All posts on Lullabot.com

Database Fun with Schema Module

addi — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 04:43:04 -0800

This video is an introduction to the Schema module. This is a great module if you'd like a peek at how your Drupal database is set up (with descriptions!) or if you are building a new module and you'd like someone else to magically create the schema for your .install file. It can also check your database and tell you if anyone has monkeyed with the way Drupal thinks it should be set up. This introduction touches on all of these features and gives a good overview on how to use this really cool module.

Do It With Drupal: Earl Miles (Views) and Karen Stevenson (CCK) Profiled

jeff — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 07:42:30 -0800

For those of you who haven't been keeping up with the Do It With Drupal blog, we've been posting profiles on some of the speakers who will be appearing at the event. Recent posts include short profiles of Earl Miles (author of Views) and Karen Stevenson (co-maintainer of CCK).

Whether or not you're planning on coming to the event next month, it's important to recognize the achievements of the people contributing such wonderful work to the Drupal project.

Karen and Earl are just two of the list of great speakers appearing at The Do It With Drupal Seminar in New Orleans. Check out the schedule for the latest list of sessions and topics. We're really excited about the way things are coming together. Seats are still available and we hope that you'll be able to join December 10 - 12 in New Orleans for this exciting event!

Using Secondary Menus

addi — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:11:37 -0800

This video looks at using Drupal menus, specifically how to use the secondary menu concept to create a relation between your top level menu items and a child menu. Once we set them up, I play around in the theme to change up where they get displayed. I also play a bit with the CSS classes that are used. Besides learning about secondary menus, this video is also a brief intro to tweaking the page.tpl.php file of your theme.

Drupal Podcast 66: Bill Fitzgerald & Drupal For Education

jeff — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 06:51:51 -0800

Jeff Robbins talks to Bill Fitzgerald of FunnyMonkey about how Drupal is being used in universities, high schools, and other educational institutions.

Using Drupal Book Cover Leaked!

liza — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 10:37:15 -0700

Here it is! Huge congrats to Lullabots Angie, Addi, Nate, Jeff, James, and Jeff!

It's a dormouse! You can pre-order now!

A Musical Ode to the Drupal Views Module (Congratulations Earl!)

kentbye — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 08:51:59 -0700

Packt Publishing recently announced their inaugural list of Most Valued People from a variety of different Open Source Content Management Systems. As you may have heard, Earl Miles (aka merlinofchaos) was voted as Drupal's MVP in large part "For his work with Views 2, which has become an indispensable part of Drupal."

A question that often comes up is "Why use Views when it'd be so much easier to write my own SQL query?" Well to answer that question and to honor Earl's genius query-building module, I've created a musical ode to Views! It includes quotes from James Walker, Jeff Eaton and Angie Byron that are taken from a recent Lullabot training event.

So congratulations Earl, and hopefully this "Views Melody" can both educate and entertain others as to why the Views module has become such a vital part to the Drupal contributed module ecosystem.

DVD Outtake: Drupal Module Selection Tips

kentbye — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:38:41 -0700

One of the hardest things to do after getting your Drupal installation up and running is deciding which Drupal modules that you're going to use. There are literally thousands of modules to choose from, and so this can be quite a daunting task. It's even more overwhelming if you don't have a clear strategy for searching through, filtering down, evaluating and testing the viable module candidates in the vast Drupal contrib repository.

You may have already come across valuable resources such as Lullabot's Top 40 modules podcast, the user ratings and feedback provided at DrupalModules.com, as well as the recently published module usage statistics on Drupal.org that allows you gauge how many people are actively using any particular module.

These are all great resources to be sure, but there is also a lot of really useful information on the health of a module that you can gather directly from the links on the module's project page if you know where to look.

This 8-minute video is an outtake from the "Understanding Drupal" DVD / digital download that features the Lullabot team sharing their module evaluation tricks of the trade. They'll walk you through some of their favorite strategies for quickly filtering down the number of viable module options down to a reasonable number.

If you enjoy these types of insights, then be sure to consider coming down to the "Do It With Drupal" Conference in New Orleans from December 10-12 where team Lullabot and a host of Drupal and outside community experts will be giving out a lot of practical Drupal site building advice like this. This is the last week of the last early bird discounts, and so save yourself a couple of hundred dollars and register today.

The Do It With Drupal Seminar: Catching Up, Hurry Up

jeff — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 06:22:47 -0700

For those of you who read the Lullabot blog, but haven't following the blog over at DoItWithDrupal.com, you've been missing some exciting announcements.

