Drupal News

hi all
I spoke at drupal camp india on building social networking sites with and around drupal. Basically I wanted to share my experiences good/painful with social networking sites with drupal as platform. Below is the link to presentation I gave, As mentioned this was more experience sharing than "Teaching" where I majorly discussed existing module stack available and issues with them (as SNS enablers) and where did I hit the wall and how did I resolve it.

It will be nice to get some more input from drupal community at large, Presentation also included lots of ideas as to how drupal can move forward in SNS direction.

Please correct me, If any information in the slides is wrong or if I've missed something.

Presentation here

Social Networking Sites

1.I am trying to segregate og groups from the main drupal site. I have too many blocks on our main site that interfere with og. I have tried page specific visibility settings for blocks, works ok but for 60+ groups it is difficult.

I have also tried disabling "Show blocks" settings, works fine for og_panels pages but the blocks for the main site reappear when creating/editing group specific content.

Is there an easier way to segregate og from the rest of my drupal site without using a different database or subdomain.

1. How do I get the group notifications block to appear in my og_panels as embedded, page or block? I cannot figure this out.

Thank You for this great new functionality with og

Groups.drupal.org

After undergoing an excruciating problem with the GMAP views filtering themselves out, I was contacted by a module developer and together we discovered a big gaping hole that should've smacked me in the face. The GMAP's holding of the GoogleAPI expires randomly on page turns (such as multilingual experiences).

We will be releasing a patch for this on the expected date Friday, August 29th to be apart of the official GMAP build. Long live GMAP!

Shouts to Cassandra Wolff of Hidef, she brought the bug to my attention and I'm sure relieved a lot of stress from GMAP users facing the same issue and for also helping me code it out.

TatorTOT / Cassandra Wolff of HiDefWeb Solutions LLC.

Skype me Cas, I have a job that you might be interested in :)

Till then, happy programming Drupalers!

Drupal Dojo

Registration for DrupalCampLA 2008 is now open. The event will be taking place September 13-14, 2008, from about 10am-4pm each day and will feature three tracks (beginners, designers, and developers). RSVP is required and the event is free to attend.

If you plan to attend and/or sponsor the Los Angeles Drupal annual community event - DrupalCampLA - then please visit the following URLs.

Attendees register at http://drupalcampla.com

Sponsors show your interest at http://drupalcampla.com/sponsorship

• Want to see a promo video for our 2008 DrupalCampLA? http://drupalcampla.com/2008
• Want to see the video from our 2007 DrupalCampLA? http://drupalcampla.com/2007
• Want to help promote our DrupalCamp? http://drupalcampla.com/promote
• Want to know more about LA Drupal? http://ladrupal.org
• Want to download the awesome LA Drupal PDF pamphlet? http://ladrupal.org has it or go to http://groups.drupal.org/node/13555 for the July edition.

FYI, Hotel and venue info is not posted yet. Just get a hotel for that weekend in the Los Angeles area (not in the San Fernando Valley or too deep into Orange County unless you want to.)

Theme development

Website is seeking a talented software engineer with a solid and in-depth knowledge of Drupal for a 4-6 week part-time contract. Direct Drupal Experience is a Must. This is an immediate opening for someone with at least 1-2 years experience.

Serious & qualified applicants must send an email and include:

A concise cover letter detailing your experience and qualifications. You MUST state your years of experience and outline your Drupal job history and responsibilities. There is no need to send a resume. Compensation will be discussed with qualified candidates. Please send information to traceeloran@aim.com. Thanks!

Tracee

Drupal Dojo

Hello everyone.

A close friend of mine is a Vp for a major media company... etc. heavy hitters. Anyway, he wanted to know "are you familier with load scaleablity of drupal - ie > can it handle extreme traffic... like - major traffic during a world wide ticket sale?"

He mentioned (off the record) another superstars site (done with Drupal) "and the performance is terrible - like very very terrible..." That site wasn't one that they put up... but he wanted to know what could be done about it. Was there any testing / performance data on it. He liked what he saw with Drupal but needed more info before he was willing to launch a site with it....

I said, to be honest, I really don't know. "alot of it just could be the flash audio is sucking up to much processor
anywho - in short - i'm looking for samples of drupal that preform under load - ~100k unique visitors a day, prob in the millions of page impressions a month"

Does anyone have any info on this? Any suggestions?

Drupal Dojo

Looking for a way to show your support for Drupal? Easy: sponsor the upcoming European Drupalcon. You'll be helping to fund critically important work--and increasing your exposure and profile in the community at the same time.

Drupalcon sponsorship: mainstay of the Drupal Association

Drupalcon is the single largest source of revenue for the Drupal Association, the non-profit that supports Drupal. Sponsorship revenues make it possible for us to tackle key Association priorities, from protecting the legal integrity of the Drupal codebase to improving the infrastructure driving drupal.org.

