So I just submitted my first core patch, followed quick by several revisions. It felt as good as I was told it would. Still tingling.

Anyways, this is an issue that's got to be resolved--it's been stuck for months on one particular issue, which I don't think should be an issue at all. It's very problematic for developers of large scale sites to be unable to adjust the expiration sent by Drupal to the client. My goal in this patch is to give developers this ability and intentionally not address the issue--which, again, has delayed this patch for months--of how reverse proxies are going to deal with it. That's not Drupal's job--it's the job of whoever is connecting Drupal with the reverse proxy, and any attempt to solve this on the Drupal Core level will require not using PHP Sessions for users that aren't authenticated. Turn the page for the proof.

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I have been hearing more and more about CSS frameworks that use grids, but I didn’t really get what they were talking about until reading Jason Santa Maria article over at 24ways.org: Making Modular Layout Systems. Now I have a better idea of why people are so buzzed about trying to get something like 960 Grid or BluetripCSS into Drupal 7 as a core theme (http://groups.drupal.org/node/16457)

This post is for people who use or are thinking of using Advanced Forum and/or Advanced Profile Kit. It contains important information to navigate the version mess I have going on right now.

The current supported versions are AF Alpha 16 (D5 & D6) and APK beta 1 (D5). If you are using these modules on a live site, stick with those versions until we get past this reshuffling. I will be doing "unstable" releases while I get them into shape. You'll know it's safe to upgrade when I go back to named alpha/beta releases. Hopefully this won't take more than a couple more weeks but it's hard to predict with my sporadic time to work on this. I am getting sponsored to work on the D6 version of APK for the bits the client's site needs but there's also bits that won't be going into APK that pull my focus away from it. I haven't abandoned the D5 versions but they aren't getting as much attention as my focus is on D6 and so are lagging behind.

If you are looking to help test the new versions, the rest of this will tell you what you need to know. If you aren't comfortable running devel and giving me reproducable steps, this isn't for you. These instructions are for both D6 and D5 but D6 is farther along at this point and will work better as D5 still needs some things backported to it. Once I've done that, I'll release "unstables" for D5 as well to make testing easier.

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Dear LazyWeb

Buddylist is aimed at Drupal 5, so when porting to a site to Drupal 6, you need Buddylist2. However the BuddyList page mentions one should look at FriendList as that project is supposed finished ..

At first sight it seems like FriendList indeed most advanced in its efforts
As I was also using Invite, which also is still under development for 6,
I was assuming that upon installing it the dependencies would tell me which one to use.. however it seems none of them already hooks into Invite

Am I overlooking a module that solves my needs . ?

We recently launched a new website for a program at the World Resources Institute called EMBARQ, which works with cities in the developing world to implement sustainable transportation projects. Along with their base in Washington, DC, EMBARQ has independent centers with a few dozen staff in six countries, an audience speaking at least four languages, and great original multimedia content. 

They needed a powerful new solution to feature their content and facilitate a decentralized content production and translation process that respected the uniqueness of each center in the network. They also wanted it to look incredible. We built a new website for them with Drupal and created a custom installer profile that allows each of their centers to quickly turn on their own customizable site, yet still benefit from the work of the entire network.

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Through a presentation from Nicole Sullivan, a former member of Yahoo’s Exceptional Performance Team and co-author of O’Reilly's upcoming book on performance optimization, I came across the following data points:

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Last year I was one of the beta testers for Acquia's Drupal distribution and the Acquia Network.  I was evaluating Acquia's products and services for a potential intranet project at work.  For this particular project, unfortunately, it looks as if Acquia or Drupal wasn't the right solution.  Our regional folks wanted a solution similar to Microsoft's Sharepoint that is more integrated with Microsoft Office and heavily featured in document management.  That's alright though because there are a number of smaller intranet projects at work where Drupal is the perfect solution and a lot of progress is being made in that direction.

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Magnetic tape isn't just dead, but it is also deteriorating. 

It is breaking down, falling apart, and what was once thought to be nearly permanent is proving to be extraordinarily fragile. 

Audio tape was used for decades as a way to disseminate music, seminars, audio histories, speeches, news, by folklorist, in short--our culture.  Hydrolysis, the breakdown of the glue that holds the little magnetic bits to the tape, is becoming more prevalent.  The life span of tapes, under the best circumstances, is up to 15 years before things start getting sticky.  In other words anything created before 1994 has almost certainly started to lose its fidelity.

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On January 17-18, I'll be in Germany to attend DrupalCamp Köln (aka DrupalCamp Cologne) and hang out with the German Drupal community. DrupalCamp Köln is organized by Thomas Narres, Daniel Niehaus, Jürgen Brocke, Torsten Zenk, Florian Latzel, and others in the Köln/Bonn users group.

The venue is sponsored by GFU, a leading German IT training organization. Other sponsors include Host Europe, the Kölner Internet Union, O'Reilly, Packt Publishing, APress, Martinsfeld and Acquia.

With so many good presentation proposals, it's hard to point out just a few. An incomplete list of sessions include SEO, fields in core, Acquia, SimpleTest, Ubercart, performance optimization, installation profiles, Solr, module writing, theming and many more.

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Lesson Two of my special Getting Started With Drupal series of instructional videos.

