Feed aggregator

New training to help you learn how to build Drupal themes is available online from Lynda.com. Drupal: Creating and Editing Custom Themes shows how a Drupal theme can alter the look and feel of a web site. Drupal evangelist and author Chris Charlton introduces the core themes that ship with Drupal, how to install and administer new themes, change color schemes, and add sub-themes. Also demonstrated is how to build a custom theme from scratch, what templates are possible in Drupal themes; integrate HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; and how to theme specific nodes, pages, and blocks by building a theme step-by-step for a fictitious online flower shop.

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My new book, Drupal for Dummies, is now available. My intended audience is non-technical, so if you've got a friend who wants you to build a Drupal site for them, this might be worth mentioning to them. The companion Web site, http://drupalfordummies.com was created using only the information presented in the book.

You can find out more about the book here:
Click for Drupal Association affiliate link to Amazon!

I'd love to hear from you with any comments or questions.

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With 2009 closing and 2010 coming, it is time to look back over our shoulder and see what a great year we had. And it is time to look ahead and predict where the future of Drupal will lead us to in 2010.

Lets start with looking back. Drupal turned eight and in CMS years this means we are young at heart while grownup in our soul.

At Dries' site, you can find a selection of sites that Dries found worthwhile mentioning, maybe because he liked the site, the implementation or the usage or the owner of the site can potentially influence other prospects to see the Drupal light. Let us take a look at that list and see what they have trends we can conclude from that list combined with the knowledge about our community.

Many big name sites switched to Drupal in 2009. In the media / entertainment market, some of the names include:

• Virgin, Slate, Monthy Python and Lucas Arts

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Over the last year, the redesign has been progressing with many infrastructure and feature improvements. We have had 6 drupal.org sprints in both Europe and North America. On January 8th, 2010 we are going to have a drupal.org redesign virtual sprint. Many members of the Drupal community and the drupal.org infrastructure team have participated in the redesign so far. In order to help complete the minimum viable redesign we've recruited 24 Drupal consulting companies to help implement the main redesign landing pages.

We specifically requested companies to sponsor pages because this part of the redesign required a broad range of skills including project management, content, design, theming, and development. We believed that sponsoring companies were used to marshaling a collection of resources to deliver sites to their customers. We believed these companies could scope, estimate, and deliver these redesign sections. While we've had 24 companies sponsor sections to date, we still require more sections of the site to be sponsored. If your Drupal company is interested in sponsoring a section please review the redesign implementers guide to understand how to contribute.

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GreatBrewers.com, a Drupal 6 site, powers BeerCloud, a mobile app available in the Android Market and iTunes App Store that helps you pair beer with food, track down your favorite beers in your neighborhood, and pull up a full description of any beer with a scan of its barcode. Whether you're a beer consumer who could use some guidance in making a well-educated purchase, a food lover who wants to discover new ways to enhance a meal with a suitable beer pairing, or a traveling beer enthusiast who wants to instantly map the closest stores, bars, and restaurants carrying one of your favorite beers, BeerCloud is the quintessential mobile beer app.

Great Brewers is powered by America’s leading network of beer passionate wholesalers that collectively represent the interests of the world’s best brewers by promoting education and awareness through shared resources. The mission of Great Brewers is to bridge the gap between the world’s great brewers and the consumers who enjoy their products, with a paramount focus on education and on enhancing beer distribution practices through the sharing of information.

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Genomeweb, a print and online publisher for the molecular biology research community, has successfully migrated its web site to Drupal. Cyrve built the Drupal site and migrated data into it from a legacy Microsoft SQL Server application. Drupal craftsmen Moshe Weitzman and Mike Ryan developed the site, and Maureen Lyons authored the theme.

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At 12.30pm on November 5th 2009, John E McGrath Artistic Director of National Theatre Wales (NTW) announced the company’s first year of work at a press briefing in Cardiff. It was simultaneously broadcast through video streaming to the world. Attracting nearly 3,000 internet users from all around the world, they joined staff, guests and artists that were in attendance at the live event, at the company’s shop/office at Castle Arcade, Cardiff.

NTW's first year of work intends to theatrically map Wales. Twelve shows over one year (plus an additional finale), will take place in locations across the country, bringing the very best of Welsh writing, performing and directing together with world class artists and world class ideas from across the globe.

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The San Francisco Drupal community is pleased to invite everyone to register for DrupalCon San Francisco to be held at the world-famous Moscone Center April 19th to 21st, 2010. Tickets are currently $195, but may increase in price. Register early to guarantee your place at the premier event of the Drupal community and experience firsthand its energy and momentum. This event is the best place to learn about Drupal 7 and the future of Drupal into 2010 and beyond.

