Newsfeeds

Nick Lewis: Notes on the Drupal Usability Report

Planet Drupal - 4 July 2008 - 2:18am

Indeed, this is a great usability report.

I scribbled these notes as I read it:

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Categories: Drupal

Sandy's Soapbox: Who Will Get .RPG?

RPGNet - 3 July 2008 - 11:00pm
On domain names and RPGs

Dale McGladdery: Northern BC Drupal User Group

Planet Drupal - 3 July 2008 - 3:29pm

British Columbia is a big place, 1180 km (730 miles) from North to South, with most of the population in the bottom third of the province. In the North there's one population center of around 85,000 people but most of the cities fall between 5,000 and 15,000 people. With the economy being primarily resource and tourism based it's a hard place to find fellow Drupalers, but Glen Ingram is up for the challenge. Glen (bermin@drupal.org has started the Northern British Columbia User Group.

If you're a Northern BCer, or have an interest, please become a charter member of the group! (I grew up and graduated in a place called Quesnel, so consider myself a honourary quasi-Northerner, even if Quesnel is technically the central interior)

Northern BC certainly isn't the only place with a low population density and an interest in Drupal. If you have tips on running a user group in this kind of situation please share!

Good luck, Glen!

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Categories: Drupal

John Forsythe: New "Orphaned Works" Copyright Bill Threatens Open Source, GPL

Planet Drupal - 3 July 2008 - 12:33pm

A new bill, The Orphan Works Act of 2008, is currently making its way through congress, and it threatens to take away copyright protection from unregistered works. This includes virtually all open source software.

Essentially, the bill (as I understand it -- and I'm not a lawyer) will modify copyright law such that if the owner of a work can not be found by "reasonable search", anyone can use the work for whatever they want, regardless of the author's intentions, or the license the work was released under.

This means companies could ignore the GPL, or any other open source license, simply by claiming they couldn't find the author. If a copyright holder decides to sue, the infringing party just has to show proof that they performed a "reasonable search".

The bill requires anyone who wants to maintain their copyright to register it (presumably for a fee) in a database with the following information:

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Categories: Drupal

Growing Venture Solutions: Why You Should Use Pathauto (or at least Path Aliases for Many Pages)

Planet Drupal - 3 July 2008 - 12:29pm

I recently saw a comment about Pathauto and started writing a really long reply that seemed more valuable to share here.

Basically one of the questions people have is “Why should I use Pathauto? If I don’t care about SEO is there any other reason?”

This is a valid question to me. There is some indication that users don’t look at the URL bar. During the Usability testing at UMN we never noticed people looking at the URL bar in the eye-tracking data. But some people certainly do look at the URL bar - people who like “hackable urls” do

Hackable URLs

I use it extensively to create “hackable URLs” that are valuable to a user. A “hackable url” or “index alias” is the feature on a site where you have a post and then users can remove the title down to the previous URL element and get the other posts from that month, one more layer for the year, and one more for that user since forever. See - fun! I even made a movie about it:

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Categories: Drupal

Arthur Foelsche: Media Mover: Workflow NG support (thanks Jacob!)

Planet Drupal - 3 July 2008 - 11:36am
I asked Jacob to start doing some integration of workflow support into Media Mover so that various triggers could be called from inside of Media Mover. We went back and forth between using Workflow and Workflow NG and ended up going with Workflow NG as it offered a much higher level of of sophistication. Two [...]
Categories: Drupal

Den Raf: plutado theme for drupal 6

Planet Drupal - 3 July 2008 - 11:25am

Not only is there a need to get modules ported to Drupal 6, but also themes. Because someone wanted to use the plutado theme on a Drupal 6 environment, I ported this theme. Attached you'll find the patch.

On this link you can find more info when you decide to join the porting-force.

Categories: Drupal

Steven Wittens: What's wrong with Drupal?

Planet Drupal - 3 July 2008 - 10:54am

Observe:

An incredibly long standing issue, that keeps popping up, gets a handful of follow-ups, none of which actually address or even mention any of the technical problems that need to be solved.

Instead, all it gets is a bunch of "+1 Subscribe" follow-ups. Whenever I see such a comment, it tells me this:

I really want this feature, but I'm not prepared to do anything about it. I won't spend any time educating myself about it, exploring the problem space or prototyping possible solutions. I fully expect others in the community to solve it, while I reap the benefits.

Go ahead, call me cynical and misguided.

Categories: Drupal

Bert Boerland: Has been...

Planet Drupal - 3 July 2008 - 10:21am

You know you are a has been if you launch a new site using a kick ass CMS and the projectlead of the CMS is not even blogging it.

Sleep tight Metallica.

