All posts on Lullabot.com

Drupal Voices 80: Yves Chedemois on the History and Future of CCK

kentbye — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:24:57 -0800

Yves Chedemois (aka "yched") talks about how he became the co-maintainer of the Content Construction Kit (CCK) along with KarenS. He also talks about the early days of CCK, and the co-evolution along with the Views. Yched also talks a bit about his motivation for continuing to work on a project such as CCK, and the challenges of working on it. He also talks about which parts of CCK are included in Drupal 7 as a part of fields in core, the new field storage engine in D7, and which parts of CCK are not included as well as pending tasks such as the challenges of developing the upgrade path to D7.

Drupal Voices 79: Daniel Kudwien and his many Drupal development contributions

kentbye — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:08:59 -0800

Daniel Kudwien (aka sun on drupal.org and tha_sun on IRC) of Unleashed Mind is a prolific Drupal contributed module author, but also Drupal core developer.

He discusses some of the well-known modules that he helped author and maintain, such as WYSIWYG, Admininstration Menu, Image Assist, Inline, and Demonstration Site.

He's taken it upon himself to make sure a lot of the Drupal 7 APIs have been standardized and cleaned up as much as possible, and also rallied a lot of help on tackling Drupal's oldest standing task of "Node 8," which is allowing users to cancel their own accounts. Sun also gave a heroic effort on helping on many of the different exception patches during the code slush period, and fellow developer chx commenting that he's never seen anyone sprint for Drupal.

Which Simpsons character best represents the Drupal community?

angie — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:29:37 -0800

In preparation for the Bringing it All Back Home: CMS Communities panel at SXSW, which I'll be speaking at on Saturday, I posed the following question on Twitter and in #drupal:

Which Simpsons character best represents the #Drupal community and why?

And the winner, in terms of number of responses, was...

Lisa Simpson

Thinks she has all the answers to save the world but is so pathetically naive she never will. Yet you love her anyway. - TheRealCrell
Underestimated, Intelligent, resourceful. With a wonderful singing voice. - bear_feet
She is open minded and usually diplomatic :) - JCL324
Logical, but not so popular. - DaftNinja

And here were the others. Feel free to comment too with your own. :)

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Customizable Header Images for Your Drupal Theme

eaton — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:56:54 -0800

The dark days of Drupal theming are history. Today, it's pretty easy to find a slick design for your site, and if you need to build one from scratch there are great training tools to make the process painless. (Shameless plug: Lullabot's Theming Basics and Advanced Theming DVDs are a great resource!)

What's still relatively uncommon, though, is support for user-friendly customization by non-designers. Drupal 5 shipped with the re-colorable Garland theme, and a handful of themes support the same feature via Color module. The Nitobe theme offers a choice of header images; Development Seed's Singular theme lets administrators upload a custom background image for a site; and TopNotchThemes' Fusion theme allows administrators to choose fonts and switch from fixed-width to liquid layout using a settings screen.

Adding these kinds of customization options to a theme can make a huge difference in usability for end users and administrators. In this article, we'll learn how to add a "header image" setting to a theme, allowing a site manager to change the site's header from the administration screen!

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Drupal Voices 78: Wolfgang Ziegler on the Rules Module

kentbye — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:13:41 -0800

Wolfgang Ziegler (aka "fago") talks about the Rules module, and how it can be used by non-programmers to set up a series of events that are executed after certain conditional triggers happen. Fago claims that this is a more robust solution that Drupal's core trigger module functionality.

The Rules module in Drupal 6 is an evolution from the Workflow-NG module in Drupal 5, but renamed to reflect that it can do much more than just workflow.

There was also a Summer of Code project by klausi that integrated into the Rules package as the Rules Forms module.

Fago also talks about the future of Rules and how he plans on improving the APIs so that it's more extensible to add in loops and new features, and to have Features module integration with rules so that it's possible to and re-use rules.

Job Post: Lullabot Seeks Experienced Project Manager

jeff — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:09:02 -0800

Lullabot is looking for an experienced project manager. Responsibilities include: managing scope, deliverables, schedules, and team resources for Lullabot client and internal projects. Daily tasks would include leading daily 15 minute check-in calls for each project, tending the ticket queue and managing task lists, communicating (email/phone) with clients, and basically keeping projects on track and moving forward. Lullabot is a distributed company without a central office, so like all Lullabot jobs, this is a telecommuting position and may involve travel.

