develOOp another fine develOOpment

Before this summer rapidly turns to fall, I’d like to take a chance to say thanks to all of the sponsors and people that made OSCon 2010 so amazing! Thanks to our sponsors we were able to get an eye-catching and eco-friendly display, great Drupal documentation, and some very popular buttons. To see how everything looked checkout the pics.

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This weekend I discovered (quite by accident) a very simple way to enable shared sign-on across multiple Drupal sites running in a multisite configuration.

Suppose you have the following sites:

• phones.com
• htc.phones.com
• iphone.phones.com
• motorola.phones.com

The first requirement is that all the sites be running on the same domain. The examples above work — they're all subdomains of phones.com.

The second requirement is that all the sites share the same user tables. If all your sites are sharing one big database, you don't need to do anything, since all your tables are already shared. (This was my setup.) If some or all of your sites are using separate databases, though, use table prefixing to share the following tables among all your sites:

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Katherine Bailey (aka katbailey) gives a brief overview of the new Ajax framework in Drupal 7. As maintainer of the Quick Tabs module, she got interested in all of the various JavaScript-related functionality in Drupal. For more detailed information on the new Ajax framework, then consider checking out the jQuery and JavaScript in Drupal training video which covers both how to use the Ajax framework in Drupal 7, as well as creating Ajax-enabled links.

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Recently, there has been a major focus on education and training from within the Drupal community – and with good reason. Dries himself has emphasized the importance of training-related initiatives on several occasions, since the future of Drupal hinges on constantly fostering new talent. One of the ideal ways to advance the Drupal community is by mentoring new individuals (developers, designers, users, etc.). There are a number of awesome endeavors like the Google Summer of Code that are tremendously beneficial to the Drupal project. There are also Drupal-centric consultancies, like Mediacurrent, who may have implemented their own Drupal summer intern program or others that have been contemplating. We just finished our first internship program, and this post will share some thoughts from our experience.

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Let's say you have an UPDATE query which uses old values to calculate new ones. The best example for now is swapping two columns: UPDATE table SET f1 = f2, f2 = f1. There is one SQL engine as far as I am aware where this breaks: MySQL (it works on PostgreSQL, SQLite and MS SQL). On MySQL, f1 and f2 both will have the old value of f2 instead of swapping.

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While the focus of the Copenhagen Drupal Core Development Summit was, rightly so, placed on making progress with Drupal 7 some time was dedicated to looking into the future. In this post I try to find some common themes across the requirements and challenges set for Drupal and some of the issues to look out for in order to meet these challenges.

Yesterday the second core development summit for Drupal took place in Copengaden. This is the gathering of people both actively involved or generally interested in core Drupal work. As was appropriate (and some would say indispensable) after an initial set of presentations the focus was squarely placed on work on Drupal 7 and great progress was made.

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In his presentation "Beyond Web 2.0", Lullabot co-founder and CEO, Jeff Robbins will be talking about the future (and possible death of) the web at DrupalCamp CT on Saturday. He looks at trends in technology and the Internet and talks about what we, as web developers, need to understand in order to prepare our websites today.

Today, Drupalcon Copenhagen kicked off with the Core Developer Summit. At least a couple hundred Drupalistas from old school to new filtered in throughout the day, and we made tremendous progress on Drupal 7, as well as the future of the project.

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A module I've been working on for a while is OAuth Connector - a module that enables a Drupal site to easily let their users log in through OAuth API:s like Twitter's.

A short screencast of how it works:

Over a year ago we needed Facebook Connect for one of our projects. Looking at the existing alternatives at the time and testing a few of them I came to the conclusion that none was very good and, most importantly, they had nothing in common with each other or with modules offering one click logins through other services like Twitter.

I wanted a flexible system that while only providing Facebook Connect then could grow and support more services in the future without the need for any massive recoding. I built the Connector module to provide a unified API for establishing connections with third party sites, but waited to release it on Drupal.org until I had a second connector in order to stabilize the Connector API - and that connector is now done.

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A popular feature request for sites that deal with a lot of content, is to see for each page what other pages are linking back to it. This can be helpful when doing some SEO or cleaning up and rewriting old content.

In Drupal 7 this is easily done. It exists where you wouldn't immediately expect it though: the core search module. Kind of mimicking how search bots like Google's indexer works, Drupal 7's search module now takes the amount of nodes linking back to another node to calculate the score for some result.

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Well, the trek is finally started. Normally by now I would have written some kind of post talking about finding an apartment in the host city, the process I went through for that and how great a deal it was. This time around, I couldn't beat the prices of the hotels, especially when you double up in a room.

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While Drupal 7 has been quite long in the making, it's going to be very different from every release before: we have added tests that make sure core works well. (BTW it took quite some time to write so many of them!) This allows the core developers to focus their attention on deeper problems which are much, much harder to fix. Instead of "OMG node preview is broken!" we now contemplate "you know, this new File API is great, but it won't work well with Amazon S3 because..."

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I just made a Google calendar for the sessions at DrupalCon, and thought I might just as well share it. See full post for links to different calendar formats.

Features-fetch (ff) is a simple drush command extension that simplifies deploying (rebuilt) Drupal Feature modules to a specific Drupal project.

Features are a collection of Drupal entities (like content types, views, contexts and imagecache presets) that taken together satisfy a certain use case. Developing a feature typically involves selecting the appropriate entities and downloading the custom feature module that the Features module generates.

You can modify a feature's entities (like add a display to a view) and update the feature module itself using the drush features-update command, but adding new components requires rebuilding and downloading the updated feature module. During the course of project development, you can end up rebuilding your feature modules quite a few times.

That is where features-fetch comes in. Instead performing the manual deployment steps over and over again, just run drush ff example_feature_module from within your Drupal project directory.

What it does:

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Chris from LevelTen recently posted a great article on Drupal modules for improved usability. However, these focused on the administrative side of the website, not end users. So here is our own list of modules for the front end of your site!

You do not want your Drupal site’s users to get lost in a myriad of long forms, fieldsets, page redirects, and confusing tagging. You want to do everything you can to make navigating your site and completing frequent routine tasks as painless as possible for the end user. This will keep them calm and give them warm fuzzies to know that they can use your Drupal site with ease without having to pop a Valium just to endure the overwhelming experience of encountering your site.

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CivicActions is offering a full day CiviCRM User Training in Seattle and in Berkeley.
I'll be conducting the training which is aimed at non-profit staff and consultants who want to learn how to
configure, administer and use CiviCRM.The training program is
equally applicable to people who are already using CiviCRM and want to
become "power users", as well as people who are interested in evaluating
CiviCRM for their organization or clients.The agenda will be finalized based on participant mix. Topics may include:

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I'm really excited to announce that I will be running two CiviCRM user trainings in September and October.  Back in March and April I was involved in two similar trainings, one with Dave Greenberg from CiviCRM at the NTC, and the other during the workshop day before DrupalCon in San Francisco.  The feedback from both trainings was really positive. 

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I've been working with Feeds a lot lately. Pretty much in every project I am involved with. I am starting to consider it as an essential piece of Drupal infrastructure whenever external data of any nature is required to be pulled in.

During development and testing, one of the recurring tasks is to clear a bunch of feeds, and then re-import them. Instead of doing these operations on each feed, I thought it would be handy to use good old Views Bulk Operations to clear and import feeds in bulk.

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