Drupal

I often am asked about which features I plan to add to Organic Groups module. Here is a list of major features that are on my list.

I'm looking for sponsors to pay me (or another person if that makes sense) to implement these features. These are non trivial features; I expect each sponsorship to cots approximately US$5000. Please do contact me if you are interested. I will credit you on the OG module page, in the README file, and on my personal blog. The community will thank you greatly.

In no particular order ...

Panels2 integration and flexible group homepage(s)

See issue. In order to customize the group home page, you currently have to theme it or you can swap in any custom View for the one that og provides. I want to leap light years ahead and let group admins create as many flexible group pages as they wish. The pages can have a layout of their choice (including grou specific CSS), and content of their choice. All this will be powered by Panels module. And admins will be able to name one of those pages as their group homepage. This greatly improves the ability of group admins to design their own mini website thats tailored to their needs.

FYI, I stumbled upon some useful code by drawk and contributed it to drupal.org as the new Views Audit module.

The goal of this module is to log when Views are used on your site. After a little while, you view an admin page which shows Views that are no longer used. This is nice for keeping your Views list tidy.

This module adds one SQL write query per View on the page so I don't recommend leaving it enabled in production for weeks at a time. But 48 hours should be fine for most sites.

Reposted from drupal.org for those who live in their news readers.

I’ve been showing off this module privately, but it is now time to broadcast the news. Drupal themeing has taken a major leap forward. Watch the screencast. Let me be the first to welcome a thousand terrific new designs and designers to our project.

The new module is called Theme developer and it can be downloaded as part of the devel project. We have built Firebug for Drupal Theming. You may now click on any part of the page and a sexy popup display shows which theme function/template outputted the HTML, and what other files could have done so. Armed with this info, a themer may quickly and accurately override the presentation. Further, all the variables passed into the template/function are presented for review.

Watch the screencast

Implementation notes

• The basic idea of the module is that it uses hook_theme_registry_alter() to make itself receive all theme calls. Thus, it logs all the variables that are received and the templates that could have been called, and were eventually called, and so forth. It finally delegates to the original theme function for generating the HTML. Finally, it takes the generated HTML and wraps it in span tags in order to identify what HTML belongs to what theme call. Those span tags get classes attached for the red border that follows the cursor.
• The popup window gets all its data from a huge javascript array in Drupal.settings. This array stores data about each call.
• In order to receive the same drill down behavior as in the screencast for the variables listing, you should install krumo. See the README file.

Backport to Drupal 5

I have not attempted a backport, since it would certainly require significant a patch to the core theme API. Others are welcome to try.

Help

If you’d like to help with this module, or ask questions, please use the issue queue for devel project - http://drupal.org/project/devel

Credits

• Moshe Weitzman - development
• Jeff Robbins - sexy user interface
• dvessel - additional development

I'd like to share some notes about recent decisions made by the Drupal Association, Board of Directors.

ACCOUNTING
* We voted to hire a Belgian accounting firm to advise us on taxes, membership details, non profit do's and don'ts, and so on. This vote followed after a lot of research and meetings by DriesK and DriesB in particular. The Drupal Association is first and foremost a "bank" for the Drupal project so bookkeeping is really really important.

DRUPAL.ORG HARDWARE
* We authorized the infrastructure manager (Gerhard Killesreiter) to make hardware purchases up to $15K Euro. He is required to post a plan for purchasing to the Association mailing list and wait 5 days for comment. Since the Association meets about once a month, we needed a way to make purchases without votes. This authorization serves that need. Also, drupal.org desperately needs hardware upgrades so this vote was a no brainer.

We also discussed a number of topics like advertising on drupal.org and Barcelona Drupalcon. These topics didn't lead to formal votes.

MISC
* The Board meets over IRC. We use the hand protocol to maintain order. It works pretty well ... The hardest part is agreeing about what time the meeting starts in various time zones and daylight savings configurations.

I finally got scared enough about my password situation that I took action. And I feel so much better. Like many of you, I used the same password on many many web sites. Even admin accounts on my Drupal clients' sites and my admin account on drupal.org. I always used a different password for my financial accounts, but thats not good enough. Sharing passwords across service providers is a really bad idea because ...

I received notice from two of my service providers that they were hacked and don't know if my pasword was stolen or not. One recommended that I cancel my credit card. Those vendors are wush.net and dreamhost.com. Ugh. So I was faced with the prospect of changing my password everywhere or just praying. I'm not religious, so praying was out. I changed all my passwords, and used a different password on each site. But I still only have to remember one password. The magic is in a bookmarklet provided by SuperGenPass. Now when I have to provide a password to a web site, I just click the bookmark and it fills in my password. The bookmarklet uses the site's domain and my master password and a hefty dose of md5 scrambling to generate a site specific password.

The skeptical engineers out there will quickly ask - "what about when you are away from your PC - you can't login anywhere". Well, this is an easily solved problem. I put up a web page on my own site which will tell me my password based on the domain I am logging into. I just put my master password and ebay.com (for example) into the form and it spits back my password. Then I copy and paste into the login form at ebay.com and I am in. So traveling is no problem at all.

This system added no hassle, and much more security. I highly recommend it.

It fills me with joy to see my musical heroes, the Grateful Dead, relaunch the Grateful Dead official web site on Drupal. I adore their music, and the Drupal communty. What a match! It feels great to see my workmanship on sites like Greenpeace and Cancer Survivors Network. But this one rattles my nostalgic core. Feeling good right now.

Last week, my latest project, New York Observer, relaunched their newspaper site on Drupal. I finally published a writeup to the Drupal showcase forum. I shared a few tips from the build of the site and initial comments to my writeup are quite positive. This is one of the best looking Drupal powered web sites that I've ever seen. The technology behind it is pretty elegant too. Read the showcase announcement.

Much respect and thanks go to Barry Jaspan who was my partner on this project. He understands Drupal to a remarkable depth considering he has been using it for only 1 year. Furthermore, the range of his programming talent is remarkable. He has ninja powers in the areas of security, html/css, and data migration to name a few.

I'm a bit late in celebrating my own 5 year anniversary with the Drupal project. You can see from that URL, that I have made 166 pages worth of commits to the contrib repositiory since then. And submitted hundreds of core patches as well.

My first major contribution was a series of core patches for the Distributed Authentication system in core. Dries had already a working version, but I generalized it by adding the authmap table.

During those first months, I struggled badly with setting up PHP, and generating patches, and understanding the code. Newbies - I have felt your pain. We all have, really. My greatest insight into the workings of Drupal came when I setup a debugger. I like Komodo. I encourage new (and old) developers to do this as a learning exercise, if not as a daily development tool. It is so useful to watch Drupal process a request. It is like watching art in progress. There is also a deep comfort in understanding the whole request cycle.

Thanks to the whole Drupal community for being as great as you are. Sometimes people ask if my freelance consulting work is lonely. It isn't lonely at all, with all the great chatter and ideas that you all generate on the mailing lists, on chat, and at conferences.

A map from Google Analytics indicating where users come from for the groups.drupal.org web site. Note the pocket from India and the strong Europe cluster.

Jake Gordon has a great new business selling custom yearbooks. He uses Drupal to manage the data entry and photos. If you are a member of the Drupal community, please join the Yearbook. Hardcover yearbooks just might become available. Would be fun :)