Drupal News

Incredible Momentum

Drupalcon Boston 2008 is shaping up to be the biggest and best Drupalcon ever. We crunched some numbers this week to compare the pace of registrations between Boston and Barcelona and found that registrations for Boston are running 50% higher than Barcelona at the equivalent stage of the registration cycle (~225 vs. ~150).ﾠ That’s incredible momentum, and as long as we have the expected surge in registrations over the next two weeks we’ll be in great shape to hit our goal of 500+ attendees.

By Feb 11: Submit Your Session Proposal

Many great sessions have already been submitted. But not enough. So we’re setting the session submission deadline for February 11 at 11 p. m. Eastern time (04:00 GMT). If you’ve been thinking about submitting a session, it’s time to put fingers to keyboard and make it happen. And if you are expecting a specific session by a specific person but don’t see it on the listings on the site, then please pester the presenter to get the session on the agenda.

By Feb 18: Get Registered, Pay, and Book Hotel

If you haven’t registered AND paid your fee (need to be logged in), then the time is now. We’ve reserved a bunch of hotel rooms at discounted rates. But they go away on February 18 - we can’t expect the hotel to hold them forever. So if you want to get a great room at a great rate, you need to get moving.

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Original post by jwhatcott and software by Elliott Back

With Drupal 6.0 around the corner and after a 6 month code freeze, it is time for us developers to start talking about the next version of Drupal. If you plan to work on something, or if you are going to contribute to Drupal in one way or another, please share your “personal battle plan” in the comments. A “personal battle plan” is a summary or itemized list of things you are going to work on in the next couple months.

Important guidelines

In this thread, we are only interested in what you plan to contribute, and not what you’d like other people to work on. Please, do NOT post personal wishlists and refrain from theorizing or sharing your grand vision. This is not the place to request features, to talk about implementation details or to discuss Drupal’s general direction. This thread is meant to be a collection of things people are actually going to work on. If you are not going to contribute, don’t post any comments. Comments that violate these guidelines, in part or in full, will be deleted. Thanks for your understanding.

Original post by Dries and software by Elliott Back

We are proud to present the third release candidate of Drupal 6.0. We hope that this will be the final release candidate before we can make an official release of Drupal 6.0. Since the second release candidate, we have fixed various issues including JavaScript performance problems, cleaned up menu updates, added several improvements to the update.module, and added a memory requirements check to update.php. We have even added some small usability improvements since RC2.

The first beta announcement provided a comprehensive list of high level improvements made since Drupal 5.x, so in this announcement we’ll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 6 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you’ve grown to love!

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Original post by Gábor Hojtsy and software by Elliott Back

Several Drupal developers are meeting February 4-6, 2008 in Chicago to work on and re-design Drupal’s core data architecture. Topics will include data APIs, object modeling, fields in core, and an overlapping swirl of related ideas. Our goal is to have a design proposal for presentation at DrupalCon Boston 2008.

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Original post by bjaspan and software by Elliott Back

After Drupalcon (March 3-6 at the Boston Convention & Expo Center), the Drupal Association is hosting an all day code sprint at MIT on Friday March 7. All registered attendees are welcome. See below for details.

What’s a code sprint

A code sprint is a gathering of a bunch of programmers to complete a short, rapid development project. It allows developers from different countries and companies to work together and learn from each other. Most importantly, it’s a fun event where we can make some impressive advances for Drupal.

We’re all meeting in a big room, where we’ll code and talk smack until we get kicked out. Come chat with long-time Drupalers to learn from their experience.

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Original post by moshe weitzman and software by Elliott Back

On Tuesday our friends and colleagues at Joomla! announced the release of Joomla! 1.5.

In their release note, the Joomla! developers remark that

The next phase offers the opportunity to bring together the code created, lessons learned, and momentum gained, to build something truly great. It took us tens of thousands of hours, thousands of revisions, and hundreds of people to get to this point. It has been a remarkable journey filled with fun, discovery, and enlightenment where everyone has something to offer and anyone can contribute.

I don’t think we could have said it better ourselves! And, with the release of Drupal 6 right around the corner, I’m sure we all know exactly how proud they are of a job well done.

As our Joomla! friends have said before, we’re friends with common goals, and we are all on the same side. We both value PHP, MySQL, GPL licenses, community based collaboration, open standards, accessibility, low-resource requirements, ease of use, and an extensible and modular design. And, ultimately, we all agree that open source matters.

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Original post by add1sun and software by Elliott Back

Last year was one of the most exciting years for Drupal. We saw Drupal 5 mature into the powerful engine that it now is, and have spent the last few months anxiously awaiting the release of Drupal 6. The user base of Drupal.org has grown exponentially, to about 250,000 registered members presently, with about a thousand new users registering every day. The Drupal Association is positioning itself as a leader for the Drupal community, and has recently held its first General Assembly. We held the largest Drupalcon to date in Barcelona in the fall, and this spring we have the chance to do even better with Drupalcon Boston.

Contributed modules for Drupal have been phenomenal as well. In addition to the ongoing improvement of the basics such as CCK and Views, we have witnessed such ground-breaking contributions as Embedded Media Field (integrating third party media providers as node fields), Ubercart and a new-and-improved Ecommerce, and the newly released Theme Developer (touted as Firebug for Drupal).

Drupal has also come into its own on the Internet, and we are witnessing a revolution in the works. Drupal is being used for countless blogs, social networking sites, corporate and non-profit sites, ecommerce, and more.

