Hello everyone, if your wireless drops or if you do not have a laptop just use your smart phone. The mobile site has a useful interface to view the schedule by day and by track.
I am hosting a BOF in room 206 at 4:15pm today, Monday to present how we created the mobile version of the DrupalCon website. The mobile version will automatically load for all webkit based smart phones.
Tonight a tweet from Laura Scott lead me to a blogpost by Zack Rosen at Semantic Focus. From the first sentence it seemed a bit odd, it's been more than 12 years since Tim Berners-Lee started working on the Semantic Web and most if not all of the points that followed seemed outdated. Only at the end of the article in the comments it then turned out that this was actually an article from 2006 (later a notice was added).
Anyway, the article made me think about all the ways that Drupal is making the Semantic Web so much more attainable today.
Patches that we write for drupal.org modules are submitted to the issue queue, and we refer to the patch’s location on drupal.org in the make file. This has made us much better contributors to other people projects as it makes being involved in the issue queue a normal part of development, and it encourages us to only patch contrib modules where it’s likely that the patch will be accepted. When a patch gets a review, we make changes, upload a newer version of the patch to drupal.org, and update our make file.
This is actually a quote from Jeff in the comments on the article Drush Make Files for Production Drupal sites, but I thought it was definitely worth highlighting on its own.
We really liked the concept of the Drupal card game pioneered by NodeOne. It is a great starting point for coaches to teach teams the value of collaboration. If you make an external reward system (e.g. winning team gets a bag of sweets) and you let teams play a couple of games, you can make a meta-game in which teams can experience the difference between different playing styles (and therefore the value of collaboration).
For the Donation+ fundraising we wanted to give something back to our donors that would speak to their Drupal geekpride and that would be fun. We talked with Rustan Håkansson, the developer of the Drupal card game, who warned us that it is difficult to fine tune the rules of a game and that it is especially hard to come up with a game that will actually be enjoyable. Since the Drupal card game is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license, we decided to make a reprint of the NodeOne card game.
Update: MediaTemple directed me to another blog post with additional details. This highlights another problem with this incident. The information has been spread all over the place. While this blog post does give some good details, it still does not provide cleanup instructions. It simply says that all malicious files have been removed. I’m sorry to say that they have not.
If you have websites hosted on a MediaTemple (gs) then you may have been a victim of this annoying redirect hack, unofficially known as the johnnyA hack. It was once thought to be an issue with WordPress, but in reality static sites are also affected by this. Essentially the attack works by including some encoded JavaScript onto your pages that tries to redirect you to a malicious website or file.
After much searching and with the help of this blog post, I have found the rootkit that is used to do the damage. If you have been hacked you will find some PHP files that were created by the attackers with a bunch of gzipped, base64-encoded source code. I converted that into the actual attack code which is listed below:
1It looks like the attackers simply visit this PHP page and pass in some request parameters to tailor the attack. It looks like there are a few different options such as generating files, executing shell code, etc. I’m no PHP wizard so let me know if you find something interesting.
So how do you find these PHP files? Just SSH into your root directory and run:
1This will list all files that have a string that is longer than 255 characters. This should help you locate these files.
My big question is for MediaTemple. What the hell are you guys doing? Why are we having to dig around for this information? Surely you have determined the same things so why are you not telling people how to clean it up? This official blog post from MediaTemple is vague and tells us nothing about how to actually clean our servers up. Do your job!
I spent a long time today trying to figure out how to customize a Date field in Drupal 6. The field is called field_recurring_dates and looked like this:
An example, like a picture, is worth 1000 words. Until recently Drupal programming examples existed but were spread among documentation pages, blog posts, and the Drupal CVS repository; some searching required. That changed in late 2009 with the introduction of the Examples for Developers module. Its purpose: "to provide high-quality, well-documented API examples for a broad range of Drupal core functionality". Now you can find high-quality, working Drupal 6 and 7 code examples in one place, many with SimpleTests.
The Examples for Developers Module, or simply Examples Module, is actually a collection of modules. Each sub-module contains a single, specific example of how to use an API or implement a feature. At the time of writing there are 17 examples:
I just uploaded a new tutorial that shows you how to provide an HTML5 video fallback option for devices that do not support the Flash Player. The tutorial also shows you how to use the new Flash Media Playback component for quickly adding video to your websites. If getting your video out to the largest number of people is your goal, providing an HTML5 fallback is an absolute necessity.
Welcome to the second part of the Drupal theming nightmares series. Not really surprised by the feedback I've got in the previous post. Most of you were enough lucky to stumble on the same problems. While the post was focused on the theming mistakes, it raised a discussion about unfinished jobs too. So if you haven't read it, it is right here: Drupal theming nightmares part 1.
That day, when I found out what I will be working with, I wasn't able to fall asleep (and it wasn't because of the litres of green tea I had). I was thinking about the person/company that wrote it, whether they are haunted in theirs dreams, do they even care? They should, you should, we all should. Take some responsibility for what you are doing. Do it right. I tend to ask people: "Would architect build a house ignoring physics?" Of course not, if he did, people might die. In our binary world we say kittens might die. Familiar right? But this could be another blog post. Lets move on.
