fidzu : Drupal

While working on a CiviCRMCiviCRM is an open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, open source, internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups. site, I ran into a problem of migrating the installation from the development host to the QA, and from there to production. Since CiviCRM stores so much host-specific information in the database, every transfer needed to re-configure the host information. After much research and a little bit of pain, we discovered that the proper way to do this is to simply empty the config_backend field in the civicrm_domain table.

So with this little bit of code tacked onto our deployment scripts:

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23 Jul 2008 8:56pm GMT

Drupal's hook system is making me almost as happy as Emacs' hook system does. =)

There's a hook_mail_alter function that allows you to modify any message your system sends. Example:

function mymodule_mail_alter($mailkey, &$to, &$subject, &$body, &$from, &$headers) {
   $body .= "\n\n" . t('This is a system-generated email, please do not reply to this message');
}

You gotta love developers who plan for extensibility and put all sorts of hooks into the code…

23 Jul 2008 8:27pm GMT

I'm really happy to announce that Content Profile is going to be the common base module for "profiles-as-nodes" solutions in drupal 6.x!

After a long discussion discussion about the bio 6.x port, I already thought my efforts to join bio and node profile development were for nothing.
But then the discussion continued and we were able to agree on a common base module, which avoids unnecessary code duplication and provides an API on which further extension modules may rely on. The people from FunnyMonkey started working on it and agreed with me on continuing my previous work on this topic: Content Profile :)

So now as we have a decision we can concentrate on coding..

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23 Jul 2008 9:12am GMT

I work in PEG access television and had the pleasure to present at the Alliance for Community Media national conference.

PEG (public, educational and government) access television is a model that provides local residents access to the local cable systems in their communities to produce and distribute their local perspectives within their cities. A lot of stuff comes along with that deal from the cable company, from the city, and from private non-profits. You can read all about that here if you want to learn more.

PEG faces challenges in adopting web-based distribution methods because of some very specific funding stream problems. The federal government requires cable companies to turn over a small percentage of revenue in each municipality (and lately to entire states with statewide franchising agreements) to make television. PEG organizations face risks by entering an internet-based video distribution market with their local content that cable providers and local governments may eliminate their funding streams because they are no longer making television.

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23 Jul 2008 7:39am GMT

http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/07/and-winners-of-2008-google...
http://drupal.org/webchick-wins-best-contributor-open-source-awards

I have lots I'd like to say about this, but am a bit overwhelmed just at the moment. Suffice it to say, my sincerest thank you to everyone who nominated me for this award, and to O'Reilly, Google, and the Drupal community in general for being so unbelievably awesome.

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23 Jul 2008 6:44am GMT

We're getting excited to come over for DrupalCon Szeged in just over a month. This will be the fifth DrupalCon that Development Seed has attended, and it always amazes me how much these conferences show off just how fast this community is growing and how far Drupal has come as a platform. We've looking forward to talking about some of our latest work to add and refine functionalities to Drupal. Here's a quick summary of the sessions we've proposed to lead. If you're interested in these topics, please vote for them!

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23 Jul 2008 12:55am GMT

As I posted before, I'm super excited about the upcoming Drupalcon in Hungary. I've never been further east than Barcelona, and I never imagined I'd get to spend my first anniversary with Christina in Budapest... I'm definitely up for any sightseeing recommendations for our time there.

The Uberdevs have set some goals for Ubercart at Drupalcon, and one of them is to present and share as much information and knowledge as possible. To that end, we've proposed two sessions and a BoF that I hope folks will find useful (and vote for accordingly).

I'll be doing my Introducing Ubercart session for the third time running, presenting attendees with a brief overview of Ubercart, a look at some advanced feature configuration, and an update on Drupal 6 development (with an eager eye toward the future).

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22 Jul 2008 9:57pm GMT

In case you've somehow missed the news, DrupalCamp Colorado is happening this weekend.

greggles posted a nice rundown of things to do for DrupalCamp. Registration is easy. The price is an affordable $10 ... or $25 at the door (if there's room -- the cap is at 100 people).

Hey, and we can haz stickers! Maybe your laptop wants one, too?