This video explores the basic configuration options to consider once you have successfully installed Drupal.

New releases of the FAQ module have been made - versions 5.x-2.12 and 6.x-1.8. This release includes a number of new features, including the ability to have multiple FAQ layouts and both short and long FAQ question texts. However the majority of the changes were small bug fixes.

The new features added include:

• #251493 - Ability to have both short and long questions (6.x only).
• #299191 - Ability to have multiple FAQ layouts (6.x only).
• #281827 -"An edit answer" link provided on faq page under the answer.
• #272265 - Pathauto support.
• #304210 - Configurable re-writing of faq taxonomy term links.
• #300959 - Support for multi-lingual taxonomy terms.

The new releases can be downloaded from the FAQ project page, while details on the changes can be found below:

• FAQ 5.x-2.12
• FAQ 6.x-1.8

Enjoy!

Eclipse, with the newly released PDT 2.0, is a very capable Drupal IDE. With code completion, automatic documentation lookups, and integrated debugging, Eclipse is very good for anyone who spends time doing Drupal code.

One issue I've run into with Eclipse when working on contributed modules is that the modules themselves aren't located within a Drupal installation. I found myself resorting to external programs or the command line to copy my changes to my development site or to my local development copy. Using Eclipse's External Tools, it's possible to deploy changes with a single click, greatly reducing the time to test modified code.

traffic to a website can be divided into four major sources : direct, paid, organic and referrals. unsurprisingly, google analytics segments the traffic sources reports accordingly.

there is, however, a small catch. the ever growing popularity of search engines has led to an odd use case : users who use a search engine to search for exactly your domain name, instead of simply typing www.mydomain.com into their web browser. these users have just reached your site via an "organic search" and google analytics will classify them accordingly.

technically this is correct, but semantically it's troubling. the users who have reached your site by typing "mydomain" into Google have far more in common with the users that entered www.mydomain.com into their URL bar and far less in common with those users that reached your site by typing "my optimized search term" into Google. and the population of these users is not small - on one of the commercial drupal sites that i maintain these "mydomain" Google searchers account for over one third of the supposedly organic traffic.

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At last, I'm happy to announce the Code Sorcery Workshop support forums! These forums will gradually become the official support channel for our Mac products Meerkat and Pukka, as well as a place to discuss what's on your mind with regard to our website, potential future products, our services, or happenings in the Mac & Drupal communities.

The forums have been open for a week or two in unannounced form, but have quite expectedly not garnered much activity, so consider this the official "word". Feel free to go to it!

Feature Run-Down

We are using Drupal for the forum solution, which is what is used for the rest of the website as well. I'd like to take a moment to go over some of the features that this provides. In the near future, I also hope to make another post about the more technical details, such as which modules were used, what kind of custom solutions were implemented, and what administrative features are provided on the backend.

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The most exciting move in Acquia for me so far just happened a few days ago. We rolled out what was called "Big tent" internally, and means much wider support for all Drupal 6 sites. As Dries points out in his blog post, we used to support our Acquia Drupal distribution via forums, tickets and phone support. However, we found that virtually all sites will use other modules, custom code and themes, tweaks to existing code. This was not surprising, but took some time to figure out how we could handle in our support organization.

While there are multiple exciting sides of this story, the one I am about to tell is about the openness of our approach to this move. The story on "making the Acquia Network Connector modules available separate to Acquia Drupal" quickly morphed into publishing them on drupal.org, since that made most sense.

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Drupal service provider joins leading vendors to advance the reach of open source computing

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Last year, Acquia opened for business, offering commercial support for a defined software distribution called Acquia Drupal. One could purchase commercial support for all the modules in Acquia Drupal. As I mentioned last week in my 2009 predictions for Drupal, one of the things we learned relatively fast is that people wanted more than just Acquia Drupal. They wanted support for all modules, themes and custom code.

No surprise, but when we set out to build Acquia little more than a year ago, we weren't quite sure how we'd go about supporting everything with the limited resources we had available. We have since learned and grew a lot, and we decided that we're finally ready to start providing technical support for all of Drupal 6.x -- not just Acquia Drupal but all modules and themes available on drupal.org, as well as custom code.

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Drupal for Education and E-learning is a must-have for any teacher, school or education institution considering a new school website, or technology-centric project in the classroom. Whether the reader has heard of Drupal or not, the book provides valuable insights, empowering ideas and simple instructions to help get any teacher or school on their way to having a powerful, useful and valuable learning resource.

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During the past couple years I've had some brief but rewarding content management discussions with Deane Barker from Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive.  Dean has worked with quite a few Web content management systems over the years and appears to be most passionate to using eZ Publish.  Naturally, our discussions almost always involve Dean talking about ez Publish and me talking about Drupal.  Unfortunately, as I am more of a system administrator than a developer, the information I have been able to provide him about Drupal has always been limited.

Well, it looks as if Deane Barker has finally decided to get on the Drupal learning curve and find out more about this great CMS.

I’m working with Drupal for the first time on a hobby project I’m doing with Seth Gottlieb (about which you’ll hear much more later…). Adam Kalsey — Drupal ninja that he is — is advising us on the technical implementation, and he’s been a great help.

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