DrupalCon San Francisco will feature three full days of sessions from the best and brightest in the Drupal community and Silicon Valley luminaries. The weekend before the conference we will also be hosting a Core Developer Summit (4/17), a Drupal Sprint and BOF Day (4/18), and professional Drupal training sessions (4/18). The traditional Code Sprint will happen the day after the conference (4/22). More details about the conference events and logistics can be found at http://sf2010.drupal.org.

San Francisco is a world-class city full of wonderful cuisine and culture. As home to Silicon Valley, it is one of the most technologically vibrant areas in the world. There are a lot of interesting things going on here and it is our pleasure to share our city with you and to invite everyone to attend DrupalCon San Francisco next April 19th to 21st, 2010.

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Drupal 6.15 and 5.21, maintenance releases which fix issues reported through the bug tracking system, as well as non critical security vulnerabilities, are now available for download. Both releases fix other smaller issues as well.

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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CrowdedText.com is a site where businesses and other customers can create writing contests for their creative and content needs. Writers then compete in these contests, uploading their entries, and getting paid if selected as a winner.

In order to create a contest, the customer fills out a multi-step form, selecting contest type, filling out requirements and prize to award, selecting any upgrades, and finally checking out and paying the corresponding fees. The customer can manage their contests by voting on entries, sorting entries, and sending private messages to writers. They can award an entry at any time.

CrowdedText.com was built in Drupal 6. The entire process was managed and implemented by PropDrop.

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The Knight News Challenge recently extended its online submission deadline to December 15th to attract a broader applicant pool, particularly targeting software developers and entrepreneurs. The fourth annual Knight News Challenge (www.newschallenge.org), sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, awards up to $5 million a year for innovative uses of digital technology aimed at helping to transform news and information sharing. The competition is currently accepting applications and previous winners have included several members of the Drupal community.

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Berliner.de is a social network focused on Berlin. Berliner.de is for all Berliners and all other citizens of the world who are mad for Berlin or are eager to become so. On Berliner.de, users are able to add new content or comment and rate other people's contributions. They can make new friends, upload pictures, send messages, subscribe to interesting topics or just stroll around the vast amount of existing bits and pieces regarding Berlin on the site. The most important things going on in a user's network are presented in a newsfeed.

The users are backed up by an editorial department that is checking, finalizing and publishing all public contributions.

Berliner.de was developed by the long-established company BerlinOnline that runs (among other portals) Berlin.de, the official website of Germany’s capital, Berlin. Involved in the development of Berliner.de were (among others) Drupal community members fl3a and ambo.

The core technical bae of Berliner.de is built on Drupal 6 using many additional modules. These include the obligatory CCK, Views, ImageCache, Pathauto and Rules.

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3281d Consulting is very pleased to announce that a new era on drupal.org has begun: Drupal distributions (also known as "installation profiles") can now be automatically packaged with Drupal core and all of their required dependencies. When you download the distribution, you just unpack it into a web root directory, visit install.php, and you're done. This should vastly lower the barriers to getting a new Drupal site up and running. Please read on if you've ever considered installing a Drupal distribution or if you maintain one on drupal.org.

If you maintain an installation profile, be sure to read the How to package a profile on drupal.org handbook page before you try to use the new system.

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The Open Magazine is a new current affairs/entertainment weekly magazine available on magazine stands in India. The magazine was launched in the first quarter of 2009.

The publisher of Open Magazine, Open Media Pvt. Ltd. wanted a web presence for its magazine. It selected Srijan Technologies, a content management specialist company based out of New Delhi, India to construct the website. Srijan's responsibility was to build the website from scratch and host it. Site design was done by Itu Chaudhuri Design.

Srijan Technologies used Drupal 6. Development took place over a period of approximately 4 months and the Open website was released to the public in July 2009.

Currently the website shows all the content that appears in the print version of the magazine online for free. The website also contains some exclusive web content that is not present in the print version. The website is substantially updated once a week though web exclusive content is updated more frequently to keep the site "fresh."

The purpose of this case study is to introduce all significant (mostly technical) aspects of the website from Srijan's perspective. Feedback and comments are requested.

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Earlier this month, the Executive Office of the President of the United States of America relaunched their website, Whitehouse.gov, using Drupal. This week three members of the White House new media team presented at the Washington, DC Drupal users group. New media director Macon Phillips, deputy director of technology David Cole, and creative director Nik Lo Bue talked about their use of Drupal.