22 Jul 2008 9:00pm GMT

For those interested, nodecomment.module has been getting some porting attention. The DRUPAL-6--1 branch has been created and a development snapshot should be available soon. Please give it a try if you're interested and give some feedback.

Views 2 integration

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22 Jul 2008 8:51pm GMT

If being a co-lead organizer for Drupalcon Szeged 2008, getting married in three weeks, moving flats and of course building products and services with Acquia would not be enough, I thought I'd top my Drupalcon participation with a nice surprise session submission.

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22 Jul 2008 7:03pm GMT

We recently received word that Acquia was named a AlwaysOn Global 250 Winner. Initially the AlwaysOn 100, this year marked the expansion of the list to 250 due to the "rapid growth of startup communities around the world." According to AlwaysOn, "this year's AO Global 250 reflects a set of trends that are about to ignite new market opportunities the whole world over."

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22 Jul 2008 3:41pm GMT

We're using Domain Access to manage a number of related subdomains on a single server. I prefer to develop and test locallly, then push my changes out to a testing server so that other people can try the system. I use the same domain names on my computer and on the test server so that I don't have to make any changes in the database. To switch between them, I comment or uncomment a line like

127.0.0.1 example.com sub1.example.com sub2.example.com

in my /etc/hosts file.

However, Firefox caches the domain name information, and it can be confusing to figure out which server I'm on. The following setup makes this much easier:

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22 Jul 2008 3:09pm GMT

As announced earlier, we are closing the room booking system on the Drupalcon Szeged 2008 site at the end of this week, so it will not be possibly to book rooms on our site after July 24th. This means that there is only three days left to take advantage of our room service and to specify roommates. After that, we will transfer the list of names and rooms to the accomodation providers. We will maintain a list of the locations and their contacts on the website, but from then on will not help you book a room. This frees up some of our resources to work on more important tasks to ensure a great program and service.

We are also closing on the session submission deadline quickly. Next monday (July 28th) will be your last chance to submit sessions for Drupalcon Szeged 2008. The unconference (BoF) submissions will be open until the conference ends, so anyone can submit BoFs on the spot, but sessions will be planned and put into a timetable next week. So next week we should have our program up on the website!

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22 Jul 2008 9:55am GMT

The folks at South by Southwest (SXSW) recently posted the audio podcast of Content Management System Roundup, the panel of CMS experts that I hosted there back in March. Even though I was fighting a losing battle with the flu and pumped full of DayQuil at the time, I think the session went very well, and the feedback that we got was quite positive. Matt McDermott, Jeff Eaton, Mike Essl, and Tiffany Farriss all deserve a tremendous amount of credit for the work that they did to make it such a great session.

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21 Jul 2008 11:32pm GMT

The Understanding Drupal DVDs are pressed and we have received them at our shipping facility! All pre-ordered DVDs have been shipped out and should be arriving this week. You can choose between a DVD, a High-Definition digital download, or the "Grab 'em both" option, which gives you both the immediacy of the HD download and a physical DVD that you can use to introduce Drupal to clients, friends, and family. You can order your copy today from the Lullabot store.

Understanding Drupal is designed to serve as a fundamental foundation to people new to Drupal by providing an introduction to Drupal's concepts, capabilities and terminology. It's the first video in the Lullabot Learning Series. Future tutorials will cover topics such as Administering Drupal, and intensives on the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views modules, Theming, Drupal APIs, and more.

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21 Jul 2008 11:17pm GMT

Greetings all,

From now on, I'm going to report the project progress of the "pivots recommendation system for drupal.org" on this blog.

The "pivots" project is an attempt to generate module recommendations to D.O. users. The idea is to display on a module page the related forum conversations and related modules that are referenced in the same conversations. We think it could provide useful information to users when they evaluate the modules.

We have deployed the system on D.O. to site maintainers and CVS account holders since June 1, 2008. More than 900 users has tried using the system since then. Statistics shows that the conversation pivot block got a 2.76% click-through rate, the double pivot block got a 1.25% click-through rate. Survey shows that 73.8% feedback on the conversation pivot was positive, and 77% positive feedback on the double pivot. To see the brief report, please click here. To see the full report, please click here.

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21 Jul 2008 8:53pm GMT