Hurry Up: Early-bird Rates Ending

Early-bird discount registration rates end this weekend. So if you're hoping to save some money, get your registration in before (this coming) Sunday, November 2nd. Registration rates and information are at DoItWithDrupal.com.

Catching Up: News From DIWD

First, the schedule is 95% done and it's posted on the site. We've announced some great speakers including Lockergnome's Chris Pirillo, jQuery author John Resig, Flickr's Heather Champ, social media author Tara Hunt, Views' creator Earl Miles, Moshe Weitzman the godfather of Drupal, internet visionary Chris Messina, and many many more.

We've also announced that we will be building and showcasing several "fantasy sites" where popular sites get rebuilt using Drupal. Aaron Winborn, author of Drupal Multimedia will be building and showcasing a clone of YouTube built on Drupal. We will also be building clones of Flickr and Twitter and showing what it takes to assemble these types of feature-rich sites using Drupal.

Several popular existing Drupal sites will also get dissected and we'll get to look at what makes them tick. The schedule currently includes a look at Fast Company's social media masterpiece FastCompany.com, Sony's multisite artist platform which powers MANY artist sites including Britney.com, Ozzy.com, and Jennfier Lopez, and the newspaper powerhouse The New York Observer.

The Do It With Drupal Seminar focuses on providing practical advice for those interested in building Drupal sites and connecting attendees with the resources that they will need in order to be successful. For more information, please visit DoItWithDrupal.com.

Jeff Robbins Interview at NetSquared

matt — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:27:06 -0700

Jeff Robbins shares his experience of the previous NetSquared conference where he learned how non-profits are being told to use Drupal, but then struggle with the platform by not having the resources or expertise to overcome the Drupal learning curve.

The conversations at NetSquared led to Jeff's vision of how Drupal will save the world and ultimately to Lullabot's new venture of distilling Drupal down into key choices and simple tools to use for free.

Check out the full interview here.

Harvard Graduate School of Design

abbey — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:21:34 -0700

Harvard's Graduate School of Design (GSD) decided to use Drupal to create an intranet for the students to use to communicate and collaborate during the school year. Lullabot was brought on to help architect the site, matching their needs to Drupal modules and helping assess potential trouble areas and custom code needs. Once building the site began, we helped with troubleshooting and best practices as well as code review and development mentoring for the site's custom theme. Now that the site is live for the 2009 school year, we are continuing the relationship to assist with any troubleshooting and new feature questions.

The site provides forums, a question and answer board, and group blogs in addition to an imported university event calendar. Most of the site uses stock Drupal modules, with very little custom module development - a few alter tweaks and custom functionality in a site-specific module and a custom authentication module to integrate with the Harvard-wide HUID login system. The Organic Groups module was used to provide several kinds of blogs. Students can have multiple blogs in a variety of categories and they may choose to make them private or publicly available. This way a student may have a personal blog as well as several group blogs for various projects or activities. The site has an extensive custom theme, which heavily customized the way all of the views are displayed as well as creating a clean, useful profile page.

Solving the permission denied error when updating Drupal via CVS

jvandyk — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 08:35:29 -0700

If you update Drupal via cvs by doing the following kind of command (here I am updating a Drupal 6.4 installation to Drupal 6.5):

$ cvs update -dP -r DRUPAL-6-5

you might run into the following error:

...
cvs update: Updating scripts
cvs update: Updating sites
cvs update: Updating sites/all
cvs update: Updating sites/default
P sites/default/default.settings.php
cvs [update aborted]: cannot open .new.oxI8ko: Permission denied

The update is aborting because the cvs program does not have permission to create a temporary file in the sites/default directory of your Drupal installation. Notice there's no "w" in the permissions for the "default" directory:

$ ls -l sites/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  6 jvandyk  staff  204 Oct 22 10:07 CVS
drwxr-xr-x  4 jvandyk  staff  136 Oct 22 09:18 all
dr-xr-xr-x  6 jvandyk  staff  204 Oct 22 09:20 default

So the solution is to give write access temporarily to the user running cvs, then take it away again after the update:

$ chmod u+w sites/default
$ cvs update -dP -r DRUPAL-6-5
...
cvs update: Updating scripts
cvs update: Updating sites
cvs update: Updating sites/all
U sites/all/README.txt
cvs update: Updating sites/default
U sites/default/default.settings.php
cvs update: Updating themes
...
[cvs proceeds with no errors]
$ chmod u-w sites/default

The chmod u+w command means "give the user who owns this file write permission" and chmod u-w means "take write permission away from the user who owns the file."