In this video, Macon Phillips addresses how they want to create opportunities for citizens to participate in their government. David Cole talks about why they wanted to change their technology platform, what they actually built, and where they are going with that new platform. Nik Lo Bue addresses how he wanted to use an amazing brand experience to visually communicate with citizens using Drupal.

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Each year, thousands of people around Ireland join Concern Worldwide in the Concern Fast. During the Fast, people give up food for 24 hours and raise as much money as they can for some of the world’s poorest people. One aspect of this years campaign is an online element, where registered fasters can get their own online profile page. Through this, they are able to take sponsorships and return any money that they have raised offline directly through the site.

Kirkdesigns built the Concern Fast website with Drupal 6, CiviCRM, a rather large handful of community contributed modules and of course, a selection of custom modules to facilitate the specific needs of the campaign.

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Drupal has won the Hall of Fame Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Drupal previously won the 2007 and 2008 Best Overall Open Source CMS Award. As a result of the previous wins, Drupal graduated to the Hall of Fame along with Joomla.

It is a great honor for the Drupal community to be the first winner of the Open Source CMS Hall of Fame Award. The Drupal community has worked hard to improve Drupal by adding internationalization, enhancing security, facilitating customization, increasing extensibility, and easing the user experience. This award is a great complement to winning the 2009 Open Source PHP CMS for the second year in a row. This critical recognition helps build both momentum and excitement towards releasing Drupal 7 in 2010.

This award has a $4000 prize, bringing the total prize money from the Packt Open Source CMS awards to $6000. The money will go to the Drupal association to help pay for drupal.org infrastructure, marketing, and Drupalcon events.

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Drupal has won best open source PHP Content Management System for the second year in a row in the Packt Publishing 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Drupal won by popular vote and a critical selection by a panel of judges. This award reflects the strong support of the Drupal community and our focus on quality which leads to critical acclaim and rapid adoption for large, high quality projects. Drupal won best overall open source CMS in 2007 and 2008.

From the award announcement,
We are pleased to announce that Drupal has won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. This category featured a very close contest between the top three, Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! in which Drupal ended up as the overall choice for the judges and the public.

While Drupal and Joomla! have always consistently featured among the top three in this category, WordPress made its way into the top five for the first time. The fact that it was outranked by Drupal by a very slight margin indicates how popular it has become with users as well as developers over the past year.

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France 24 is a public 24/7 international news channel broadcast in three languages: French, English and Arabic. Its mission is to cover international current events from a French perspective and to convey French values throughout the world. The channel provides keys to understanding complex events through in-depth analysis. France 24 also puts culture at the forefront of its programming. France24 is part of the AEF (the "Audiovisuel Extérieur de la France" or French foreign media), along with RFI (a radio station) and TV5 (a TV station).

Launched in December, 2006, the website was originally based on a Java CMS, Magnolia. But due to stability problems, we switched to Drupal 5 in mid-2008. We have just migrated to Drupal 6 and a brand new codebase. This case study covers this migration, focusing on the technical part, and describes some of our homegrown modules to be open-sourced.

The monthy traffic of the France 24 websites is around 5 million unique visitors. A more geeky metric is that the site runs 300-400 concurrent active Apache threads at all times.

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It was a close race to the finish -- or rather the beginning -- of the Drupal 7 code freeze process a couple of weeks ago. Now that we're in the middle of the code freeze, I wanted to update everyone on the current status of the freeze, and provide some guidance about where we go from here.

First and foremost, I know that both Angie (my Drupal 7 co-maintainer) and I want to express how excited we are about how everyone really pulled together as a team at the end, and who, by working together, got a lot of great stuff in before the deadline for the "code slush" passed. Of the exceptions we had previously noted (see slides for details), eight of the ten made it in. The two stated exceptions that didn't are (1) allowing user profiles to use the field API, and (2) the administrative overlay. Since the overlays patch got incredibly close, Angie and I are committed to having this as part of the final release. There is now a further exception for getting overlays in, and I encourage everyone to keep working on it as fast as possible.

Other than changes necessary for the overlay, and a few left-over patches that were ready by the 10/15 deadline, we have now entered the next phase of the code freeze: no more API changes and no additional features. At this point, we focus exclusively on usability, accessibility, and performance. (If a performance, accessibility, or usability patch requires an API change, webchick and I will make a decision on a patch by patch basis.) This current phase was originally said to be four weeks from API freeze, but we're extending it to six weeks instead. The new deadline is December 1st, instead of November 15th.

My guidance at this point: depending on your strengths, and how involved you've been with the various issues in the past, please devote some time to the overlay patch, to D7UX issues and Usability issues, to accessibility issues, or to performance-related issues. For the remaining five weeks, that's where the action is. Get involved now!

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