Revenue from past Drupalcons is directly funding pressing projects like our top priority this year: improving the drupal.org website. Sponsoring Drupalcon is a direct and concrete way to financially support the Association's work.

Profile and Benefits

Sponsoring Drupalcon is not just a way to support important work promoting the Drupal platform. It's also an opportunity for exposure and profile in the Drupal community.

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Download Drupal 6.4
Download Drupal 5.10

Drupal 6.4 and Drupal 5.10, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities, are now available for download.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in Drupal 5.0 release announcement.

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• Advisory ID: DRUPAL-SA-2008-047
• Project: Drupal core
• Version: 5.x, 6.x
• Date: 2008-August-13
• Security risk: Highly critical
• Exploitable from: Remote
• Vulnerability: Multiple vulnerabilities

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The Drupal Association is pleased to announce the selection of a design partner in its Drupal.org redesign efforts. Through a competitive process, UK-based Mark Boulton Design Ltd. was selected. Their proposal stood out because of their work on Coolspotters and the upcoming Standaard.be (launching Q4 2008), their agile design approach and their highly-experienced project team including Mark Boulton as Creative Director and project lead, Leisa Reichelt as Information Architect & UX Research and Carolyn Wood as Content Strategist.

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South by Southwest (SXSW) is an annual festival and conference held every spring in Austin, Texas, dedicated to bringing together creative indviduals from around the world for a week-long celebration of music, film, and interactive technology. The interactive portion of the festival features over 150 panel discussions on cutting-edge topics in the new media industry and culture, as well as a trade show, Web Awards Competition, video game tournament, and some great after-parties.

Not only was the main SXSW Web site recently redesigned and relaunched in Drupal, but there are a number of really great Drupal-related panel proposals suggested for the interactive festival, which which will be held March 13-17, 2009. We need your help to make sure that Drupal is well-represented at SXSW because it offers an opportunity to reach out to a lot of new people who are not part of the traditional developer community. This past spring's festival included a Content Management System Roundup panel with George DeMet and Tiffany Farriss of Palantir and Jeff Eaton of Lullabot that attracted more attendees than all of Drupalcon Boston.

You have the opportunity to register your support for these proposals by going to the Interactive Festival Panel Picker, which is a Web site that allows you to review, vote for, and comment on all of the more than 1200 panel proposals that were submitted. The festival's organizers take feedback from this site into account when making their decisions for which panels are included in the final program. You can create an account and register your opinions regardless of whether you're planning to attend or not. The Panel Picker will be open until August 29, and the final panel selections will be announced starting in October.

If you’re interested in having Drupal represented at SXSW, providing positive feedback for these session proposals is a great and easy way to show your support:

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We are building a multi-site Drupal network and will modify and integrate modules that have not been done in this fashion before.

We like to work in small chunks of ten to fifteen hours a week and we use Assembla.com to communicate and keep on-track.

This is a big job and it will take months, but the budget is available. We have a full-time project manager and a designer on the team.

If you have advanced skills and want to help build something that will be heavily promoted, we want to hear from you. My email is don@smallfrymedia.com

This is a contract position and W9, 1099, non-disclosure applies. We are very flexible and work well together.

Willamette Valley / Western Oregon

There has been a lot of work going on in the Docs team lately and we want to share that with the larger community. The biggest news that will impact everyone is that we are in the process of creating a new top-level handbook to be added to drupal.org, called "Getting Involved." It will be listed along with the other handbooks on the main Documentation landing page as well as be the new target for the Contribute tab. We have also been working on other plans and ideas to collaborate on the docs. Here is a run down of the cool stuff we have to shout about.

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One observation I've had from lurking in the Knight Drupal Initiative meetings is something that's haunted me before. If only I was good at writing a solid grant proposal and subsequent review and revisions, some of my pie-in the sky ideas might actually turn into something valuable for the community (and provide a self-sustainable way for me to contribute). Similarly, with a bit more polish, I could generate some good DROP tasks, ideas for Summer of Code projects, and even sponsorship/funding proposals. While there are good tips and resources, there is (as far as I can tell) no clearly defined support group of actual people who could help with these tasks.

The recent launch of the Knight News Challenge Garage provides a good example of a mentoring group for some of these business/marketing-centric efforts with are often overlooked, yet essential, in forwarding the Drupal project. I could be on the minority here (as often is the case) but I think a dedicated space (possibly a Drupal group) and a platform for coaches/mentors to advise (this could be one potential solution and a project that some might support) would enable myself and a lot of others turn some good ideas into something a bit more substantial.

Curious to hear any other thoughts/ideas on this topic.

