Drupal Radar

Our Regular Round-up of News, Blogs and Tweets about Drupal Steve Parks has the latest summary of news and views from the Drupal community as he rounds up your announcements, blogs and tweets...

Drupalcon Copenhagen is over, and Drupal geeks have slowly returned to normal life after a week of Awesomesauce in Denmark. DrupalRadar brought you full coverage of the week, in liveblogs and TV programmes.

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First regular roundup of Drupal events We round-up details of upcoming events in the Drupal calendar - from training and workshops to conferences and camps...

This is the first in a new regular series in which we’ll highlight upcoming Drupal events. Previously these were included in the ‘On the Radar’ news roundup, but that was becoming very long - so we’ve split the events out into this separate post.

Radar Database Acquia OpenPublish Webinar Training: Rock Solid Drupal Training: Drupal Module Development Training: Drupal Administration Training: Drupal E-commerce Solutions with Ubercart Training: Drupal Development with Views and CCK Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit Drupalcamp Atlanta 2010

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Session on Organic Groups Highly Praised By Delegates The presentation that everyone was talking about at Drupalcon Copenhagen was Amitai Burstein's session on Organic Groups. Watch the video here...

In the closing keynote of Drupalcon, which DrupalRadar hosted, we asked for people’s favourite sessions - and this one was mentioned by a few people to loud cheers from others. It’s a creative approach to giving a presentation - Amitai illustrates the features of Organic Groups by telling a story. It’s well worth watching - not just to find out about Organic Groups, but to sharpen your own presentation skills.

The session notes say:

Radar Database DrupalCon 2010 Copenhagen

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Each week we take a quick look at new modules and provide a quick summary of what they do. Last week we did our first module roundup and covered over twenty modules. Some of you have commented that this isn't all that helpful because with such a long list we just skim the surface. This week we will keep the numbers down so we can provide a bit more information.

As usual the Drupal community is churning out modules like there’s no tomorrow. We thought last week was maybe extra busy because people wanted their stuff to be committed before Drupalcon and it would ease off this week - no such luck. So, bearing in mind the point above about trying to provide a manageable list, we’ll only cover modules where there’s a commit and we think the module would add value across a range of sites rather than being a very specialized use case.

Radar Database Simple Donations MyHook

Jeremy Keith, author of 'HTML5 for Web Designers' presents a highly informative, and entertaining keynote at Drupalcon Copenhagen. DrupalRadar Database DrupalCon 2010 Copenhagen

To round off Drupalcon Copenhagen, DrupalRadar hosted a live closing show, with MortenDK, Isabell - and a very special musical end to the show... DrupalRadar Database DrupalCon 2010 Copenhagen

Keynote Speech on Day 3 of Drupalcon Copenhagen Jeremy Keith is a highly regarded web designer, and author of 'HTML5 for web designers'. He's giving a keynote on the same subject to Drupalcon Copenhagen - and DrupalRadar is liveblogging...

Jeremy starts by talking about design principles, saying that there are design principles behind every piece of software, or anything in fact. He sets out some examples from fiction - including the ‘design principle’ in Animal Farm by George Orwell - “Four legs good, two legs bad”.

He then moves onto the specifications of HTML. There was no official version 1, version 2 was released in 1995, then HTML 3.2 in 1997, with HTML 4.0 released in the same year (a high velocity year for web design). In 1999 HTML 4.01 was released - the last official version of HTML.

Radar Database DrupalCon 2010 Copenhagen

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Live TV Broadcasting from Copenhagen In August 2010 we brought you live programming from Drupalcon Copenhagen, powered by Brightcove. We had a great week, and some great programmes. You can find recordings of these programmes at http://www.drupalradar.com/tv - and join us for more live programmes from Drupalcon Chicago! Drupal Radar Broadcasting Live from Drupalcon, supported by BrightcoveDrupal Radar Broadcasting Live from Drupalcon, supported by Brightcove Radar Database DrupalCon 2010 Copenhagen

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Rasmus Lerdorf presents a keynote at Drupalcon Copenhagen, speakingabout Drupal Performance in PHP. Video produced by Drupal Radar for the Drupal Association, and powered by Brightcove. DrupalRadar Database DrupalCon 2010 Copenhagen

Peter Wolanin and Robert Douglass session on Solr

Data gets sent to SOLR as xml documents and can then be searched using queries sent as http get requests. SOLR runs as a java server application and you can learn how this is works by running SOLR with a java engine. As all the data from Drupal is stored as xml documents these can be returned as search results so displaying them doesn’t require node_load for every node. That’s one reason why solr is quicker. It struck me this might provide an interesting perfomance boost model because you could even display single nodes as calls to Solr, provided you took account of security issues.

Radar Database DrupalCon 2010 Copenhagen

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Founder of PHP Speaks at Drupalcon Copenhagen Rasmus Lerdorf, the founder of PHP, is today's keynote speaker at Drupalcon, and we're live-blogging his speech...

Rasmus was born in Greenland, but lived for 8 years in Denmark, before moving to Canada in 1980 as a child. He says it’s a lot of fun coming back to Denmark.

He starts with a little history of PHP and his involvement in the web. In 1993, he says, it was basic HTML static pages. His manager wanted to have a catalogue online, and he didn’t want to do it all in static pages. He wanted to find a way to integrate web pages with databases.

