Upgrading

Upgrading Drupal can be pretty complex and frustrating. You can follow the official Drupal tutorials or choose for automated approach. The presentation guides you through upgrading to another major version (so for example from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6) in the automated way. It uses version control system and drush (command line shell and Unix scripting interface for Drupal).

The main tips are:

• Make backups, often (of the Drupal files and DB)
• Make frequent updates (keep modules and Drupal versions up to date)
• Order matters! (some modules have dependencies so it’s important to install the modules in right order)
• Disable contact with web (especially out coming e-mails, but also registration and user content generation)
• Clean up (remove not used modules and files)

Slides: happypixels.net/blog/upgrading-drupal

Apache Solr and state-of-the-art search techniques

Drupal's file handling capabilities keep getting better. Beyond the core upload module, the filefield module for CCK has enabled us to build sites with all sorts of files; documents, images, music, videos, and so forth. Searching within these docuements, however, has never been a common feature on Drupal sites. Some solutions have existed, particularly for extracting texts from PDFs and common wordprocessing documents. With Apache Solr, the attachments module, and an extension library called Tika, things can be much better. With Tika you can extract texts not only from Microsoft Office, Open Office, and PDF documents, you can also get text and metadata from images, songs, Flash movies and zipped archives. Searching for these texts is done as part of the normal Apache Solr driven site search.

Read more at: acquia.com/blog/use-apache-solr-search-files
Acquia Search: acquia.com/products-services/acquia-search
Slides: State-of-the-art Drupal search with Apache Solr

How to setup the perfect development environment (on Ubuntu)

Setting up a new machine to be able to do Drupal development often takes a lot of time, googling and tweaking. The presentation goes about the automated installation process which takes you up to speed in roughly 20 minutes.
The whole installation process is split up in three different steps.

• Setup Lamp Server
• Setup Drush (command line shell and Unix scripting interface for Drupal)
• Setup Eclipse (editing tool)

These steps have been automated based on a freshly installed Ubuntu 9.04. The article below gives you the code and the installation steps.

Article : Towards perfect drupal development environment
Slides PDF : krimson.be/sites/default/files/Roel_Dev_Machine.pdf
Slideshare : www.slideshare.net/krimsonbelgium

Front end performance

Page load performance talk was presented on FOSDEM 2010 in Drupal devroom. Below you will find the main functionality and links with more information.

Page load performance is crucial for and successful website. It’s influenced in 10% by HTML, and in 90% by css, js and images. The solution presented in the talk would be use of content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) which is a system of computers containing copies of data, placed at various points in a network so as to maximize bandwidth for access to the data from clients throughout the network. A client accesses a copy of the data near to the client, as opposed to all clients accessing the same central server, so as to avoid bottleneck near that server. Use of CDN is particularly important for websites with huge graphical content and with target users spread across the globe.

The speaker presented his research on influence of CDN on performance of the website and modules which enable use of CDN within Drupal.

Slides: wimleers.com/talk/fosdem-2010
CDN module: drupal.org/project/cdn
Episodes module: drupal.org/project/episodes

The eID module

The eid module was presented on FOSDEM 2010 as one of the Drupal devroom talks. Below you will find the main functionality and links with more information.

The eid module makes it possible to add Belgium eID Authentication to Drupal site. It works with a reverse proxy authentication.

Belgium eID can be compared to Dutch DigID but it uses hardware in form of card with chip and card reader. It’s used for e-counetr, electronical identification, digital signature. Belgian governance works hard to include eID in more online and offline activities.

I looked around but I was not able to find this kind of module for DigID. At FOSDEM I had a talk with developers of eID module and they would be interested to look at the technology behind DigID and consider building relevant module for Dutch users. Very handy for future projects in public sector.

Project page: drupal.org/project/eid
eID page: welcome-to-e-belgium.be

Display Suite module

The Display Suite module was presented on FOSDEM 2010 as one of the Drupal devroom talks. Below you will find the main functionality and links with more information.

The Display suite module is an API which other modules can use to store and manipulate display data for objects (nodes, users, comments etc). Modules implementing this API automatically get an interface for adding build modes, fields and plugins either through code or via the UI.

Key features of the API:

• Regions: every field can be dropped in its own region per build mode.
• Choose formatters and labels per build mode
• Define custom build modes via the UI.
• Define custom (block) fields via the UI with token support.
• Hooks for adding and overriding custom fields, plugins and build modes.
• Plugins to alter the display at runtime.
• Import & export functionality.
• Views and basic Features support

Modules implementing the API:

• Node displays- Node displays is a replacement for the node build modes and the field / display settings screen provided by CCK. You can select per build mode which field is displayed, give it an order and render it in a node region. Support and integration with core (search) and contrib (like CCK, fivestar and ubercart) modules is available at the Node displays contributions project.
• Node displays contributions – support for CCK, Fivestars, Ubercart products, apachesolr.
• Comment displays - renders the comment fields into regions.
• User displays - renders the user profile fields (with or without the core profile module) into regions. It also exposes a block build mode so you can render different data of a user into a block region.
• Heartbeat displays - shows user activity on a website

Project page: drupal.org/project/ds
Demo page: demo.customsource.be/ (You can login with demo/demo to play around)
Screen cast: www.vimeo.com/9214091

Drag and drop widgets page for Drupal 6

For one of the projects had to find Drupal 6 module which gives you the functionality similar to iGoogle or Netvibes, where each authenticated user can design his/her own homepage (within your page) filled with portlets or widgets of his/her own choice.

It seemed like very cool functionality. I was sure the productive and innovative Drupal community came up with out-of-the-box module which does exactly that. The first link I found was this post with an example of frontend which looks pretty nice with drag drop functionality. The author even includes download, but unfortunately it’s only compatible with Drupal 4…

Then I found MySite module which has very promising functionality including not only Drupal based widget content but also Google Gadgets. The project site states however that MySite module works only with Drupal 5 and in Drupal 6, this module is being replaced by the Dashboard project. On the website of Dashboard project however the first thing you read is “Dashboard is being developed for Drupal.org as prototyped. It will work for all sites, but not yet.” Dead end.

But my huge believe in Drupal community didn’t let me to give up so easily… And then I found Home Box and it's long list of features:

• Create as many home box pages that you need
• Each home box pages as its own access permissions by role (ex: authenticated user, contributors, webmasters, etc.)
• Users can enable/disable each block
• Users can collapse each block
• Each user action is saved in the background through Ajax (user doesn't even see it happen)
• Users can set color for each block (colors are defined per home box pages)
• Can be used with Color picker module to set block colors
• Plays nicely with Views 2 and its exposed Ajax filters
• Views 2 exposed filters are saved (even if user logs out and come back later)
• Tested on Safari, Firefox, Chrome, IE 6, IE 7
• Integrates with Path module so you can choose any URL alias for each home box page
• Respects Drupal permissions' system (block restricted to certain roles aren't rendered for others)
• Based on Drupal Block system, so anything that is a block can be used on such a page
• Code is pretty clean and respects Drupal coding standards (checked with Coder module)
• Comes with documentation through the excellent Advanced help module

Very easy to install and use without much need of tutorials. The fact it uses only block content and no external widgets doesn't really bother me that much. With all the freedom of building customized blocks you have quite a lot extra functionality.

Still taking my time to go deeper in it’s actual functionality, but from what I saw till now, it looks like module with lot’s of potential.