Marketing of Drupal

I've been working with Gábor for almost 5 years. First as a contributor to Drupal, next as my Drupal 6 co-maintainer, and more recently as a co-worker at Acquia. Yesterday, Gábor got married, so needless to say, a number of us traveled to Hungary to attend his wedding. In the picture below, you can see some of the Drupal people that were present.

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On 08.08.08, WorkHabit opened their Southern California Office doors in the San Diego marketspace. The main offices in Sacramento, CA cover all the territory from San Jose and San Francisco to Redding, and now their San Diego based location can service clients in the Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and Beverly Hills areas. Please come celebrate with us at the next S.D. Drupal User Group meetup this Wednesday!

Employment positions are 60% filled already, but there are still several job openings available for strong framework-savvy PHP programmers, so act quickly if you'd like to be working with a visionary company! If you are a Drupal developer or themer, and you want to be living and working in sunny, balmy San Diego, now's the time.

We offer amazing working relationships and training, your own Portable Development Environment, a.k.a. P.D.E., long-standing clientele who love us and our work habits, as well as friendly and knowledgeable employees who are interested in helping you to succeed. WorkHabit also has a Community Fridays program that, should you qualify for it, will allow you to get paid to work on any module, test, patch, or document within the Drupal community at large. Ever dream of giving that pet project some love, but can't find the time? Maybe it's time to move to San Diego!

The housing market is still down, so the cost of living here is more reasonable than you might think. The food here is great, and so are the beaches. There is nothing like working on your tan while working on some code. Heck, even the pace of life is perfect for a code-head. You put in the hours required to finish the projects, and we'll give you a paycheck. How simple is that?

Our phone number, as always, is 866-WORKHABIT, and the email address is apply@workhabit.com. Get in touch with us, you'll be glad you did.

WorkHabit
24/7 fully managed Drupal services
for companies with big demands.

"What's your habit?"

San Diego

The Knight News Challenge Garage launched (beta) today. In the press release, the site is described:

Fifty coaches are standing by online to help innovative thinkers apply for the Knight News Challenge, a $5 million-a-year contest to move journalism into the 21st Century. The coaches — made up of past jurors and winners — will give News Challenge hopefuls a better chance of winning up to $5 million in prizes annually. They also hope to attract a more diverse range of ideas.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has funded the contest with $25 million over five years. Its goal is to discover new ways of using digital technology to meet the information needs of geographic communities. Last year’s contest received 3,000 applications. It named 16 winners.

The new “Knight News Challenge “Garage” mentoring site can be accessed online at garage.newschallenge.org. “With this incubator site we are taking a page from technology companies,” says Gary Kebbel, Knight Foundation’s journalism program officer. “We hope that the Garage coaches will extend the contest’s reach beyond the journalism field. We want to attract more applicants from technical communities, such as the social media arena. Another goal is to improve the overall quality of applications.”

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We have just published our draft session schedule for Drupalcon Szeged 2008 yesterday based on feedback from you, the track chair selections and available rooms and timeslots. While building up the program, we took great care to find enough time for attendees to network, discuss code and business.

The unconference never received so much attention at Drupalcons. We set aside three workshop rooms for bigger BoFs, and now allow you to schedule your BoFs yourselves way in advance. It was a popular request to be able to know the unconference program before the event for easier planning (even though this goes against the unconference definition a bit). While BoF speakers can modify their placement whenever they see appropriate (even on the day their BoF would be held), the pre-scheduling possibility might help you gauge the wealth of program available on this event. You will be able to submit and schedule new BoF proposals on the spot in Szeged, but submitting earlier will help you get more attention to your topic.

Some early quotes we have heard about our program include Peter Wolanin of Acquia saying yesterday: Hmm, I might have to cancel all my BoFs - too many sessions I want to see! and Mikkel Høgh of Peytz & Co tweeting just took a look at the tentative Drupalcon schedule [...] – so much to see, so little time. It's going to be hard to pick….

Now that the program is out and unconference sessions are put into place, we thought you might decide easier to attend Drupalcon. So to make it a trivial decision, we extended our discount on tickets until this Friday. You can still buy 120 EUR tickets for Drupalcon today and tomorrow. If you are still not among those registered, don't miss the opportunity now!

At last but not least, some sponsor spots are still available and we are now selling booths at the different exhibitions as well. If your company would like to reach the hundreds of Drupal people at the event, or would like the developers among them to resell your hosting or other services to their customers, you should sign up as soon as possible to get into our booklet and have maximum impact.

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Hi, all experts,
Recently I am stuck by the above task. In each book, many people cooperate and finish one book. Some may writes several subsections/sections/chapters. Some may contribute one small sub-subsection.

I wish I post this request in the right place.

Best,
Tony

Drupal Dojo