Drupal Planet

We're very proud to see the first fruit of several months of work and several year of building the Drupal enterprise eco-system in Israel.
The first site shipped, http://shituf.gov.il is a site which exposes the latest rules and discussions from the government to the public.
That way legislators get a very short feedback loop on the current activity and the public gets to state it's opinion and vote up or down on the stream of new rules and political activity.
This "political digg" is the first time in Israel where official governmental activity is letting the public create content in the website and the first time Drupal and it's underlaying open stack is used in official governmental hosting.
The site is seeing great engagement (for instance a rule about monitoring the state of israeli education had 544 votes, divided almost equally and hundreds of comments.
Shlomi Tsadok, Our reprasentitve in the government has led this project and we are showing day after day the flexability, ROI, lower TCO and general awesomeness which is Drupal.
YADGSCTL - Yet Another Drupal Govermental Site Comes To Life (I'm not sure about the popularity of the acronym, but Drupal is gaining popularity in Enterprise Israel and that what counts :) ).
World Domination is now.

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I have recently added drush and drush make packages to my openSUSE repository. For more information or to report bugs on the packages please visit their respective project pages: drush and drush_make.

To install the packages you can use the one-click installers provided by the build service or manually add my repository and install the packages as shown bellow.

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There are approximately 38 critical issues that need to be resolved before Drupal 7 beta gets released. For more on these beta blocker issues check out: Drupal Core Improvements.

With this post I want to encourage you to install Drupal 7 alpha, test it out, and ultimately help to fix the critical issues and speed up the beta release.

You'll need a localhost LAMP or XAMPP environment to follow along with the examples here. If you don't have one set up I recommend using the Acquia Stack Drupal Installer.

Once your testing environment is configured, download Drupal 7.

Installing D7

Save the installer to your localhost Drupal /sites folder and extract it. Set up your MySQL database using your preferred method. Note to developers: D7's new database abstraction layer will theoretically support multiple database types including SQLite, PostgreSQL, MSSQL and Oracle. So if you are running Oracle you may be able to use D7.

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Many sites have views that are used to generate a large number of sections/pages on the site, and you may want to easily change the number of results without having to edit the view. It's easy to create a settings page that will allow you to configure the number of results.

We've launched the Drupal.org redesign theme on localize.drupal.org about six weeks ago, and the reception was great. While other subsites like api.drupal.org are also in the process to migrate to this theme, we could pioneer some fixes and get them into production. We keep tweaking the theme on this site and get fixes in based on your feedback.

Some great feature additions landed since the last update. The most requested new feature is that you can now export all outstanding suggestions with translations. In case of multiple outstanding suggestions for any one string, the suggestions will be in comments. In case of single suggestions, the export uses Gettext's fuzzy facility and just marks the string as "not ready". Look for this option on the language export screen.

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Nathaniel Catchpole (aka catch) talks about some of the performance-related patches that he has been focusing on for Drupal 7. When Dries gave his State of Drupal keynote address in DrupalCon San Francisco, he presented the Top 20 Drupal 7 core patch contributors and catch was at the top of the list with over 337 patches that he was involved with by that point. He notes that a lot of his patches were a series of smaller performance-related patches that he discovered by using profiling tools such as XHProf and XDebug. He talks about some of the performance changes that got into Drupal 7, as well as how he's been able to work on Drupal 7 core through his job at Examiner.com.

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This year in my keynote at DrupalCon San Francisco, I mentioned that the elephants are coming. Well, earlier this week Capgemini, one of the world's foremost consulting providers with 95,000 employees, announced a new service, Capgemini Immediate. I'm pleased to say that they're using Drupal as a foundational technology for their new Immediate platform.

Capgemini Immediate is an offering which helps organizations to build and run on-line services. It consists of a number of preferred technologies (i.e., Drupal, MySQL, Salesforce, Lithium, etc.), best practices, and an ecosystem of preferred partners of which Acquia is part.

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With entities Drupal took a huge step forward in providing conceptual clarity in how it deals with things like users, comments, taxonomy terms and nodes.

I believe there is one more step to take to bring even more clarity that will hopefully be possible in Drupal 8. This is the content of my Core Developer Summit lightning talk- hopefully it is not completely off the mark.

With entities Drupal took a huge step forward in providing conceptual clarity in how it deals with things like users, comments, taxonomy terms and nodes.

I believe there is one more step to take to bring even more clarity that will hopefully be possible in Drupal 8 (or 9!). This is the content of my Core Developer Summit lightning talk- hopefully it is not completely off the mark.

It goes something like this:

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Compared to Tattler, one of the weaknesses of Managing News is the lack of topic monitoring - where a user inputs a keyword phrase representing a topic and the system takes care of tracking this topic across pre-selected RSS sources.

Soon after we started using Managing News, this requirement came up.

