Drupal

I've been around the Drupal community in one form or another for five and a half years now. This past weekend was DrupalCamp6. I didn't get to go because I didn't register fast enough and they are at capacity. While the past DrupalCampNYC events have been big, I don't remember ever thinking that I needed to register sooner rather than later due to capacity issues.

Now I see the NYT has an article on the event. I guess Drupal has hit the mainstream. How did it get so big so fast? It seems like every week now someone is pointing out a large organization that is using Drupal to power their website along side the dozens of smaller operations that have been for years.

This year I want to take a more active role in the community and make sure I actually go to the next DrupalCampNYC.

Of immediate interest to us, however, is the accompanying website, recovery.gov, which -- you guessed it -- is using Drupal!

Crooks and Liars originally started out on Radio Userland , which served as its home for two years. After that we started exploring other blogging platforms. At that time we were averaging around 100,000 hits per day. We decided to move to Wordpress , which could handle our smaller team of only 4 at the time.

As the site continued to grow and we were approaching the 200,000 hits per day mark, we started experiencing a lot of down time from server overloads. We were utilizing the famous wp-cache plugin for Wordpress, as well as hosting the database on a single master and two slaves, using the HyperDB class for Wordpress to handle the replication.

While investigating the problems we realized one of our problems was the high level of comments the site receives per day -- around 2,000. Being a political blog we also attract a lot of disruptions in our comments, which meant a larger work load for our small moderation team of volunteers.

So I've been working on our Intranet redesign with Drupal and one issue we have is we want people to be able to post PDFs to the Intranet. The simplest way to handle this in Drupal is to create a content type for PDF and use the CCK file field to give people the ability to upload files. This way the PDFs sit by themselves and won't have to be attached to a particular page (which is what happens if you use the default Drupal upload module). Also the upload module makes it so that any node can have files attached which I didn't want.

The issue with doing it this way is that when you click on a PDF node you end up at a page that has the Title and a link to the PDF you uploaded. This isn't what we wanted. Instead we wanted the link to take us to the PDF proper. To do this one has to make a template for that content type. Normally when you want to alter the template for a content type you create a new node template. But this only allows you to alter the content portion of the screen (ie. the portion where the node displays usually the center of the screen). If you want to change something more than this you need to alter both the page and node template along with adding some new info to your template.php file.

Very clever, I love this!

After getting sick of closing issues in various module's issue queues that boiled down to people not knowing how to use Views 2's relationship feature I decided to make a screencast explaining it.

Never used this before, but looks really powerful

It's been years since we are dreaming of getting CCK into core. Dries has announced a code sprint, where six people are going to work on this for an entire week. That's 240 (wo)manhours and all we ask is a $7000 donation. This is your only chance to hire the top Drupal coders for less than a $30 hourly fee. If you have ever used CCK please consider donating the equivalence of one hour payment of your time -- it surely saved that many but likely even more.

I'm at the Drupal and Multimedia session at DrupalCamp NYC 5 and they were briefly going over the modules that there are (a) there are a lot and (b) there's usually several ways to do something. One thing they pointed out was that by Drupal 7, the plan is for image module and imagefield module to merge. Great, this will cut down on redundancy and it will give site-builders a clear solution that will hopefully do everything they need it to do.

I also think that MAQUM should be migrated to imagefield and a lot of the metadata should be shoved into a CCK field.

Sie war sehr ehrlich und hat zahlreiche "Baustellen" in Drupal angesprochen.

I don't speak German, but the photo says it all, the image module is used by 30% of Drupal sites, but the imagefield module isn't even listed.

So, Lyle and I cooked up a module now available through drupal.org called UC Node Checkout for DIWD. This allows you to tie newly created nodes of specified node types to products in a customer's shopping cart. You can expand the node type however you want with CCK so you end up with a robust, customizable product form. When the customer completes checkout, you can execute a little bit of PHP to loop through the products on the order, check for a related node ID, and process the referenced nodes accordingly.

DIWD is of course using this for conference registration nodes, but anyone looking for customizable products that go beyond what Ubercart's product attributes system has to offer can take advantage of UC Node Checkout. I've already got ideas for improving the module, but right now it's a pretty rockin' system.

Provide an Embeddable Widget option for Views aside from Page and Block. This will enable the view to be embedded to any website as Javascript, IFrame/FBML (Facebook support and similar), Google Gadget, or even Flash.

This looks like a neat Summer of Code project.