Additional responsibilities include helping to write and assemble new project proposals and statements of work, though we tend to focus on bigger projects and don't take on too many projects at once. You'd be responsible for estimating and staffing projects, meeting with clients, pursuing and growing development partnerships, and coordinating the delivery of various projects.

If this sounds like a lot, it is. But Lullabot is a very collaborative company so you won't be working in isolation. You'll be working with a team of highly experienced Drupal consultants and developers with excellent communication skills and a passion for their work.

Ideal candidates should:

have 2 years or more of experience managing large web projects
be generally familiar with the Drupal platform
be a great communicator with good writing skills
be comfortable managing and organizing remote virtual teams
be based in the U.S.
have a sense of humor

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Drupal Voices 77: Doug Green on Lessons from Big Multilingual Drupal sites

kentbye — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:11:56 -0800

At DrupalCon Paris, Doug Green of CivicActions shared some insights doing big Multilingual sites. He talks about some of the pain points faced with doing the site, and working with the i18n module.

Other references mentioned:

Lullabot Podcast 82: How Do You Pronounce Ægir?

jeff — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:04:26 -0800

Nate Haug, Jeff Eaton, Addi Berry, Karen Stevenson, Jerad Bitner, and Dave Burns join Jeff Robbins to talk about the latest Drupal news and try to figure out how to pronounce certain Old Norse words.

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Drupal Voices 76: George DeMet talks about Foreign Affairs on Drupal

kentbye — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:42:24 -0800

NOTE: This Drupal Voices podcast was recorded at DrupalCon Paris back in September of 2009. Now that our latest training video on Drupal Module Development is out the door, then I should have more time to put out the remaining Drupal Voices interviews.

George DeMet is the founder and co-owner of Palantir.net. At DrupalCon Paris, DeMet led a panel discussion talking about converting Foreign Affairs magazine over to Drupal. DeMet touches on some of the highlights of functionality for the site and the Palantir team that built it. Palantir also took the time to write up a very comprehensive case study over on Drupal.org back in August that goes into a lot more detail. Finally, DeMet talks about how they transitioned from a regular development shop that produced their own CMS to working much more closely with Drupal.

Single Sign-on across Sub-Domains in Drupal with No Extra Modules

nate — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:28:18 -0800

With the multitude of single sign-on modules out there for Drupal, it's easy to miss the fact that Drupal has a built-in single sign on mechanism already. No modules, no configuration, just 20 easy lines of PHP in your site's settings.php file. This solution works for a lot of clients, but the set of requirements is pretty specific as to when you can use this approach. This includes:

The sites sharing a single log-in must be on the same domain. For example:

www.example.com
forums.example.com
subsite.example.com

You must be using MySQL.
Your sites must be on the same hardware cluster to be able to query each other's databases.

If your site fits within those requirements, you're on your way to simple, efficient, and easy Single Sign-on!

The concept for this single sign-on approach is based around Drupal's ability to prefix database tables. As you may know, you can run multiple Drupal sites on the same MySQL database. However, most sites are not configured this way, each site is given it's own dedicated database. Drupal's table prefixing can be combined with MySQL's ability to query across databases to make a simple "shared table" across multiple sites. Then you just need to set a cookie domain so that the two sites share session information and you're done!

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Rapid Waters Team Joins Lullabot

jeff — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:32:07 -0800

Today we're proud to announce that the team at Rapid Waters Development will be joining Lullabot. Jerad Bitner and David Burns founded Rapid Waters, a Drupal-focused development company, in 2009 after years of development experience with Sony Music, MothersClick, and Lifetime Television. Rapid Waters recently helped Lullabot launch IgniteShow.com for O'Reilly Media.

Since we began in 2006, Lullabot has been as a small consulting and education company focused on high-level technical planning and architecture, developer training and mentorship, and server performance tuning. As Lullabot takes on more projects like Buzzr and the thriving Lullabot Store, we find ourselves doing more development on both client and Lullabot internal projects.