Announcing BeautyTips, a jQuery Tooltip Plugin

jeff — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 09:33:51 -0700

Well I've done it! I've written my first jQuery plugin. The plugin creates rollover balloon-help style tooltips for any element on your page. While there were a few different tool tips plugins that existed for jQuery, none of them seemed to quite meet my need for a NetFlix (or Google Maps) style talk-balloon popup.

It quickly became apparent that in order to accomplish this type of flexible talk-balloon tooltips, I was going to need to engage the use the HTML 5 canvas element (and a lot of high-school algebra and trigonometry). The result is BeautyTips, a flexible and smart tooltip which calculates the best position for each tooltip bubble and then draws it. Bubbles can have rounded corners with a variable corner radius, "spike" length, color, opacity, and much more.

BeautyTips in action on DoItWithDrupal.com

The canvas element is supported in modern versions of Firefox, Safari, and Opera. However, Internet Explorer needs a separate library called ExplorerCanvas included on the page in order to support canvas drawing functions. ExplorerCanvas was created by Google for use with Google Maps and several of their other web apps. Include it on the page according to the readme file and BeautyTips should work just fine in IE.

Beauty Tips was written to be simple to use and pretty. All of its options are documented at the bottom of the jquery.bt.js file and defaults can be overwritten globally for the entire page, or individually on each call.

For those who were wondering...

liza — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 13:16:27 -0700

People have been asking for more information about our new venture. More detailed information is forthcoming, but meanwhile, I did a press round-up for those of you who might be interested. We're working on a press page for Lullabot.com, but meanwhile, I thought I'd post it to our blog.

Paid Content
Media Bistro
Newspaper Association of America

And of course, there are a couple of great articles about here on Lullabot.com:
Edward Sussman: Why Start (Up) Now?
Jeff Eaton: Power to the People

Updated:
My own personal post about this is here

Drupal Podcast 65: Dries Buytaert, Acquia, and Mollom

jeff — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 11:33:39 -0700

Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert, joins Jeff Robbins to talk about Acquia, Mollom, and Drupal 7 and the future of Drupal.

Edward Sussman: Why Start (Up) Now?

jeff — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:05:30 -0700

With our recent announcement of our new venture, the web has been abuzz with speculation. What follows is a guest blog post by Ed Sussman who visits lullabot.com to help shed some light on the situation.

Amid the gyrations of the stock market, and predictions of a severe economic downturn, I have found myself in the interesting position of launching a start up with my friends at Lullabot and Bond Art + Science. Over the past six years, I've worked within the comfortable fold of two well known brands in the media world: Inc. and Fast Company, the last four years as president of a digital division with six websites, 40 employees and more than $10 million in revenue. Now I've left to be the CEO of a self-funded company formed by Lullabot and Bond Art + Science that doesn't even have a name for its product yet (even the name of the company is just Codename Enterprises.)

Some people think we're crazy to do this now. Jason Calcanis wrote a couple of weeks ago that he expects 80% of the start ups already funded would collapse because of the down, part of a "start up depression." And legendary VC Fred Wilson said companies without angel or VC funding in place would probably have to try to make it without VC funding.

Reprint of "Power to the people: a new approach to Drupal"

jeff — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:24:53 -0700

This is a reprint of a blog post that Jeff Eaton put up on his blog. It seems to sum up many of our interests and intentions with our new venture. We wanted to be sure that no one missed it, so we're reposting it here. -j.r.

Late Friday afternoon, the first news broke about a project that I've been working on for the last couple of months. Internally, the Lullabot folks have been calling it "Project Codename," because we like recursively cheeky names. The goal is pretty ambitious: build a dirt-simple hosted service that lets people with great ideas leverage the power of Drupal.

For the past couple of months, a lot of cool things have already come out of the project for the Drupal community, though we haven't been able to say much about what was going on behind the curtain. SimpleViews, my new task-oriented front-end for the Views module, is one example. Rather than constructing content listings bit by bit, it lets site-builders make a few simple choices and get quick results. Nate Haug has been building similar tools for the CCK module; Angie Byron has been working with user experience experts to streamline Drupal's administrative interface; and Jeff Robbins has been hard at work on some amazing tools that allow site builders to customize a site's layout and CSS skins with point-and-click, drag-and-drop simplicity. Subtler stuff, like John VanDyk's recent improvements to the Views Bulk Operations module, have grown out of the tools we're building for simple, customizable administration panels.

