All posts on Lullabot.com

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

Download Audio

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.

Download Audio

Theming Drupal at the University of Arizona

matt — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:54:27 -0800

Making Beautiful Drupal Sites

Have you seen the Drupal showcase sites, but aren't sure how to make your Drupal install do that? Wondering how you're ever going to implement your design? Join us at the U of A and learn everything you need to know about Drupal theming!

» Tucson, AZ - January 7th & 8th, 2010

Drupal Intensive at University of Arizona

matt — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:54:16 -0800

Your guide to understanding Drupal

Having trouble figuring out how to harness the power of Drupal? Join Lullabot for our three 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.

» Tucson, AZ - January 4th,5th & 6th, 2010

Both University of Arizona Workshops

matt — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:54:03 -0800

Comprehensive Drupal Training

Join the team for expert advice to take your Drupal understanding to the next level. From the API to advanced theming techniques, come learn how it's done!

» Tucson, AZ - January 4th - 8th, 2010

Drupal Theming Tips + Tricks

liza — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:50:04 -0800

Lullabot and our own James Walker are partnering with Acquia to offer a free Drupal webinar: "Tips and Tricks for Drupal Theming". On Thursday, November 19th, at 1 pm EST, James and Acquia's Bryan House will team up to help you polish up your theming toolkit.

Here's the schpeel:

The Drupal theme system is incredibly flexible and powerful - allowing "themers" to completely control the entire look and feel of your website. Mastering Drupal theming is the key to giving your website it's own unique, polished appearance. In this webcast, we'll watch the process of taking an HTML and CSS mockup of a website and turning it into a fully functional Drupal theme. Learn how to make your Drupal site match your organizational needs.

What will we cover?

How to approach a Drupal theme
Creating a theme from a pure HTML/CSS design
Working with template files
The Drupal theme system and how it works

White House's Open Source Plans Previewed at Drupal Meet-Up

kentbye — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:18:31 -0800

The White House New Media team broke its silence to the Drupal community at the DC Drupal Meet-Up on Monday evening by giving a brief talk providing some context on their switch to the Drupal content management system and broader efforts for having the US government openly participate in and help foster open source projects.

After the initial announcement of WhiteHouse.gov going Drupal, aside from a post from Dries, and a round of commentary and reactions summarized here, there hasn't been a lot of new public information about the White House's switch to Drupal and their future open source plans.

But that changed after Monday night when three members of the White House New Media team spoke at the Drupal meet-up in Washington, D.C.

What are the White House's future plans with open source?

The biggest news from the night was a few announcements about the White House's plans for engaging with open source development communities. Dave Cole, the White House Deputy Director for Technology, said that the White House New Media team has been working with the White House legal council to figure out how to participate and contribute code back into the Drupal community. They can't promise a timeline for when that'll happen since it's pretty unprecedented for the Executive Branch to be participating in an open source project and to be directly engaging the Drupal community.

They also want to start holding "Development Challenges" for the international Drupal community in order to help figure out some ways to take the best ideas that are already out there, and see how they can be used for the public good.

The White House New Media team is also looking to solidify all of this into an event coming up early next year. The specific details and timing is still uncertain, but they're looking to hold a "camp here in DC for open source developers to both collaborate on what public sector development should look like in open source as well as ways that people can engage with the White House" and specifically the Executive office of the President.

Sounds something like a "White House Open Source Drupal Camp" to me.

More details in video uploaded by Development Seed and other Drupal-specific highlights down below.

White House New Media Team on Using Drupal from Development Seed on Vimeo.

Drupal Voices 73: Liza Sabater on Drupal Site Building and Power Blogging

kentbye — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:12:39 -0800

Liza Sabater is a Drupal Site Builder and active blogger who runs both Culture Kitchen and The Daily Gotham. She talks about being a non-module developing, site builder and the role of technical adviser to non-technical clients. And she also talks about why she chose Drupal for her blogging platform and some of her favorite modules including:

Download Audio

Drupal Voices 72: Simon Hobbs on the Evolution of his Drupal shop

kentbye — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:59:17 -0800

Simon Hobbs (aka "sime") talks about the evolution of his Drupal shop Em Space based in Melbourne, Australia. Specifically, he talks about the shifts in job descriptions and challenges of running a small Drupal development shop. He also talks about the most crucial time of any Drupal project, which he sees as the beginning while the information architecture and module selection decisions are happening. He also talks about some of the crossroads that he's facing of where to focus the energy and growth of his company.

Drupal Voices 71: Joeri Poesen on DrupalCon Paris & the French Drupal scene

kentbye — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:40:46 -0800

Joeri Poesen of AF83 was one of the organizers of DrupalCon Paris, and talks about the process of organizing the conference in coordination with the French Drupal Association.

