Yves Chedemois (aka "yched") talks about how he became the co-maintainer of the Content Construction Kit (CCK) along with KarenS. He also talks about the early days of CCK, and the co-evolution along with the Views. Yched also talks a bit about his motivation for continuing to work on a project such as CCK, and the challenges of working on it. He also talks about which parts of CCK are included in Drupal 7 as a part of fields in core, the new field storage engine in D7, and which parts of CCK are not included as well as pending tasks such as the challenges of developing the upgrade path to D7.

Daniel Kudwien (aka sun on drupal.org and tha_sun on IRC) of Unleashed Mind is a prolific Drupal contributed module author, but also Drupal core developer.

He discusses some of the well-known modules that he helped author and maintain, such as WYSIWYG, Admininstration Menu, Image Assist, Inline, and Demonstration Site.

He's taken it upon himself to make sure a lot of the Drupal 7 APIs have been standardized and cleaned up as much as possible, and also rallied a lot of help on tackling Drupal's oldest standing task of "Node 8," which is allowing users to cancel their own accounts. Sun also gave a heroic effort on helping on many of the different exception patches during the code slush period, and fellow developer chx commenting that he's never seen anyone sprint for Drupal.

In preparation for the Bringing it All Back Home: CMS Communities panel at SXSW, which I'll be speaking at on Saturday, I posed the following question on Twitter and in #drupal:

Which Simpsons character best represents the #Drupal community and why?

And the winner, in terms of number of responses, was...

Lisa Simpson

• Thinks she has all the answers to save the world but is so pathetically naive she never will. Yet you love her anyway. - TheRealCrell
• Underestimated, Intelligent, resourceful. With a wonderful singing voice. - bear_feet
• She is open minded and usually diplomatic :) - JCL324
• Logical, but not so popular. - DaftNinja

And here were the others. Feel free to comment too with your own. :)

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The dark days of Drupal theming are history. Today, it's pretty easy to find a slick design for your site, and if you need to build one from scratch there are great training tools to make the process painless. (Shameless plug: Lullabot's Theming Basics and Advanced Theming DVDs are a great resource!)

What's still relatively uncommon, though, is support for user-friendly customization by non-designers. Drupal 5 shipped with the re-colorable Garland theme, and a handful of themes support the same feature via Color module. The Nitobe theme offers a choice of header images; Development Seed's Singular theme lets administrators upload a custom background image for a site; and TopNotchThemes' Fusion theme allows administrators to choose fonts and switch from fixed-width to liquid layout using a settings screen.

Adding these kinds of customization options to a theme can make a huge difference in usability for end users and administrators. In this article, we'll learn how to add a "header image" setting to a theme, allowing a site manager to change the site's header from the administration screen!

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Wolfgang Ziegler (aka "fago") talks about the Rules module, and how it can be used by non-programmers to set up a series of events that are executed after certain conditional triggers happen. Fago claims that this is a more robust solution that Drupal's core trigger module functionality.

The Rules module in Drupal 6 is an evolution from the Workflow-NG module in Drupal 5, but renamed to reflect that it can do much more than just workflow.

There was also a Summer of Code project by klausi that integrated into the Rules package as the Rules Forms module.

Fago also talks about the future of Rules and how he plans on improving the APIs so that it's more extensible to add in loops and new features, and to have Features module integration with rules so that it's possible to and re-use rules.

Lullabot is looking for an experienced project manager. Responsibilities include: managing scope, deliverables, schedules, and team resources for Lullabot client and internal projects. Daily tasks would include leading daily 15 minute check-in calls for each project, tending the ticket queue and managing task lists, communicating (email/phone) with clients, and basically keeping projects on track and moving forward. Lullabot is a distributed company without a central office, so like all Lullabot jobs, this is a telecommuting position and may involve travel.

Additional responsibilities include helping to write and assemble new project proposals and statements of work, though we tend to focus on bigger projects and don't take on too many projects at once. You'd be responsible for estimating and staffing projects, meeting with clients, pursuing and growing development partnerships, and coordinating the delivery of various projects.

If this sounds like a lot, it is. But Lullabot is a very collaborative company so you won't be working in isolation. You'll be working with a team of highly experienced Drupal consultants and developers with excellent communication skills and a passion for their work.

Ideal candidates should:

• have 2 years or more of experience managing large web projects
• be generally familiar with the Drupal platform
• be a great communicator with good writing skills
• be comfortable managing and organizing remote virtual teams
• be based in the U.S.
• have a sense of humor

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At DrupalCon Paris, Doug Green of CivicActions shared some insights doing big Multilingual sites. He talks about some of the pain points faced with doing the site, and working with the i18n module.

