Drupal World - Articles

Drupal 6 supports translation of content with the core Content Translation module. So you can create a page in English, then translate the page to Dutch.But what if you attach a file to the English page? It does not show up on your Dutch translation. And what if you are using CCK and FileField?

If you update Drupal via cvs by doing the following kind of command (here I am updating a Drupal 6.4 installation to Drupal 6.5):$ cvs update -dP -r DRUPAL-6-5you might run into the following error:...cvs update: Updating scriptscvs update: Updating sitescvs update: Updating sites/allcvs update: Updating sites/defaultP sites/default/default.settings.phpcvs [update aborted]: cannot open .new.oxI8ko: Permission deniedThe update is aborting because the cvs program does not have permission to create

Does Google's "duplicate content penalty" harm Drupal sites?

Yesterday, my Orphaned Works article hit the front page of Reddit, a popular social news site. Traffic instantly increased by a factor of more than 20. At peak, the site was serving over 15 requests a second, enough to take down most poorly configured Drupal sites.

By request, a multi-layer Photoshop file of the A3 Atlantis Drupal theme is now available. This will mainly be useful for those of you who wish to change the position of map to show South America, Africa, or Australia.You can download the zipped PSD here.

A new bill, The Orphan Works Act of 2008, is currently making its way through congress, and it threatens to take away copyright protection from unregistered works.

A3 Atlantis is my newest contribution to the Drupal community. Designed from the ground up to be fast, elegant, and search engine friendly, this theme features a stunning visual design, beautiful typography, and a standards-compliant code base.A3 Atlantis was designed exclusively for Drupal, and is licensed under the GPL.This free Drupal theme is currently available for Drupal 5, and a 6.x version is in the pipeline.

In presentations I usually point out that Drupal is three things:A content management system: The forms you fill out, the buttons you click, and the content you work with.

Information Week, the influential B2B technology magazine, just posted a new article called Getting Started with Drupal. Here's a quote:"Drupal is a free, open-source content management system, and its flexibility and ease of use have long made it a favorite in the content management community."Perhaps my favorite thing about this article is that the author takes the time to mention a few community sites he found useful.

Google recently added a new feature to Google Trends: You can now compare websites to see how many daily unique visitors they're getting.If there's anyone who's qualified to estimate traffic, it's Google. They handle half the world's search requests, and for the Drupal community, that number is probably more like 95%.So, what can we learn from this new tool?

Drupal's theming system offers developers and designers a flexible way to override default HTML output when specific portions of the page are rendered. Everything from the name of the currently logged in user to the HTML markup of the entire page can be customized by a plugin "theme".Unfortunately, this system can be its own worst enemy. Themes are very powerful, but in many cases they're the only place where specific output can be changed without hacking core.

Inspired by Laura's recent post, I decided it would be fun to run some of the data from DrupalModules.com through Wordle.So, I wrote a script to parse the entire collection of released Drupal modules. Over 2000 descriptions, written by hundreds of different module developers, were analyzed. This image shows the top 150 words used in the module descriptions, sized according to frequency.Unfortunately, Wordle outputs fairly small images. Fortunately, I figured out a way around that.

Planning to make the switch from Joomla to Drupal?

The next Ottawa Drupal Meetup is Wednesday, June 11th, at 5:30pm. The location is the same as last time, The James Street Pub, at 390 Bank St.The last meetup was lots of fun, we had about 20 people show up. If you're planning to come, head over to the Ottawa Drupal Group and click the "signup" button.read more

I recently evaluated ExpressionEngine for viability as a CMS replacement for Drupal. ExpressionEngine (EE) is a commercial CMS tool built on PHP and mySQL by EllisLab. A client of ours was attracted to its clean interface, built-in features, and expandability.I was impressed by the well-designed UI and the flexibility of EE's templating engine. There are definitely lessons the Drupal community can learn from their attention to detail.

Building a Drupal module from scratch can be remarkably simple -- just create an .info file, create a .module file, then implement a few functions like hook_menu and hook_nodeapi. In no time, you've got a module up and running, leveraging Drupal's APIs and adding functionality to your site.The problemUnfortunately, things can get a bit more complicated if your module needs to store and maintain its own collection of data.

Various attempts at "fingerprinting" a Drupal site have been tried in the past, none of which are completely fool-proof.These range from *super* easy stuff like checking for CHANGELOG.txt to checking the source for a reference to "drupal.css" (Drupal 4.7) to checking for common paths like taxonomy/term/1, and /user, (which might be aliased to something else with something like Pathauto/Path Redirect module), and so on.However, since Drupal 4.6, there's a super geeky trick you can use to fingerpr

Learning Drupal 6 Module Development is a new book from Packt Publishing, written by Matt Butcher. The book is aimed at Drupal users who know PHP and want to learn module development.I was one of the Technical Reviewers for this book, so I've had a digital copy for a while, but my final hard copy just arrived today, and I must say, it's quite cool to see my name in print!

Yesterday Garland got a long-overdue update: The page.tpl.php file was updated to use best practices. Now we can finally open up Garland in a workshop scenario and not have to use it as example of the bad practices within a .tpl.php file. This article applies to Drupal 6 and higher, though the theming principles apply to all versions of Drupal.What's this about best practices?

Drupal has a lot of forms to fill out and not all of them may be just the way you want or need them to be. Modifying forms is a topic that is often met with groans but once you understand the two methods to accomplish the task and the basic, underlying concepts, it really isn't that hard to do at all. You'll be a form-modifying, input-customizing wiz in no time.