Categories: Drupal

Nicholas Thompson: Global Redirect Update

Planet Drupal - 3 July 2008 - 8:30am

One of my most popular Drupal modules - Global Redirect - has just had an update from 1.2 to 1.3. This update includes several fixes for the following:

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Categories: Drupal

Kathleen Murtagh: Keep your code out of the database when developing in Drupal

Planet Drupal - 3 July 2008 - 6:27am

As I've mentioned before, version control with Drupal is tricky because a lot of configuration changes are stored in the database. Version control is vital because you should be maintaining multiple workspaces so you do not work on production. The last thing you want to do, then, is to make this worse by putting PHP in your nodes and blocks.

2bits wrote up a great post explaining that you should free your content of PHP. Yes! Read that! Follow it and add it to your Drupal bible.

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Categories: Drupal

Jeff Whatcott on Acquia

Dries Buytaert - 3 July 2008 - 1:13am

John Eckman of Optaros sat down with Jeff Whatcott, Acquia's Chief Communicator, to talk about Drupal and Acquia. Rock on, Jeff.

If you can't see the video above, you can view it directly at blip.tv.

Categories: Drupal

Dries Buytaert: Jeff Whatcott on Acquia

Planet Drupal - 3 July 2008 - 1:13am

John Eckman of Optaros sat down with Jeff Whatcott, Acquia's Chief Communicator, to talk about Drupal and Acquia. Rock on, Jeff.

If you can't see the video above, you can view it directly at blip.tv.

Categories: Drupal

Usability, usability, and usability

Dries Buytaert - 2 July 2008 - 11:20pm

The Interaction Design and Information Architecture program at the University of Baltimore and a team of eight graduate students have completed a usability study on Drupal. The result is a great report (PDF) and an incredibly valuable video which they shared on drupal.org. It is too important not to share, so the video is also embedded below.

The results are consistent with the results from usability tests done at the University of Minnesota.

The results can't be ignored.

I printed the report, taped it on my wall, and I won't release Drupal 7 until I crossed of at least 90% of the problems they identified.

Categories: Drupal

Dries Buytaert: Usability, usability, and usability

Planet Drupal - 2 July 2008 - 11:20pm

The Interaction Design and Information Architecture program at the University of Baltimore and a team of eight graduate students have completed a usability study on Drupal. The result is a great report (PDF) and an incredibly valuable video which they shared on drupal.org. It is too important not to share, so the video is also embedded below.

The results are consistent with the results from usability tests done at the University of Minnesota.

The results can't be ignored.

I printed the report, taped it on my wall, and I won't release Drupal 7 until I crossed of at least 90% of the problems they identified.

Categories: Drupal

Wushu Skidoo: Ujigami

RPGNet - 2 July 2008 - 11:00pm
You're dead. Now, you serve the living.

Jacob Singh: Helpers_user: The user API that never was

Planet Drupal - 2 July 2008 - 9:58pm

I was writing an install profile for a out-of-the-box workflow install profile to be used by media organizations today, when I ran into the rote task of adding roles and permissions.

(for reference, see my last article on workflow configuration in drupal)

So being the programmer who will write something in a day which takes an hour to run to save 5 minutes, I decided to scratch a long standing itch:

The Drupal User System API.

I love the simplicity of the drupal user system, but like many things in drupal, it wants you to use forms to admin it, and the DB model is inherently tied to the controller (not good).

So I decided to contribute this to the helpers module. It provides some simple functions like:

helpers_user_help($section)
permissions_get(unknown_type $rid)
permissions_set(unknown_type $rid, unknown_type $perms = array)
role_add(string $name)
role_get(int $rid = 0, string $name = “”)
user_add_roles($uid, $roles = array)
user_delete_roles($uid, $roles = array)

Simple stuff, but AFAIK, lacking in drupal.

In addition, I also wrote a full set of simplete tests for it which can be found in the tests directory.

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Categories: Drupal

2bits: Free your content of PHP: Moving PHP code out of blocks, views and nodes

Planet Drupal - 2 July 2008 - 7:43pm
From the early days, Drupal had the ability to embed PHP code in its content. This provides flexibility and functionality, most importantly, nodes and blocks can contain dynamically fetched data from the database using custom queries and displayed them in other content. This is an easy approach to get such data without writing a module. All you need to do is assign the PHP input format filter to the node or block and paste your PHP code in it, and voila, you have dynamic content.

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Categories: Drupal

agileapproach.com: Theming Views in Drupal 6

Planet Drupal - 2 July 2008 - 7:20pm

Any reasonably complex Drupal website involves using Views for listing items and CCK for the creation of custom content types. Since each website has a unique look, a large part of creating a Drupal website is theming Views and CCK nodes. This is especially true for Views, since most CCK theming can be done via CSS (or for more complex stuff it goes to Forms API, beyond theming), but Views usually needs to be themed.

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Categories: Drupal
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