Drupal News

The Interaction Design and Information Architecture program at the University of Baltimore and a team of eight graduate students in the Research Methods class, taught by professor Kathryn Summers, have completed a usability study on Drupal. The Drupal community has been working with Becca Scollan in the usability group.

The usability research used video recordings and eye tracking tools to follow participants gaze in the Drupal interface. The study used eight participants, which is considered a valid sample. The study duplicated some tests done in usability testing at the University of Minnesota, and confirmed several results.

Fixing the usability problems

Core issues from both studies

• WYSIWYG in core: WYSIWYG group, Better input format support in Drupal 7
• Evaluators said that “content” was used too often in too many context and that was confusing: content, post, node , Change “story” content type to “article” or “news”, Content types descriptions tweaks

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Original post by Amazon and software by Elliott Back

Drupalcon registration is running like crazy, 2 weeks after we opened the registration we are nearing 150 registered participants!

We got a lot of positive feedback from all over the community, especially for the registration system that Gábor Hojtsy and János Kuszing pieced together. This is what Dries said after he registered:

I had to share this: I just completed my DrupalCon Szeged registration. The conference organization and the registration system on the website are truly remarkable. Keep up the great work!

Several people told us that they were really pleased that they can book their hotel and shuttle bus from the Drupalcon site. Beware though, rooms are going really fast so if you want some choice you better be quick!

What you’ll get for your money? 4 days of conference in a really cool venue with 4 tracks, plenty of BoF’s, 4 exhibitions, plenty of (Drupal) fun, a codesprint and of course some serious shoulder rubbing with the developers of your favorite core and contributed modules. If you are new to Drupal it is the best opportunity to level up your knowledge. Don’t miss THE community event this fall!

Until Monday July 1st, we are giving away the tickets for 80 EURO. So better make sure you don’t miss that deadline!

See you in Drupaltown!

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Original post by kvantomme and software by Elliott Back

There are several ways for you to get a Drupal theme up on your site. It all depends on your skill level, time, and budget.

Advertisement:

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Original post by stephthegeek@drupal.org and software by Elliott Back

For the past year or so, there have been periodic questions raised about Drupal’s licensing status. Is it GPL version 2? Are we moving to GPL version 3? Could we even if we wanted to? Is it OK to write a module that does [something weird]? As a member of the Drupal Association Board of Directors, I made it my task to sort out the answers to those questions.

Understanding licensing, and the differences between licenses, is more important than some realize. Open source is not the same as public domain. Open source and Free Software requires that source code be made available and that others are allowed to make use and share of the source code, but there are rules attached to how they can do so just as there is with proprietary software. For example, not all open source software can be combined, and there are requirements for how you distribute the source code of a program. Knowing which of those rules apply to Drupal, and to Drupal modules and themes, is important not only for the health of the code base (so we know what we can and can’t do with the work of over a thousand people) but also to the health of the growing commercial Drupal economy.

I am pleased to announce that we now do have firm answers to these questions, and have a new and shiny FAQ up to answer them. There is nothing new in the FAQ; it is just a clarification of some edge cases that didn’t used to exist.

We’d like to thank James Vasile of the Software Freedom Law Center for his help in working out the details. We also wanted to take a few moments to go into some of the reasoning behind how we reached a few of these conclusions.

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Original post by Crell and software by Elliott Back

When the site gets too busy, the infrastructure team sometimes disables the built-in search function. In an effort to cut down on the number of posts reporting this, I am linking to all the recent ones here and promoting this.

When it’s down, you can always use Google. Just put “site:drupal.org” in your query.

http://drupal.org/node/270417
http://drupal.org/node/272571
http://drupal.org/node/271612
http://drupal.org/node/269992
http://drupal.org/node/271694
http://drupal.org/node/271936
http://drupal.org/node/272208
http://drupal.org/node/270705
http://drupal.org/node/272506
http://drupal.org/node/255841

Michelle

Note: Because I noticed several comments about use of the throttle module, I’ve updated this post to clarify that the search module on Drupal.org is not disabled automatically by the throttle module. At this moment, Drupal.org does not use the throttle module. –David Strauss, Drupal.org Infrastructure Team

Original post by Michelle and software by Elliott Back

When the site gets too busy, the throttle module kicks in and search disappears for a while. In an effort to cut down on the number of posts reporting this, I am linking to all the recent ones here and promoting this.

When it’s down, you can always use Google. Just put “site:drupal.org” in your query.

http://drupal.org/node/270417
http://drupal.org/node/272571
http://drupal.org/node/271612
http://drupal.org/node/269992
http://drupal.org/node/271694
http://drupal.org/node/271936
http://drupal.org/node/272208
http://drupal.org/node/270705
http://drupal.org/node/272506
http://drupal.org/node/255841

Michelle

Original post by Michelle and software by Elliott Back

This line in iedestroyer.css is looking for some file that is missing:

background: #ffb url(images/background.gif) bottom repeat-x;

There is no images directory and thus no background.gif can be found.