This is an Apache Directive that I've never had to use before, but it came in very handy for a very specific problem.
There was already an apache redirect (RewriteRule + RewriteCond) in place, but the destination URL was case sensitive! That's not normally a problem, but it was for an ad server, and the variables were coming in as uppercase, but needed to be lowercase after the redirect. Bad programming on the part of the ad server in my opinion, but we're not going to let that stop us! :)
RewriteMap to the rescue!
First off, the actual directive is a lot like a function definition, and it can only go in a config file or vhost, it's not allowed in a .htaccess file. Luckily the one we want to use is built in, so we just make it available with:
RewriteMap lc int:tolowerThis makes the "lc" function is available in our rewrite rules. We start off with the condition and basic rule ...
Barry and I just met with a team from Northscale -- the startup formed to support and extend Memcached, the popular key-value cache used by the largest web sites. We learned about their new database project, Membase, and talked about how it could help high-volume Drupal sites including our Acquia Hosting customers.
Membase is built on the core Memcached technology and supports the Memcached API. I'm excited about what they've done to extend Memcached: Read full article »
Earl Miles and Young Hahn join Dave Burns, Jeff Eaton, and Jeff Robbins to discuss the similarities and differences between Drupal's Panels and Context modules. Earl is the creator of Panels. Young is the co-creator of Context as well as Features, Spaces, and several other great modules. We open up the cage, toss everyone in, and see what happens!
Also be sure to check out David Burns' article "Assembling Pages with Drupal," which also compares and contrasts Panels and Context.
Testing out the Drag'n'Drop Uploads module to see how it works.
So Mollom absolutely stinks, as far as I'm concerned.
I just posted this comment on a site that is not mine, but is a Drupal site running Mollom: http://www.istos.it/blog/drupal-training/open-sourcing-drupal-training:
The Examples for Developers project is an open-source training initiative. I'm trying to get it used for developer training and to have books on Drupal development use it for examples instead of rolling their own (which invariably get out-of-date and can't be maintained.)
I encourage you in this (vast) initiative.
And what did I get?
Your submission has triggered the spam filter and will not be accepted.
That's about the fourth time I've taken the time to write a comment on a Drupal Mollom-enabled site, and gotten that kind of a response. How many comments are being rejected inappropriately on sites that use Mollom? Who will ever know?
This module Creates A Store RSS Feed, Out Of The Box Ready For Use With Google Base, But The User Is Given The Flexibility To Include Or Exclude Elements To Suit Any Other Use, Flexibility And Ease Of Use Were Both Priorities In Creating This Module.
Additionally The Module Creates A Sitemap, Both Are Indespensable Tools For Any Website.
I just had the chance to listen to the latest DrupalEasy Podcast published earlier this week, where Ryan Price and Mike Anello interview Jacob Redding on his work, book, and Drupal's general greatness in many fields. Jacob was an early supporter of the Localization server idea that was built out to eventually power http://localize.drupal.org, so it was great to hear that he gives some exciting coverage of the topic (at about the middle of the podcast). He explains the Localization client and its connection to the server and how these two interact to get as many people submit translations as possible. If you are not using the Localization client yet, this might be a good time to look at it.
As Drupal gains popularity, the need for developers is increasing and consequently so is the need for trainers. Let's make sure that the first point of contact for people to the community is a positive experience by open-sourcing our methods of teaching.
How do you explain Drupal to someone completely new to both Drupal and to content management systems? What are the metaphors that people have found work best?
How do you go about introducing hooks and the menu system to developers? Views, Panels, CCK, Context?
Setting up a Wysiwyg or rich text editor in Drupal is a straightforward task: you download the Wysiwyg module along with the library of your favorite editor and you're good to go. You will run into issues when you're using CCK multiple value fields though:
This week we launched modulecraft.com a fundraising tool that we want to use to raise interest, involvement and money for the development of a series of tools for Drupal professionals. Pure donation systems like chip-in have a pretty bad track record, but a donation/reward system has to our knowledge not yet been tried in the Drupal community. When you donate you will be contributing to the community AND getting something valuable in return.
We launched the platform with Documentation+, our first fundraising effort which primary aim is the development of a Documentation distro for Drupal.
For a couple of years now, people in the documentation team have been wanting to implement a DITA architecture for the documentation. DITA is an open standard managed that was initially developed by IBM that is now managed by Oasis. It is fairly young, but has gained a lot of momentum in the documentation industry.
This tutorial is sponsored by the Save Joseph campaign. Only 6 more days to save one man from a roomful of teeth. http://savejoseph.org.
I've recently been using the Evernote module to blog, which has made my life surprisingly more rich. After building the module, I started using it right away and found it was the missing piece in creating a workflow that would encourage quality, rapid posting - something I've always wanted to be able to do. Now that its set up, I feel like I can write with virtually no overhead, and using images - kind of tricky when using webforms and wysiwyg - is about as easy as it can get. Even adding annotations is super simple with Skitch (writeup for a workflow with Skitch is imminent).
The ease with which I can create content made me wonder if maybe I could run an entire Drupal site's content off of Evernote. So I gave it a shot when setting up http://josephcowman.com, and it worked like a charm!