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Original post by Robin Monks and software by Elliott Back

MySQL AB and KernelTrap.org’s Jeremy Andrews are partnering up to offer an online presentation titled “Achieving Optimal MySQL Performance For Drupal”. Aiming to provide a better understanding of how to properly monitor and tune your MySQL database, the online Webinar will take place on Thursday, January 31st, 2008, at 16:00 UTC (11:00 am EST). The presentation will last 45 minutes, followed by 15 minutes for questions and answers. You can sign up for the free event here.

The presentation will offer insights into understanding your database’s current performance. It will start by detailing some recommended methods for monitoring MySQL, measuring performance and isolating bottlenecks. Next, MySQL storage engines will be briefly discussed, offering tips on choosing between MyISAM and InnoDB. Finally, the talk will offer concrete details on how to actually optimize MySQL for improving Drupal performance.

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Original post by Jeremy@kerneltrap.org and software by Elliott Back

The Boston Drupal conference will have tracks, planned sessions, as well as sessions from the community. We had 31 Drupal sessions at OSCMS, and 93 sessions at Barcelona. While both of these conferences were highly successful, this year the conference organizers are aiming to raise the bar even higher in terms of session quality.

• Business and marketing track
• Design and user experience track
• Site building track
• Community and core

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Original post by Amazon and software by Elliott Back

Drupalcon Boston 2008 registration is now open. Please register for the conference site, and then pay your $195 conference fee. You can also purchase a conference sponsorship for your organization, and learn about the benefits that best meet your organizations needs.

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Original post by Amazon and software by Elliott Back

I’ve been showing off this module privately, but it is now time to broadcast the news. Drupal theming has taken a major leap forward. Watch the screencast. Let me be the first to welcome a thousand terrific new designs and designers to our project.

The new module is called Theme developer and it can be downloaded as part of the devel project. We have built Firebug for Drupal Theming. You may now click on any part of the page and a sexy popup display shows which theme function/template outputted the HTML, and what other files could have done so. Armed with this info, a themer may quickly and accurately override the presentation. Further, all the variables passed into the template/function are presented for review.

Watch the screencast

Implementation notes

• The basic idea of the module is that it uses hook_theme_registry_alter() to make itself receive all theme calls. Thus, it logs all the variables that are received and the templates that could have been called, and were eventually called, and so forth. It finally delegates to the original theme function for generating the HTML. Finally, it takes the generated HTML and wraps it in span tags in order to identify what HTML belongs to what theme call. Those span tags get classes attached for the red border that follows the cursor.
• The popup window gets all its data from a huge javascript array in Drupal.settings. This array stores data about each call.
• In order to receive the same drill down behavior as in the screencast for the variables listing, you should install krumo. See the README file.

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Original post by moshe weitzman and software by Elliott Back

We are proud to present to you the second release candidate of Drupal 6.0. Although there are still a few known issues that we are working on fixing for you, we are confident that our code is stable enough for wider testing by the community. Since the first release candidate, we have fixed various issues including the security fixes that come with Drupal 5.6 and others involving caching filtered content, menu item inheritance, missing breadcrumbs, better error reporting in the installer and updates, some translatability issues and lots of code style cleanups, and other small fixes. The most notable usability improvement since Drupal 6.0 RC1 is that the files directory is now automatically created in sites/default.

The first beta announcement provided a comprehensive list of high level improvements made since Drupal 5.x, so in this announcement we’ll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 6 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you’ve grown to love!

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Original post by Gábor Hojtsy and software by Elliott Back

Drigg is a powerful Drupal module written by Tony Mobily, that allows you to promote stories automatically based on your users’ votes.

Advertisement:

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Original post by admin and software by Elliott Back

Note: This post assumes that you are aware of the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. If not, see that link, or listen to the latest Lullabot podcast about GHOP.

Since our last status report on December 13, 2007:

• An additional 12 students have taken on tasks from the Drupal project, bringing our total to 54 student participants.
• 11 new students have completed one or more tasks, bringing our total to 38, which means about 70% of our students have completed tasks. Of that number, 65% are brand new contributors who came to the Drupal project because of this contest.
• There have been a total of 67 tasks completed so far, which is nearly double since the last report. The leaders in terms of raw task numbers are cwgordon7 (6) and Corsix (7), with Etinin (4) and ezyang (3) coming up behind.
• We have 97 available task slots remaining. The community created and offered to mentor 31 new tasks since the last status report, but we still need people to Propose new tasks and, perhaps more importantly, Review and refine existing task ideas.
• We also need help reviewing tasks promptly and throughly. Please keep your eyes on the list of GHOP issues, specifically those that need review. Note that we have a good mix of types of tasks (documentation, marketing, training, etc.), so non-coders can help as well.

There are fewer than 3 weeks left to propose tasks and fewer than 5 weeks left of the contest. Please help us get through this final stretch, folks!

Read on for a description of the tasks that have been completed since the last status update.

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Original post by webchick and software by Elliott Back

The Drupal Association is pleased to announce that the next Drupalcon will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, USA from March 3 - 6, 2008 in the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.

This Drupalcon represents two big advancements for Drupalcon.

• Larger capacity. The last two Drupalcon’s have sold out, capped at 450 people. Depending on final arrangements we may be able to handle 700 at this event.
• Community expansion. Drupalcon is being held at the same time/place as AIIM International Exposition & Conference, the largest content management technology conference in North America. Though technically independent of each other, the Boston team is working to arrange some cross-event access. The goal: introduce Drupal to thousands of potential new Drupalers.

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Original post by moshe weitzman and software by Elliott Back