Original post by Farreres and software by Elliott Back

Consider the following…

I have a CCK content type which includes a user select. When a user creates a node of this type, he/she has to pick a user from the list to which to grant access rights. When the node is submitted, I would like to run some code that grabbed that new $nid, pulled the user selected from the db, and then grant access.

Now I know this question probably doesn’t relate directly to the Content Access module but I thought this would be a good place to ask.

Any ideas how this might be achieved?

Cheers,
Chris.

Original post by chrism2671 and software by Elliott Back

I have created a Page View (table style) which contains several fields including “VotingAPI percent vote result (average)” using the “Fivestar Stars (clickable, with text)” option.

In the theme I am using (Garland) this causes the width of the column containing the field to change as the user hovers over the stars. This causes “page jitter” and in some situations this can make it near impossible to register a vote.

Is there a way to prevent this from happening?

Original post by CoolDreamZ and software by Elliott Back

Hi

I’ve installed upload path into my drupal and sometimes (few times) it doesn’t work right. I’ve created this path:

[type]/[nid]

But in some cases, the files ends directly into [type] folder. It seems the module is ignoring the [nid] token. I haven’t find any pattern to reproduce this bug, it just happens sometimes and the only way to notice it is looking at the file paths.

Kind regards and congratulations for this module (keep it alive )

Original post by Macarro and software by Elliott Back

Is there anyway to access just the nodereference URL from within the node object? I have a content type where you upload an image and then use the nodereference to associate that image to a node. I want to be able to make that image link to the node and get rid of the node title on the display. When using contemplate, I see that I can access the node ID and the “view” which is Node Title and I am hoping to have a variable that is just the URL - just “path/to/page” — any ideas?

Original post by capellic and software by Elliott Back

Hey guys,

sounds like a stupid support request but is it possible with a few hacks to use the domain access module for unique pages without subdomains?

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Original post by deegree and software by Elliott Back

Just a minor suggestion, I found this interwiki alias very helpful. I thought you might like to include it by default in future versions.

For example when posting about a meeting or something, you can easily create a link to a map of the location:

Examples:

Original post by dugh and software by Elliott Back

This Wednesday we opened the registration for Drupalcon Szeged 2008 and some of the early birds are already in! If you sign up before the end of June you will be able to buy your ticket at the extra discounted price of 80 EUR. From July the price will increase to 120 EUR, from August on to 160 EUR and just before and during the conference it will be 200 EUR to attend. We also help you get a hotel room and buy shuttle bus tickets until July 24, so if you’d like to go the easy way, make sure to register by then.

A week ago we published the sponsor packages. We received positive feedback from several companies and we already sold our first platinum package! As you might have noticed we only have 3 gold and 4 platinum packages available this Drupalcon. So if you want to get the exclusive benefits of these packages and get your company’s name on one of our BoF or session rooms, contact us as soon as possible. To make the conference a huge success again, we will need your help: if you know a company that could be interested in sponsoring Drupalcon please get in touch!

We also opened session submission last week. If you have a topic that you would like to present this Drupalcon please fill in the form. Our track chairs will then evaluate your proposal and choose the sessions that will become part of the conference tracks. Session submission will be open until the last week of July. You can also submit BoF session proposals for our unconference program. This Drupalcon we are going to have 3 bigger rooms for larger BoFs (and an open space for smaller ones), so make sure to get the word out about your plans and spark interest in them sooner then later.

Drupalcon North America 2009, Drupalcon Europe 2009 as well as Drupalcon [place your idea here] are being planned right now. If you would like to have a Drupalcon in your town please let us know by submitting a formal proposal. If you have questions regarding the submission process feel free to contact the Drupal Association and someone will help you.

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Original post by kvantomme and software by Elliott Back

SourceForge.Net is a site which strongly believes in OpenSource, and what it standard for, in much the same way as the Drupal Community. Every year they host a competition where their commnunity votes for their favourite packages and this year is no different. After reading through the Program Information I cannot see any reason why we shouldn’t try to get Drupal up there (“Any open source project of any kind can be nominated by anyone (yes, that means you!) to be a finalist in any category” - from their website).

On their site they say “This is for the prize” in regard to voting, however I’m not completely sure if the prize is simply winning or if there is some financial gain for the Drupal Association.

So, lets try to get Drupal nominated for an award on Sourceforge.Net…
http://sourceforge.net/community/cca08-nominate

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Original post by nicholasThompson and software by Elliott Back