The very first version of PHP, in 1994, had its code embedded in HTML comment tags. It used a database called miniSQL, a precursor to MySQL.

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A panel presentation on the Drupal Community Drupal is an unusual "product" because it's based in a community.

To get the most from Drupal you need to enngage with the community.
So here’s the definition - “a collaborative software development framework”. This is akin to working in a company with thousands of employees.
So how do new arrivals engage with the community? One main area is contributing to issue queues but these won’t work well if all you do is moan, and don’t go back to try out patches and confirm how they work. When you’re using queues try to be polite because you’re asking for help from someone who is probably very busy and isn’t being paid to do this.

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The DrupalRadar team are bringing you daily coverage of Drupalcon Copenhagen. Each day at 1700 CET we broadcast a live 1-hour Drupalcon news show. This is the first show - with a few technical hitches, but a lot of fun. Thanks to all who tweeted us during the show - we're sorry we didn't get to read them all out, we'll be better at that tomorrow when we don't have technical problems. Tune in live on Wednesday 25th at 5pm CET, 4pm BST, 11am EDT, 8am PDT. Follow @drupalradar for announcements.

A presentation by Mark Boulton live-blogged by Drupal Radar

Although Mark is talking about UI he starts with the point that a nice-looking UI is pointless if the underlying UX (user experience) is not there.
One important start-point was work by the useability team. That research highlighted the fact that having virtually no difference between front and back end was really confusing. Remember the “how do I add content?”guy?
This was closely followed by “how do I find things?”
The research led to four principles
Make regular stuff easy
Design for the 80% (that’s the people with a life outside drupal)

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Carl Wiedemann provides an introduction to theme pre-process functions Although Carl's demo is based on Drupal 6, all his examples apply to D7. Pre-process functions kick in where a basic variable in a theme template isn't sufficient. For example, how would you make a variable change in how it renders and looks depending on context?

A long time frustration for themers is modules pump out formatted data and more often than not, in formats you don’t want. That’s where the pre-processing stage helps out.
Key tools for helping out in this are Firebug, Devel, admin_menu and Drush. Audience members also reckon Firebug for Drupal.
If you start from the end of the rendering process you’ll normally be at page.tpl.php and inside there you get a load of variables. These are being generated by pre-process functions and if you want to over-ride these you do it in template.php.

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Founder of Drupal Gives His Traditional State of Drupal Speech It's a longstanding tradition that Drupalcon opens with a 'State of Drupal' speech from the project's founder, Dries Buytaert. DrupalRadar brought you video of the speech - but here our editor, Steve Parks, liveblogs the speech...

Dries says that when he started to write his presentation he didn’t know what to say - we’d just had Drupalcon SF, and Drupal 7 wasn’t ready to launch. But when he thought about it, he decided this was the perfect time to take a step back and think about the big picture.

He starts by talking about the slide he showed in his last speech ‘The Elephants are Coming’. Capgemini recently started a programme called ‘Immediate’. They have 95,000 employees, 9 billion Euros in revenues, and are signing up major clients to use Drupal.

Radar Database Dries Buytaert DrupalCon 2010 Copenhagen

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Ryan Szrama presents the Commerce for Drupal Seven project Ryan gave a run through of how the new Commerce project differs from Ubercart by taking many of the original ideas that made Ubercart such a winner but in effect re-engineering these into a form that works with the principles that underlie Drupal Seven

Anyone who has worked with Ubercart has probably experienced a mixture of delight at the ease with which you can quickly deploy a professional looking online store and frustration when you want to make some relatively minor changes. The new Commerce project addresses this by re-working the Ubercart concept to work with two key aspects of Drupal Seven: entities and cck in core.

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Can't make it to Drupalcon Copenhagen? Don't miss out - watch our coverage live daily at 5pm CET, 4pm BST, 11am EDT, 8am PDT. Starts Tuesday 24th Aug, here on DrupalRadar.com Hosting and streaming of DrupalRadar video is sponsored by Brightcove.

Our regular update on new contrib modules 'On the Radar' is our regular round-up of Drupal news and events. For the first few editions we included a quick round-up of new contributed projects. Now we've decided this should be a separate post so you can subscribe separately. In the first in the series, Steve Cowie lists recent new modules...

This is our first special post of Module Radar. Each week we will put out a list of some of the most interesting new contributed modules. Unfotunately, we don’t think we can cover every module because there’s sooooo many. For instance, we just decided to do this new feature and we last published ‘On the Radar’ on 3rd August; since then there have been 69 new modules listed for Drupal 6.

Radar Database Google Custom Search Engine Advanced AD Gallery User Alert CTOG Epub Webform Revisions qTip Administer Tool Tip ShURLy Case Tracker Due Date Case Tracker Comment Driven Modernizr Color Changer Quant Debut Background Field WYSIWYG ImageField SiteIndex Deck Views Litepager Domain Bulk Import/Export Fingerprint Update Status Proxy Access Private

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Sun, 22/08/2010 - 09:00 - 17:00 The main developers at the centre of the Drupal project get together to discuss key issues and the future development of the project. We liveblog the event...

HTML5 in Drupal 1 day 8 hours ago 'More Faster, More Better' - Drupal Performance 1 day 16 hours ago