Drupal Voices 80: Yves Chedemois on the History and Future of CCK
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
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.
Customizable Header Images for Your Drupal Theme
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!
read more »Drupal Voices 78: Wolfgang Ziegler on the Rules Module
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.
Drupal Voices 77: Doug Green on Lessons from Big Multilingual Drupal sites
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?
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.
read more »Drupal Voices 76: George DeMet talks about Foreign Affairs on Drupal
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
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.comforums.example.comsubsite.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!
read more »Analyze This! Using the Google Analytics API
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.
read more »Lullabot Podcast 81: Live from Do It With Drupal 2009
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).
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