Other references mentioned:

• Locale module in Drupal 6
• Properly the t() function
• i18nSync module included within i18n
• Amnesty Report Site
• Amnesty International site

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Nate Haug, Jeff Eaton, Addi Berry, Karen Stevenson, Jerad Bitner, and Dave Burns join Jeff Robbins to talk about the latest Drupal news and try to figure out how to pronounce certain Old Norse words.

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NOTE: This Drupal Voices podcast was recorded at DrupalCon Paris back in September of 2009. Now that our latest training video on Drupal Module Development is out the door, then I should have more time to put out the remaining Drupal Voices interviews.

George DeMet is the founder and co-owner of Palantir.net. At DrupalCon Paris, DeMet led a panel discussion talking about converting Foreign Affairs magazine over to Drupal. DeMet touches on some of the highlights of functionality for the site and the Palantir team that built it. Palantir also took the time to write up a very comprehensive case study over on Drupal.org back in August that goes into a lot more detail. Finally, DeMet talks about how they transitioned from a regular development shop that produced their own CMS to working much more closely with Drupal.

With the multitude of single sign-on modules out there for Drupal, it's easy to miss the fact that Drupal has a built-in single sign on mechanism already. No modules, no configuration, just 20 easy lines of PHP in your site's settings.php file. This solution works for a lot of clients, but the set of requirements is pretty specific as to when you can use this approach. This includes:

• The sites sharing a single log-in must be on the same domain. For example:
• www.example.com
• forums.example.com
• subsite.example.com
• You must be using MySQL.
• Your sites must be on the same hardware cluster to be able to query each other's databases.

If your site fits within those requirements, you're on your way to simple, efficient, and easy Single Sign-on!

The concept for this single sign-on approach is based around Drupal's ability to prefix database tables. As you may know, you can run multiple Drupal sites on the same MySQL database. However, most sites are not configured this way, each site is given it's own dedicated database. Drupal's table prefixing can be combined with MySQL's ability to query across databases to make a simple "shared table" across multiple sites. Then you just need to set a cookie domain so that the two sites share session information and you're done!

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Today we're proud to announce that the team at Rapid Waters Development will be joining Lullabot. Jerad Bitner and David Burns founded Rapid Waters, a Drupal-focused development company, in 2009 after years of development experience with Sony Music, MothersClick, and Lifetime Television. Rapid Waters recently helped Lullabot launch IgniteShow.com for O'Reilly Media.

Since we began in 2006, Lullabot has been as a small consulting and education company focused on high-level technical planning and architecture, developer training and mentorship, and server performance tuning. As Lullabot takes on more projects like Buzzr and the thriving Lullabot Store, we find ourselves doing more development on both client and Lullabot internal projects.

This acquisition marks the beginning of a new development division at Lullabot. These new dedicated development resources will allow us to provide more complete Drupal solutions. We're still a small company concentrating on high-end projects, and our focus will continue as a consulting and education company, however now we're able offer better hand-in-hand development resources for our clients.

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Lullabot is proud to announce the launch of its latest project: IgniteShow.com, an archive of videos from Ignite events around the globe. The site, produced for O'Reilly Media, features a curated archive of Ignite's signature 5-minute videos as well as listings of upcoming events, news, cities with established Ignite presence, and information on how to get involved. Additionally, the site features support for live video streaming of events.

Popular videos are featured on the home page and the archive can be searched and sorted by location, event, popularity, chronology, or video tags. Each city has its own landing page on the site which is administered by volunteers. These landing pages (such as http://igniteshow.com/seattle) provide a city-specific archive of videos with city-specific featured videos, popular videos, and chronological archive - contolled by the volunteer administrators. Cities may also feature their own sponsors separate from those elsewhere on the site.

