Drupal Drops - English Edition
Issue #1 - May 20, 2005
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Welcome to the first ever Drupal Drops Newsletter! Drupal Drops will provide monthly information, news and advocacy for, hopefully, everyones favourite CMS.
The best part, you help write it! We get all our content from forum posts, changlelogs and monthly contributors. This means that we are a completely community newsletter.
If you want to contribute to Drupal Drops, you can send information to devlinks@gmail.com and, if it looks good, it will be included in the next edition of Drupal Drops.
Over the last month Drupal 4.6 was released. Youll find some of the latest updates from Drupal 4.6 to CVS in this months Updates section.
All of us sincerely hope youll enjoy Drupal Drops!
Robin Monks
Drupal Drops Editor
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1) Drupal Sightings
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Rasmus Lerdorf_____________________
There is now no doubt that Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) knows about Drupal. Thanks to the quick thought and camera skills of Gordon Heydon, this (http:// buytaert.net/albums/miscellaneous-2005/11/) photo was snapped at the Australia national Linux conference in April with Rasmus and Drupalicon. Great work Gordon!
Yahoo!_____________________________
A recent article at http://boxesandarrows.com tells of how, after considering many options (Movable Type, pMachine, PHPNuke, PHPCollab, Tikiwiki and Drupal) and user interface patterns, choose Drupal for its internal site.
Ultimately, we chose Drupal because of its breadth of capabilities, powerful taxonomy, and extensibility
The original article can be found at http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/implementing_a_pattern_library_in_the_real_world_a_yahoo_case_study.php and the drupal.org write-up at http://drupal.org/node/21930.
Dan Gillmor/Bayosphere_____________
Dan Gillmor (a prominent journalist; http://www.dangillmor.com/) has recently started a grass-roots program (http://bayosphere.com/node/28) that is happily based on Drupal. An article on why they choose Drupal can be found at http://bayosphere.com/why-drupal, and the Drupal.org write up is at http://drupal.org/node/22919.
moby.com___________________________
Moby.com has also been found to be secretly using Drupal (see the node URL under the news link). The Drupal.org comment is at http://drupal.org/node/22919#comment-39354.
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2) Drupal In The Press
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Tangent Mobile_____________________
Tangent Mobile has recreantly published an article concerning the changing CMS systems and development of these systems. This article reviews Drupal and WordPress and can be found at http://www.tangentmobile.com/2005/05/05/blogging-content-management-systems-wordpress-drupal/.
Slashdot___________________________
Slashdot also noted Dan Gillmor's Grassroots Journalism efforts with Drupal at http://slashdot.org/articles/05/05/16/1037230.shtml.
LinuxWorld: South Africa Linux firm
upgrades corporate identity________
"Our stand will play host to thought-provoking talks from our experts on... technical topics like... setting up content management with Drupal; and more open source community-focused topics." http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;2032004860;fp;2;fpid;1
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3) Updates
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Drupal quickies, May 2005__________
This is a summary of what the developers are working since Dries has opened the new developer tree on Apr 7, 2005. I presume that you are familiar with Drupal 4.6, I'll list only the major news. This does not mean we discredit those who have fixed bugs, improved help texts and so on, but this newsletter can't include all the changes.
* The first big change is the addition of folksonomy support by Morbus Iff. When you are editing a node, you can enter comma separated tags. Simple and effective. You can enable free tagging per vocabulary. For folksonomy vocabularies a pager is added. It is under consideration that this pager should be used for "big" normal vocabularies as well.
* jeremy@kerneltrap.org introduced loose caching. For highly dynamic sites the existing cache mechanism is not performing well. Loose caching keeps caching pages except for specific users who have submitted changes to the site. This means the cache can be used for a couple minutes more, while users still see their own changes reflected immediately. It seems that there are issues and we need locking to make this perfect.
* Nedjo added an author information block.
* Steven improved the auto-linebreak filter to ignore the contents of <script> and <style> This makes it easier to use JavaScript (e.g. Google AdSense) blocks. For 4.6 as well
* Dries and chx added a site-wide contact form (as seen on http://drupal.org/contact) to contact module.
* Jose A Reyero reworked the 'request new password' functionality. Drupal now sends a one-time usable URL which lets you log in and change the password.
* The queue module has been moved into contrib.
* chx has centralized print theme page calls. This lets you put the output of any Drupal call into a block. Several pages turned out to be totally empty after this, but it seems fixed by now.
* Stefan and TDobes has made status messages and help themeable.
* chx has changed the block configure page based on ideas from Dries. Now you can use PHP code to define pages where a block is visible. Node type constraint is gone.
* Dries optimized "Who's online" block and corrected the "Last access" column
in the user administration overview table. You can now sort users by 'last
access'.
* chx fixed a long outstanding bug regarding duplicate inserts. However, this
made PHP 4.3 required for Drupal if mysql is used. Also, this bugfix led to
some code cleanup and speedup in search module by mathias.
* mathias and mikeryan improved performance of path aliases.
* James and Gerhard made file downloads more robust. Now it's harder for
contrib modules handling file downloads to create a security hole.
* Last but not least, XTemplate engine has been moved to contrib and now PHPTemplate is the default. All hail Adrian for PHPtemplate. Gordon ported Bluemarine and has written a port guide.
Stay tuned for more improvements:
* Blocks everywhere on the page, not just left and right.
* Installation system.
* Revisions moved to a separate table. Speaking of revisions, check Moshe Weitzman's diff module in contrib, it's really nice.
* Grants based on taxonomy. And an UI to the grant system.
* CCK.
... and lot more to come!
Karoly Negyesi,
http://drupal4hu.com/
Drupal.org Downloads_______________
Gordon has recently updated the Drupal.org downloads page with a new, better, easier to use interface. You can see his handiwork at http://drupal.org/project.
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4) Drupal News
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Reverse Bounties___________________
The recent experiment concerning reverse bounties (http://drupal.org/node/20301) on Drupal.org is an apparent success; securesite (http://drupal.org/project/securesite) was completed last month (April 25) by Karoly Negyesi. This experiment is also being duplicated with a portfolio module (http://drupal.org/node/21574).
This site, http://www.webs4.com/quiz_module, sums up the idea nicely:
It is often said that open source software is all about scratching one's own itch...We have also noticed that many itches go unscratched...One recourse would be to hire other programmers to produce the desired software. Get some help with all the scratching. Few programmers, however, have the resources to hire others to do programming for them...But what if more than one person has the same itch? The great thing about software is that, at least in theory, a problem can be solved once and the solution shared infinite times. So if all of the people who are interested in solving a certain problem could just get together and pitch in their spare change, might they not be able to hire that programmer after all?
Drupal Documentation_______________
The new Drupal Documentation project (found at http://lists.drupal.org/listinfo/drupal-docs) is now underway. Users and developers are encouraged to contribute and give suggestions to the future of Drupal documentation resources.