This acquisition marks the beginning of a new development division at Lullabot. These new dedicated development resources will allow us to provide more complete Drupal solutions. We're still a small company concentrating on high-end projects, and our focus will continue as a consulting and education company, however now we're able offer better hand-in-hand development resources for our clients.

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Drupal Powers Video Portal For O'Reilly Media

jeff — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:07:56 -0800

Lullabot is proud to announce the launch of its latest project: IgniteShow.com, an archive of videos from Ignite events around the globe. The site, produced for O'Reilly Media, features a curated archive of Ignite's signature 5-minute videos as well as listings of upcoming events, news, cities with established Ignite presence, and information on how to get involved. Additionally, the site features support for live video streaming of events.

Popular videos are featured on the home page and the archive can be searched and sorted by location, event, popularity, chronology, or video tags. Each city has its own landing page on the site which is administered by volunteers. These landing pages (such as http://igniteshow.com/seattle) provide a city-specific archive of videos with city-specific featured videos, popular videos, and chronological archive - contolled by the volunteer administrators. Cities may also feature their own sponsors separate from those elsewhere on the site.

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Lullabot Drupalcon proposals - vote now!

angie — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:05:15 -0800

Drupalcon San Francisco sessions are now open for open for voting. Here are the sessions proposed by the Lullabots. Come and vote for them! Lullabot loves you, you know you love us, too! ;)

How Drupal Works: An Architectural Overview: Whether you're an architect overseeing a Drupal project, a developer coming to the Drupal world after working with other frameworks, or an existing Drupal developer looking to get the big picture, Jeff Eaton's session will help put you on the right track.
Jeff Eaton's Token for Fun and Profit session will also lead you through the new, advanced Token API in Drupal 7 core.
Lullabot Case Study: Liza Kindred, Lullabot's Business Director, shares some tips and tricks on being a successful business in the Drupal ecosphere.
Liza is also listed as a co-presenter on the Best Practices For Managing a Drupal Firm session, a panel discussion on what it takes to run a successful Drupal agency.
Drupal 7: What you need to know: Angela Byron, the Drupal 7 co-maintainer, will give an overview of the new, cool features in Drupal 7 and how to prepare for its imminent arrival.
Angela is also listed as a co-presenter at The exodus: leading Drupal out of CVS. Learn more about Drupal.org's migration from CVS to Git, and how it will affect you!
Reference This!: Karen Stevenson, co-maintainer of the amazing CCK module, will discuss some of the 50 or so nodereference modules and show off advanced tips and tricks for working with nodereference and userreference.
Be a Drupal Docs Hero in 15 minutes: Addison Berry, Drupal documentation team lead, will walk through easy, quick tasks you can do in 15 minutes or less to contribute to the Drupal project.

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IE iFrame Insanity

KarenS — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:52:57 -0800

After I spent THREE HOURS trying to figure out why IE insists on rendering a white background for an empty iframe, Nate pointed this little gem out to me.

IE has default values for iframes. Yes they do. And the default is to put an opaque background and an inset border on iframes that will ignore any attempt you make to change the iframe background color or border using css. So if you put 'background-color:transparent' into your css for the iframe element it will have no effect. That's right IT WILL IGNORE YOUR CSS!

To fix it you have to do this:

<iframe allowtransparency="true" frameBorder="0"></iframe>

See the documentation for this stupid behavior here

- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533072%28VS.85%29.aspx
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533770%28VS.85%29.aspx

Using the VI Editor

KarenS — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:48:01 -0800

I'm a relatively recent Mac convert and I still stumble a bit with some command line tricks. In particular, when I need to use VI to edit things I always have to look up the commands to edit and save my text.

So here is my cheat sheet, in a public place that is easy to find :-)

Type vi FILENAME to use the vim editor to alter this file.
Navigate to the line that needs to be changed or added and make your changes.
Apparently the exact keys that control navigation vary. On my computer, the following worked:
- Down - the enter key
- Right/Left - left/right cursors
- Delete a letter - the 'x' key
- Insert letters - the 'i' key
When finished editing, do the following: ESC :wq!

That's my short and sweet blog for the day.

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Drupal Wins GRAMMY.com

jeff — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:40:44 -0800

Lullabot is proud to announce that GRAMMY.com, the official site of the GRAMMY Awards, is now a Drupal site. The GRAMMY Awards is the music business' largest and most prestigious awards ceremony. This year's telecast, happening January 31st, will be the 52nd annual awards ceremony held by the The Recording Academy.

