Planet Drupal

I am taking a break from the core issue queue until http://drupal.org/node/125315 is committed.

Some years back I became acquainted with Techsoup while working for a nonprofit as the Technology Director.  At the time I was grateful for inexpensive licenses for software we needed.  By the time I left that position, we planned software purchases around the Techsoup cycles.  It has been a valuable program for nonprofits in the United States and in Canada.

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Assuming the administrator gives access, anonymous users may now create and compete with characters at 5 Second Game (which is powered by the module of the same name). Additionally, if an anonymous user registers or logs in, they'll be able to claim that character as their own, allowing for saving any statistics, etc.

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I wonder how much crossover there is in the Drupal users and role playing gamers crowds. I'm contemplating running a Paranoia RPG one-shot next DrupalCon. Who'd be interested? (If you don't know what Paranoia RPG is, you probably aren't all that interested, but the brief description is that it's a Dungeons & Dragons type game in a dark future run by a paranoid computer. There's lots of intrigue, betrayal and death. It's a dark dark dark humor game, and it's basically impossible to meet the mission objectives and completing them isn't really the point.)

I don’t believe I didn’t know this all these years. You can edit windows host file at C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts, and add entries of the form:

127.0.0.1 foo.localhost
127.0.0.1 bar.localhost

Tip of the hat to wulff over at http://drupal.org/node/24454

There's a lot to read and absorb on the new Drupal 6 but the good news is that if you've spent a while hacking version 5 you will need just a few days to get up to date.

One of my favorite changes is on theming. Now every module can provide its own .tpl.php files. To override them you just need to copy them to your theme directory and start hacking around.

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I recently posted about my new store for Drupal-related items, which gives 10% of the price of all purchases to Drupal Assocation. Here's why I think it's important to support DA:

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Smashing Magazine wrote up a very detailed and lengthy list of Drupal development resources yesterday on their blog.

The Drupal community as a whole needs more face-time like this to sustain and grow a healthy influx of new developers and designers. It's definitely worth a peek and a bookmark, so check it out!

Drupal 6 has a few problems with large numbers of nodes.

There are two slow queries in the search index update process that gets run during cron. Slow query #1, in node_update_index(), picks out the node IDs to (re)index. Slow query #2, in search_update_totals(), figures out which rows have been deleted from {search_index} and need to be deleted from {search_total}.

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I'm using more and more views on DrupalMU and I needed a way for the pages and blocks to be blog-centric. When you're on a specific blog you only want to see the recent comments on that specific blog, or only see the archive of blog entries by that owner. You also want the blocks to appear on any page of which the blogger is the owner: the user's profile, his blog entry listing, a specific blog entry, the comment page of that entry, ...

In order to determine this kind of context I created a small function that I call as the default argument for the views I use, for instance for the default "recent comments" or the "archive" view. Both can be seen in action on the site when you go to a specific blog.

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I while ago (almost a year!) I released a module called Relevant Content to the community. This module executes a relatively lightweight SQL query which pulls up other nodes and sorts them by how many terms they have in common with the current node you're looking at. This provides a rudimentary method of suggesting other content to visitors to the page. It also provides a way of teaching search engines about other potentially relevant content.

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If I could read only one web design blog in the world, it would be smashing magazine. At one time, (maybe 2004-2005ish), I would have picked A List Apart. But frankly, I've found the vast majority of their articles as of late to be either boring, not relevant, restatements of the obvious, or not worth even a click and scan (with gripping titles like, "The Boar, the Swan, and the Dump Truck: Test driven development project management strategies in world of reality driven Standards and Accessibility." ) Perhaps that's a gross exaggeration, but some headlines excel in capturing everything I don't want to read about.

Smashing magazine, on the other hand, has created the ultimate resource of quality articles, tools, techniques, ideas, theory, and everything that really matters to people who have jobs to do, and want to do them well, on time, and improve their skills with every iteration. And you don't have to be from San Francisco's community of serial conference speakers* to understand why they are worth reading.

If you've lived under a rock for a while, than I urge you to check out the entire site. Really. You have a lot of catching up to do.

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There was some talk recently about releasing pre-alpha versions of Drupal 7 for development and testing purposes and this got me thinking about the actual Drupal 7 code freeze. For those of you who are "in the cold" and don't know what a code freeze is (horrible pun, sorry), it's a given amount of time where features are denied from going into Drupal. Although it's sad to see additional features not be able to go into Drupal, it gives the developers a bit of time to fix bugs and optimize performance before the official releases go out.

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Not even a year after I reported annoying comment spam that looks relevant but instead advertises irrelevant websites, Kris now has the same problem !

I bet Kris his solution was not working for my problem after all ? Who would have thought ? While I should be feeling sad, I am enjoying the irony here ;-)

Now, the question is, on which spam forums was Kris his blog mentioned ? Google to the rescue !

To be honest, the real fix for this is a very loud advertised "the comments on this blog are moderated, no need to advertise irrelevant links". Since the comments are human-fed, that should make some people think twice before doing the effort (I hope). So I guess we urgently need a Drupal module that adds a custom (scare) message right before the comment-entry form.

Any takers ?

The monthly DrupalPDX Meetup returns to its regular time and place this month. It looks like we're going to have an excellent presentation followed by open discussion and, as a matter of course, a cold beer at the Green Dragon afterward.

From the official announcement: "Brian Gilday of Aha Consulting will be doing a presentation on building with minimal coding." Find the full description HERE; in short, it's a topic for power users on how to make the most of existing modules using configuration and a minor coding.

The meetup takes place October 8th from 6pm-8pm at our offices, located at 711 SE Ankeny (one block south of E Burnside at 7th). As always, the event is free and open to all Drupal enthusiasts.

Mark your calendar, bring a discussion topic, register at the DrupalPDX page, and we'll see you there.