Indeed, this is a great usability report.

I scribbled these notes as I read it:

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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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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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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

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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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.

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.

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.

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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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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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.

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.

Matthias Vandermaesen released a Mollom plugin for Wordpress. You can read more about it on his blog or you can download WP-Mollom from the Wordpress.org plugin directory. Thanks for all the hard work, Matthias!

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.

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.

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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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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