GRAMMY.com has run on several platforms over the years, but The Recording Academy decided to move to Drupal for its flexibility, speedy build-out, scalability, and performance under pressure. The website sees a huge traffic spike around the telecast and the Academy needed a content management system which could be both resource efficient throughout the year and provide high-performance and high-availability around the dates of the awards ceremony.

Lullabot, whose portfolio includes Lifetime Television, FastCompany.com, and the Sony Music artist platform (running over 100 Sony artist websites), brought in developers from Santex to help get the site built in about eight weeks. The site features extensive photo and video galleries, a live video feed, blogs and news, and of course listings of all the nominees. The site also features integration with Twitter and the GRAMMYs' active Facebook community. The project was assembled using mostly existing free add-on modules from Drupal's vast contributions repository.

In the past, a website like this would have cost millions of dollars to build. But Drupal allowed The Recording Academy to assemble the site quickly at a fraction of the cost.

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Analyze This! Using the Google Analytics API

KarenS — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 04:03:22 -0800

Google Analytics is a great way to monitor site usage and traffic. You add Google Analytics to your site using the Google Analytics module, which is super simple to set up. After it's in place, you can go to the Google Analytics site and dig into a ton of data, create custom reports, etc.

But you can also use the Google Analytics API to pull Google statistics into your own site and display them there. There is a Drupal module, Google Analytics API that was created by Joel Kitching as a Google Summer of Code project. It provides a wrapper you can use to create tailored queries of your analytic data. You can turn on the included 'Google Analytics API Reports' module to display Google statistics in blocks or pages right on your site, and/or create custom code to suck in specific statistical data and do any Drupally thing you like with the results.

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Lullabot is looking for Drupal teachers

liza — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 09:47:24 -0800

Are you a Drupal expert? Are you excited to travel to exotic locations, meet interesting people, and share your knowledge with them?

Lullabot is looking for part-time freelance Drupal teachers. If you've got a flexible schedule and can travel for as much as a week every month or two, this could be a great opportunity.

You should:

be a Drupal expert
have great communication skills and a sense of humour
have teaching experience ('Camps, 'Cons, classes... you name it)
be able to commit to doing a certain number of teaching days each quarter
be flexible and reliable

We will:

train you as a Lullabot teacher
provide the training curriculum and equipment
pair you with experienced Lullabot teachers (you won't need to go out on your own right away)
send you around the world delivering fun Drupal training to smart people
work with your schedule
pay you for your time and cover your travel expenses

Lullabot has been running public and private Drupal workshops, seminars, and events for the past four years. We've run over one-hundred training events, and trained thousands of Drupal developers internationally. We'd like to share our experience with a few new teachers and expand our training staff.

Interested? Please send the following:

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Lullabot Podcast 81: Live from Do It With Drupal 2009

jeff — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:52:57 -0800

A panel of Drupal experts take questions at the Do It With Drupal Seminar 2009. Panel members: Nate Haug (Lullabot), Josh Koenig (Chapter Three), Emma Jane Hogbin (Hick Tech), Angie Byron (Lullabot), Ryan Szrama (Ubercart / Commerce Guys), Alec Hendry (MTV UK), Paul Reeves (MTV UK), and Jeff Robbins (Lullabot).

User Management for Real World Groups

KarenS — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 03:49:56 -0800

Drupal's default methods of handling user names, emails, and registration processing work pretty well out of the box for many web sites. Drupal assumes your users are online, have unique email addresses, and that you want to create a site that grows organically as users find it and register themselves. Drupal out of the box may not work so well for real-world groups of people where the group already exists and consists of specific people who may or may not be online, may or may not have unique email addresses, and may or may not be able or willing to register themselves on your site.

Some good examples of the problems I have run into are creating web sites for families, clubs, and churches, but the same problems exist for any other real world organization or group. They have established groups of members, some of whom may share email addresses or have no known email address. And in these cases the administrator will probably create user accounts for everyone rather than waiting for users to self-register. On top of that, we may want some control over usernames so that users can recognize each other once they do get online, by forcing the username to be FIRSTNAME LASTNAME.