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Drupalcon San Francisco sessions are now open for open for voting. Here are the sessions proposed by the Lullabots. Come and vote for them! Lullabot loves you, you know you love us, too! ;)

• How Drupal Works: An Architectural Overview: Whether you're an architect overseeing a Drupal project, a developer coming to the Drupal world after working with other frameworks, or an existing Drupal developer looking to get the big picture, Jeff Eaton's session will help put you on the right track.
• Jeff Eaton's Token for Fun and Profit session will also lead you through the new, advanced Token API in Drupal 7 core.
• Lullabot Case Study: Liza Kindred, Lullabot's Business Director, shares some tips and tricks on being a successful business in the Drupal ecosphere.
• Liza is also listed as a co-presenter on the Best Practices For Managing a Drupal Firm session, a panel discussion on what it takes to run a successful Drupal agency.
• Drupal 7: What you need to know: Angela Byron, the Drupal 7 co-maintainer, will give an overview of the new, cool features in Drupal 7 and how to prepare for its imminent arrival.
• Angela is also listed as a co-presenter at The exodus: leading Drupal out of CVS. Learn more about Drupal.org's migration from CVS to Git, and how it will affect you!
• Reference This!: Karen Stevenson, co-maintainer of the amazing CCK module, will discuss some of the 50 or so nodereference modules and show off advanced tips and tricks for working with nodereference and userreference.
• Be a Drupal Docs Hero in 15 minutes: Addison Berry, Drupal documentation team lead, will walk through easy, quick tasks you can do in 15 minutes or less to contribute to the Drupal project.

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After I spent THREE HOURS trying to figure out why IE insists on rendering a white background for an empty iframe, Nate pointed this little gem out to me.

IE has default values for iframes. Yes they do. And the default is to put an opaque background and an inset border on iframes that will ignore any attempt you make to change the iframe background color or border using css. So if you put 'background-color:transparent' into your css for the iframe element it will have no effect. That's right IT WILL IGNORE YOUR CSS!

To fix it you have to do this:

<iframe allowtransparency="true" frameBorder="0"></iframe>

See the documentation for this stupid behavior here

- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533072%28VS.85%29.aspx
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533770%28VS.85%29.aspx

I'm a relatively recent Mac convert and I still stumble a bit with some command line tricks. In particular, when I need to use VI to edit things I always have to look up the commands to edit and save my text.

So here is my cheat sheet, in a public place that is easy to find :-)

• Type vi FILENAME to use the vim editor to alter this file.
• Navigate to the line that needs to be changed or added and make your changes.
• Apparently the exact keys that control navigation vary. On my computer, the following worked:
  • Down - the enter key
  • Right/Left - left/right cursors
  • Delete a letter - the 'x' key
  • Insert letters - the 'i' key
• When finished editing, do the following: ESC :wq!

That's my short and sweet blog for the day.

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Lullabot is proud to announce that GRAMMY.com, the official site of the GRAMMY Awards, is now a Drupal site. The GRAMMY Awards is the music business' largest and most prestigious awards ceremony. This year's telecast, happening January 31st, will be the 52nd annual awards ceremony held by the The Recording Academy.

GRAMMY.com has run on several platforms over the years, but The Recording Academy decided to move to Drupal for its flexibility, speedy build-out, scalability, and performance under pressure. The website sees a huge traffic spike around the telecast and the Academy needed a content management system which could be both resource efficient throughout the year and provide high-performance and high-availability around the dates of the awards ceremony.

Lullabot, whose portfolio includes Lifetime Television, FastCompany.com, and the Sony Music artist platform (running over 100 Sony artist websites), brought in developers from Santex to help get the site built in about eight weeks. The site features extensive photo and video galleries, a live video feed, blogs and news, and of course listings of all the nominees. The site also features integration with Twitter and the GRAMMYs' active Facebook community. The project was assembled using mostly existing free add-on modules from Drupal's vast contributions repository.

In the past, a website like this would have cost millions of dollars to build. But Drupal allowed The Recording Academy to assemble the site quickly at a fraction of the cost.

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Come learn how to take your Drupal theming to the next level!

We'll be adding advanced features to a simple existing theme and exploring Drupal's complex elements: forms, CCK fields, Views content lists, and more. We'll also address the subtle issues that can make or break large theming projects.

» Tempe, AZ - April 8th & 9th, 2010

Google Analytics is a great way to monitor site usage and traffic. You add Google Analytics to your site using the Google Analytics module, which is super simple to set up. After it's in place, you can go to the Google Analytics site and dig into a ton of data, create custom reports, etc.

But you can also use the Google Analytics API to pull Google statistics into your own site and display them there. There is a Drupal module, Google Analytics API that was created by Joel Kitching as a Google Summer of Code project. It provides a wrapper you can use to create tailored queries of your analytic data. You can turn on the included 'Google Analytics API Reports' module to display Google statistics in blocks or pages right on your site, and/or create custom code to suck in specific statistical data and do any Drupally thing you like with the results.

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