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Mike Carper (aka mikeytown2) talks about the Boost module, which a lightweight performance enhancement for small-scale sites that don't have a lot of dynamic content. After adding some apache rules to the .htaccess file, then Boost will translate Drupal pages into static HTML files and serve those directly instead of going through PHP and MySQL. Carper talks about some of the other caching configuration options, and says that this module is perfect for sites on shared hosting that are looking for a performance boost. He says that Boost can actually make your site slower in some cases where you have a lot of content that is frequently updated. In those cases, Varnish would probably be a better solution, but the Boost module is intended to be a quick and easy solution for smaller websites looking for better performance.

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This tutorial is sponsored by the Save Joseph campaign, a grassroots effort to find a good friend, stellar artist and all around amazing person a satisfying, creative job in the next 8 days. I know the Drupal community could use this kind of talent. Learn more about the effort at savejoseph.org. If you have any ideas on how I can get the word out about this, let me know!

My use case was that I wanted to be able to use social media icons for menu items so that we could re-arrage, add or remove items directly from the menu management interface:. The result is what you see below:

To use images for menu items in Drupal, the first step is to create an override theme function for theme_menu_item_link() in your theme's template.php file. The idea is to first run your image handling bit to switch out text for images, and then hand it over to the parent theme to do the rest. In my case, I'm using the Zen theme.

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When working in setting up and developing websites (among other things) we often have to choose between getting stuck in and getting stuff done the known way or trying to invest time in coming up with a more automated way or efficient way of doing things. Usually at some point we become aware of whether we made the right choice – and I find that moment is normally accompanied by a certain sinking feeling.

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For the growing universe of developers turning to Drupal as a solution for mission-critical or highly ambitious applications, the question is less and less "can we build it?" and more and more "how do I scale it?"

For those of you considering attending DrupalCon Copenhagen this August looking to answer those kinds of questions, I humbly submit that in addition to immersing yourself in the inspirational slipstream that is the Drupal community, you come a day early — and get your employer or client to find a little extra budget ;) — to attend the Scalability and Performance Workshop on Monday August 23rd:

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Evolving Web had a great time at Drupal Camp NYC last weekend. The camp was a huge success thanks to the excellent turn-out and presentations on exciting topics such as administrative interfaces, Context, and Drupal security. The team of organizers who put the camp together did an amazing job. Here are the slides from our sessions at the camp:

Monitoring Your Drupal Server and Site

An introduction to installing and configuring Nagios as well as extensions and plugins such as logging and graphing and how to setup automated responses to problems.

We’ve been looking forward to DrupalCon Copenhagen for so long, it’s hard to believe that it’s less than a month away! In addition to all the sessions, training, code sprints, and other great content you’d expect from an international Drupal conference, this year's European DrupalCon should also be one of the most fun yet; as mortendk, one of the conference's organizers (and bona fide Drupal rock star) puts it, this August 23-27th, something will be awesome in the state of Denmark.

Palantir’s contingent to DrupalCon Copenhagen will include George DeMet (gdemet), Tiffany Farriss (farriss), Larry Garfield (Crell) and Ken Rickard (agentrickard). As usual we’ll be presenting and participating in a number of sessions:

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Ryan Price and Mike Anello recently talked with Jacob Redding (jredding), author of Beginning Drupal as well Treasurer and Interim General Manager of the Drupal Association.

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Client brief:

Show the different coloured backgrounds to events based on tags

Method:

first go to admin/content/taxonomy/add/vocabulary and create a new taxonomy called calendar >

link it to event node type and add terms eg dropin, office, outreach, shop that reflect the

type of events that you wish to highlight.

then at node/add/event create a few test events all with different taxonomy terms

at admin/settings/date-time/formats add a new format g:ia and link it to a new format type

hourmin_g:ia > save

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Khalid Baheyeldin (aka kbahey) has been involved with Drupal since 2003, and focuses on the performance & scalability in Drupal. He talks about his strategies for diagnosing the performance bottlenecks in a Drupal site, and mentions some of the various tools that he prescribes as a solution.

For more information, be sure to check out Baheyeldin's DrupalCon presentation slides and talk titled 2.8 million page views per day, 60 M per month, one server!

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Khalid Baheyeldin (aka kbahey) has been involved with Drupal since 2003, and focuses on the performance & scalability in Drupal. He talks about his strategies for diagnosing the performance bottlenecks in a Drupal site, and mentions some of the various tools that he prescribes as a solution.

For more information, be sure to check out Baheyeldin's DrupalCon presentation slides and talk titled 2.8 million page views per day, 60 M per month, one server!

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This week we had the pleasure to welcome Mike from Drupal Easy in our Krimson office.
Mike has been working in Antwerp the whole summer and is returning to his homebase Florida next week.