Lullabot's New Venture

liza — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 06:55:20 -0700

Lullabot announced today the formation of a new company -- a joint venture between Lullabot, Bond Art + Science, and Ed Sussman, former president of Mansueto Digital. The new company will be launching an easy-to-use platform for groups, individuals and businesses to create powerful dynamic social websites. Historically, these sites required huge time commitments and expert developers; this platform will allow users to harness the power of Drupal and its wealth of add-ons with a streamlined point-and-click, drag-and-drop interface. With these tools, even newcomers will be able to build feature-rich multi-user websites that go beyond the boundaries of simple blog sites.

Lullabot will continue to provide all of the same consulting and educational services that they currently offer. The new company will be separate and distinct from Lullabot.

The members of the Lullabot team are recognized as experts in the Drupal platform, having guided the development of Drupal sites such LifetimeTV.com, Sony BMG Records' artist web platform, and FastCompany.com. Bond Art + Science are experts in user experience and interaction design. Their principal partners have during the course of their careers worked with clients such as the NYTimes.com, Microsoft, Nike, Fast Company and the Atlantic. Ed Sussman has left his position as the president of Mansueto Digital where his responsibilities included running FastCompany.com and Inc.com. He founded FastCompany.TV with Robert Scoble, IncBizNet.com and IncTechnology.com. He grew the company's revenue 600% in four years. He will become CEO in the newly-formed and yet-unnamed company.

"This project is all about taking the power of Drupal and distilling it into key choices and simple tools," said Sussman. "It's a huge leap beyond the rigid nature of turnkey products like Wordpress, Ning, but it avoids the 'infinite options paralysis' that newcomers can feel when experiencing Drupal's flexibility for the first time."

"Drupal has been challenging in the past," said Jeff Robbins, CEO of Lullabot. "It's our hope to make its power accessible to mere mortals."

"Lots of people want to build great websites but don't have the resources," said Karen McGrane, senior partner at Bond. "Our platform will create opportunities for ordinary people and small businesses that want websites as good as those of major corporations."

Further information will be released shortly. With questions, please contact liza (at) lullabot.com.

Drupal Podcast 64: Do Nodes Still Matter?

jeff — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 05:40:02 -0700

Earl Miles joins Lullabot's Nate Haug, Jeff Eaton, Kent Bye, John VanDyk, and Jeff Robbins for a discussion about the relevance of the node and node-based solutions for user profiles and comments given the advances in Views 2 and future versions of Drupal.

Links mentioned in the podcast:
http://drupal.org/project/acquia_marina
http://mollom.com/download
Parents Click bought by Lifetime
http://www.markboultondesign.com/news/detail/cap_d_or_not_splash_or_not/
http://www.doitwithdrupal.com
http://drupal.org/project/jqp
http://drupal.org/project/simpleviews
http://drupal.org/project/views_bulk_operations
http://www.lullabot.com/videocast/building-views-fivestar-and-votingapi

Building Views with Fivestar and VotingAPI

nate — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:15:48 -0700

This videocast covers three modules, wrapped together to provide a flexible solution for displaying information about content ratings in a list.

VotingAPI: Central storage of votes and rating information.
Fivestar: A flexible widget for registering votes on a 1-10 star basis.
Views: The ultimate Drupal query builder, capable of pulling out lists of information from the database.

In Drupal 6, the options in configuring views has become drastically more complex. This videocast helps understand how to setup views that display information about the current average rating for piece of content and also how to pull in an individual users results, each displayed as Fivestar widgets.

SimpleViews: The demo

eaton — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:15:34 -0700

I've mentioned the SimpleViews module a few times over the past couple of weeks, hinting that it would be cool and -- perhaps -- cure cancer or help over-leveraged investment banks. I can't promise too much, but the first version of it has hit Drupal.org, and I filmed a short demo to show off what it does.

SimpleViews has been a fun project for me, in part because it grew out of a need for a current client project. The site needs to give inexperienced admins the ability to build simple listing pages of different kinds of content -- the stuff Views is perfect for -- but can't overwhelm them with the kind of power-tools Views UI offers. Voila! SimpleViews.

Enjoy!

Talking Drupal on FLOSS Weekly with Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz

jeff — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:13:28 -0700

A few weeks ago Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz interviewed me for the 40th episode of FLOSS Weekly, a podcast about free (and libre) open source software. This podcast is part of Leo's popular and growing TWiT podcast network which includes This Week In Tech, MacBreak Weekly, and many others.

I had invited Leo to come and speak at the Do It With Drupal Seminar and, though he wasn't able to make it to New Orleans, he did want me to come on the podcast and catch people up with Drupal.