Joeri talks about the French Drupal community and some of the sites being launched in France by AF83 and some of the other French Drupal companies.

He mentions that some of AF83's contributions include a lot of the core work that Damien Tournoud (aka "DamZ") has been doing, as well as some of the latest Übercart work that has been going on. Back in October Ryan Szrama announced the Ubercore Initiative, which is a combination of Ubercart, Drupal 7 and the influence of #Smallcore, and tagged with D7UC.

Damien has also been involved with this effort as one of the editors and AF83 is also one of the sponsoring companies for the effort due to some of the e-commerce work that they're involved with.

Joeri also talks about the importance of multi-lingual functionality and the i18n suite of modules.

Download Audio

Drupal Voices 70: Jeff Eaton on Token in core

kentbye — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:44:32 -0800

Jeff Eaton talks about the third most popular contributed module in Drupal: the Token module.

Jeff talks about the architectural changes necessary in order for Token to be committed and included into Drupal 7. A lot of the changes will also eventually be backported to the token 2.0 version for Drupal 6.

There's also a pending User Interface issue for token in core that needs some help from someone with some javascript skills and initiative to get a UI into core before December 1st.

The original motivation for token in core was to have pathauto in core, but this did not get in before the API freeze, but the token functionality that made it into D7 will make pathauto's job much cleaner in contrib.

Download Audio

Drupal Voices 69: Karoly "chx" Negyesi on his Drupal core work

kentbye — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:36:23 -0800

Károly Négyesi, better known as "chx", talks about some of his motivations and work that he's done on Drupal core. At the time of this publishing, Károly has participated in over 169 pages worth of Drupal issues over the past five and a half years -- including his work on the Form API, menu system, filter_xss and much more.

Károly is also the development team lead at Now Public, and this interview was conducted the day after Examiner.com acquired Now Public.

Károly also talks about his invovlement with the #D7CX movement to get Views 3 ported to Drupal 7, which since this interview there has been a Drupal 7 Contributed Modules Sprint and a week ago an initial CVS commit of Views 3 for Drupal 7.

Download Audio

Lullabot Podcast 80: Top 40 Drupal Modules Revisited

jeff — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:09:27 -0800

Angie Byron, Jeff Eaton, Nate Haug, Kent Bye, and Jeff Robbins discuss the latest Drupal news and then revisit the Drupal Top 40 podcast, this time with a list of 50+ "must have" Drupal modules. Enjoy this epic 2 hour podcast!

White House Drupal Coverage: The Roundup

eaton — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:58:54 -0800

October's announcement that the White House website had relaunched on Drupal brought cheers from the open source community. Even outside of the Drupal world, the high-profile government site was seen a vote of confidence for open platforms and collaborative development. The teams at Acquia and Phase2 helped deliver a great site that silences outdated claims that OSS can't be used on "Enterprise" level sites, and impresses anyone who thought that that Drupal sites have to look like blogs.

Naturally, there's been a lot of chatter about the switch, some good and some bad. I thought I'd take some time to round up the most interesting articles for the community and study what they say about how Drupal and its role in the White House's web presence are being perceived.

The Associated Press broke the story on the morning of the 24th, confirming rumors that had been circulating about a high-profile government site launch. (At DrupalCon DC in March, hallway chatter was buzzing about Dries Buytaert's invite to the White House to discuss Drupal and its technical underpinnings.) The story cast Drupal in a pretty favorable light, and touched on some basic Open Source issues like crowdsourced security.

New Video Announcement: Site Building With Drupal

jeff — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:54:54 -0800

Announcing Site Building With Drupal
How to install, customize, configure, and launch a Drupal site

This is it! Site Building With Drupal is the definitive guide to Drupal website creation. In this densely-packed 4 hour and 45 minute video, Addison Berry, Angela Byron, and Jeff Robbins illustrate Drupal's concepts and define its jargon while building a complete website from the ground up.

The team shows how to install Drupal, add modules, create and configure content types, build listing pages, and configure Drupal's multi-user permission system. You'll see how to use Drupal's taxonomy system to classify and organize your site's content, how to create and configure sidebar content using blocks, and many common tasks such as setting up a rich-text editor. Also discussed are tips for choosing which contributed modules to use, how to create private content, and how to launch a site.

This video pairs well with Administering Drupal, which shows how to administer this site once it has been created.

Early release pricing: Site Building With Drupal is now available for download at an early release price of $55. That's more than 25% off the normal price. But don't delay. This price is only available for the first few weeks while we wait to get the DVD version back from the pressing plant. When the DVD comes in, this price will go up.

Podcast 79: Drupal 7

jeff — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 01:00:00 -0700

Angie Byron, Nate Haug, Karen Stevenson, and Jeff Robbins discuss the new features of Drupal 7 as well as the latest Drupal news.