This creates several problems that have to be overcome creatively. After several years of trying various approaches, here is a summary of the problems I ran into and the ways I eventually solved them. I have included links to the ones I discuss, with the number of downloads in the week of November 22 as a measure of how commonly used they are.

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Hands-on Introduction to Drupal at Arizona State University

jeff — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:00:33 -0800

Learn how Drupal works by building a site

Having trouble figuring out how to harness the power of Drupal? Join Lullabot for our two day, hands-on workshop and we'll walk you through which modules to use, what configuration is required and how to build an awesome site just the way you want it.

» Tempe, AZ - February 8th & 9th, 2010

Do It With Drupal!

haley — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:37:36 -0800

Have you checked out the Do It With Drupal website lately? There are a lot of exciting things happening! This year's keynotes come from Lullabot co-founder, Jeff Robbins, Brain Traffic's Kristina Halvorson and Drupal founder, Dries Buytaert. DiWD also has a lot of other awesome speakers coming. Check out our updated schedule to get a good overview of all of the sessions.

Back by popular demand, we will be doing case studies and site dissections from top Drupal sites including the Economist, New York Senate, and MTV UK. We'll have their development teams on hand to crack them open for us, show us what makes 'em tick, and answer our copious questions. We're also building and demonstrating Drupal fantasy sites – we create clones of popular websites in Drupal. This year's clones include Etsy, Craig's List and Yelp.

We've got master classes from Views and Panels author Earl Miles, Ubercart uber-guy Ryan Szrama, Organic Groups author, Moshe Weitzman, and Karen "the Queen of CCK" Stevenson talking about both CCK and date/event handling. We've got Drupal 7 co-lead Angie Byron talking about Drupal 7 and the list goes on and on. We've also got some great speakers from outside of the Drupal community coming to talk about many of the non-Drupal skills needed to build a successful Drupal project -- these include content strategy, community building, project management, and understanding some of the emerging technologies which we will all need to integrate into our sites over the next few years.

Another important part of the Do It With Drupal experience is the social interaction and networking. Want to share a drink with some of Drupal's top developers? Want to meet other site builders, developers, and decision makers who are in the same boat as you? Want to find some people to help answer your Drupal questions? With most of the event happening in one central place and organized evening events – not to mention lots of fun stuff nearby in the French Quarter, it's easy to meet people at Do It With Drupal!

What else besides a lot of interesting information and amazing speakers do you receive if you come to New Orleans you ask? How about these highlights:

Amazing food - free breakfast and lunch each day for attendees
A sweet swag bag that includes, yes... swag! Oh... and a Lullabot t-shirt.
Your choice of one DVD from our popular Lullabot Learning Series
Access to the 2009 Do It With Drupal video archive. We're recording it all! Go online once you get home and catch the sessions you missed during the excitement.
Come hang out with Lullabot team, with a hammer and nails, at the Habitat for Humanity event on Saturday.
Lullabot temporary tattoos. Pretend they're permanent. Look tough.

We'll see you in New Orleans!

Command Line Basics: Symbolic Links

addi — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 04:26:15 -0800

This video shows how to use the magical symbolic link, or symlink. These are basically a handy *nix way to create shortcuts. They come in particularly handy if you want to organize code for your websites outside of the web server's document root and that is the example we use here.

Drupal Voices 75: Bevan Rudge on Civic Actions and Drupal in New Zealand

kentbye — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:33:16 -0800

Bevan Rudge has been a Drupal developer and engineer at Civic Actions and talks about the structure of Civic Actions and challenges and benefits of being spread out across many different time zones. Bevan also talks about the Drupal scene in New Zealand.

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Drupal Voices 74: Katherine Druckman on Managing the Linux Journal Website

kentbye — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:30:03 -0800

Katherine Druckman is the sole "webmistress" for the Linux Journal's Drupal site. She talks about the evolution of managing the site, including recently incorporating version control and starting to build out more and more features as their needs grow.

Some of the modules that she mentions are Views Bulk Operations to help manage a streamlined workflow, Twitter & Activity for beefing up the user profiles, Flag for bookmarking content.

Finally, she talks about some of the motivations for coming to events like Drupalcon and Do It With Drupal, and compares and contrasts the difference between the two.

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