We talked about Drupal, Lullabot, and the theme music that I made for their podcast. My hope was to go on there and give a good overview of Drupal for "the rest of the world". Of course the interview flew by in a blur and I find myself with many things that I wish that I'd mentioned. But I think we hit most of the high-points. Either way, it's nice to help Drupal getting out there into the public consciousness.

It was a fun podcast. If you're looking for something to listen to while you go about your weekend, I recommend it.

Drupal, duplicate content, and you

eaton — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 07:00:00 -0700

Does Google's "duplicate content penalty" harm Drupal sites? No! Here's why.

For years, Drupal has enjoyed a solid reputation as a search engine friendly CMS. It generates relatively clean, standards-compliant HTML out of the box; syncs up the important TITLE tag with semantically useful H1 and H2 tags in the body of each page; and provides short, human-readable URLs with plentiful options for customization. (Anecdotal evidence: several years back, I wrote a post on my Drupal-powered blog that mentioned the name of the company I worked for. Within two weeks, my blog post ranked higher than the company's own web site on Google.)

Recently, I've witnessed a number of discussions where people expressed concern about the way Drupal generates the human-readable URLs that help make it Google-friendly. In particular, they were worried about Google's dreaded Duplicate Content Penalty, a system designed to keep spammers from flooding Google with the same content at dozens (or hundreds!) of URLs. There's a lot of confusion floating around, so for the geeks in the crowd (and the not-so-geeky interested in learning how things work behind the scenes), I thought it would be useful to give a guided tour of how Drupal manages and generates URLs.

Fast Company

abbey — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 07:13:50 -0700

Fast Company is a magazine for business professionals following innovation, technology, leadership and social responsibility. The new FastCompany.com web site combines rich editorial content with advanced networking tools for industry watchers and professionals. The redesign of the online magazine was the second project that Lullabot teamed up with Mansueto Digital, the first being IncBizNet.

When Mansueto Publishing began planning their relaunch of the Fast Company web site (http://www.fastcompany.com), they wanted to build more than an online magazine. They needed to tie in customizable news feeds, integrating an existing 100,000 member business networking site, and a blog-inspired collaborative approach to industry and business news. We worked with a large team to translate their designs into Drupal solutions, and helped train their internal team to continue managing and building the site as it evolved.

Sony MyPlay

abbey — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 06:54:52 -0700

SonyBMG's MyPlay site (née Musicbox) is a multimedia showcase for their artists. It provides video, music, and photos that can be rated and reviewed by the users. Users can also track their favorites and build a network of friends on the site.

Lullabot did the original development for the Musicbox video website in 2006. Then in the summer of 2007 Lullabot came back in to the project to upgrade the site to Drupal 5 as well as expanding it beyond videos. During that process we also helped them build their internal Drupal team. We worked side-by-side with their team while building the new site to bring them up to speed on the existing work as well as turning them into Drupal ninjas.

Moving forward with Lullabot in a consulting role the SonyBMG team rolled out a rebranding/redesign of Musicbox to MyPlay in Spring 2008.

Do It With Drupal Seminar

walkah — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:18:41 -0700

Lullabot is pleased to announce our biggest event ever! Do It With Drupal is a 3-day seminar focused on the configuration, architecture, and process behind building successful Drupal websites. It takes place in New Orleans, Louisiana, December 10-12, 2008 and features a cavalcade of superstars offering helpful advice, tips, and tricks geared at attendees with a wide range of Drupal experience.

This large-scale, 3-day learning event will take place at the New Orleans Marriott Hotel, located at the edge of the city's historic French Quarter. The suites provide a stunning skyline view of downtown and the Mississippi River, and the hotel is steps away from Bourbon Street and other top attractions in the heart of New Orleans.

Do It With Drupal is our latest Lullabot training initiative, and features the following highlights:

Examine and dissect successful Drupal sites
Discover new site-building strategies
Learn from Drupal's top developers
Hear from community-building experts
Connect with other Drupal professionals
Expand your Drupal knowledge

We are thrilled to be bringing together key Drupal developers such as Earl Miles, Gabor Hojtsy, Moshe Weitzman, Karen Stevenson and Ryan Szrama along with technology and community experts such as John Resig, Heather Champ, Karen McGrane, Brian Oberkirch and Ed Sussman. Of course, our own fantastic team will all be there too!

For more information, including our list of confirmed speakers. and schedule, check out http://www.doitwithdrupal.com/ . Be sure to check out the official blog for more speaker and conference-related announcements.