (It's' at the bottom): http://jacobsingh.drupalgardens.com/content/media-mania-multimedia-solution-drupal-7

Apologies, my webmaster will be flogged appropriately.

Tags: drupalmediaplanet

If you're thinking of taking my online seminar, "Setting Up, Customizing Drupal" on 29 March, use the discount code "DRUPALTOMG10" to get 10 percent off! Here's a direct link to get the discount.

The discount code also made me realize: You can't spell Tom Geller without OMG!

Laura Scott of PingVision talks a bit about her DrupalCon Paris presentation on Functional Interaction Design in Drupal.

Mon, Mar 15, 2010 by steve

Many of us are using the 'LAMP' system (Linux, Apache, Mysql, and PHP) for web development. Session is usually used by websites to keep track of various user related information across some period of time. PHP provides session garbage collection mechanism that ensures old unused sessions to be cleared regularly. This will help to prevent performance degrade due to filling up of session data and to reduce the risk of session hijacking as well.

How you can save time and drastically improve your Drupal experience with the Features module

Tomorrow Drupal4Gov is holding their monthly meeting, bringing together developers and IT managers who work in the federal space to talk about Drupal best practices specifically in the U.S. government space. This is a new group, led by Kirsten Burgard at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and one that has already generated a lot of interest and participation. Jeff is headlining this month's meeting and will present via webcast on managing a clean development -> staging -> production workflow in Drupal. His discussion will be targeted to IT decision makers and to developers who are interested in streamlining their site development and deployment with the Features module.

read more