build2be/com/e something is going on over there

In developing an affiliate marketing website with Drupal recently, I was in need of an Advertisement module where I could control advertisement in different sections of the site, randomly display with multiple ads, and to view statistics on impressions and clicks as well as a few other things. I found the module I was looking for called simply the Advertisement Module for Drupal.

The ad module is a powerful advertising system for Drupal-powered websites. It supports the random display and tracking of graphical (banner) and text ads. Ads can easily be displayed in themes, blocks, or embedded in site content. The module records comprehensive statistics about when and how often ads are viewed and clicked, including a plug-in module for generating graphical time-based reports. Ads can be assigned to multiple owners, each of which can be assigned their own set of permissions. Installation is simple by design. An API is provided allowing the development of additional
functionality and integration with other Drupal modules.

read more

Our Devroom request for FOSDEM2009 has just been confirmed so we’ll have a mini Drupal track, just like last year.

Mark your calendar: Sunday Feb 8, 2009 – Brussels – FOSDEM Drupal Devroom

The acceptance of our proposal is clear sign of the confidence the FOSS universe has in Drupal, and the importance that is attributed to both the Drupal project and the surrounding community.

Thanks FOSDEM crew!

• Fan all-star voting
• Fan favorite award
• Greatest captain sweepstakes

If you build quality sites that attract a large number of visitors and interaction there eventually will come a point when you have to start looking for ways to offload your files and bring down your server overhead. I have been looking into the CDN issue off and on for the past 6 months. Recently I decided it was time to get something dialed in and move forward. I wanted something that required the least number of hacks and was easy and scalable. This post isn't meant to be an end all to Drupal and CDNs, but rather just some insight into the way I have tackled this issue for the time being.

read more

We just got confirmation that Drupal has a DevRoom at Fosdem on Sunday February 8, 2009.

If you live somewhere in Europe (at least if it's in the 1000km area around Brussels), make sure to block this weekend in your agenda. Not only for the Drupal DevRoom on Sunday, but also to meet the other 4000 people and tens of intresting Open Source projects at the conference.

As posted a few weeks ago, Drupal has a history at Fosdem; so let's make this one another one to remember...

We will use the Fosdem groups at g.d.o. to discuss the presentations, and practical stuff like transportation, and stuff to do on Saturday or Friday night.

Hope to see you this Wednesday, December 3rd for the Northern Virginia Drupal Meetup at 6:30 PM. We’ve moved the venue to Ireland Four Courts which is conveniently located in courthouse on the orange line. We’ll be in the back room.

This month, we will talk about scaling Drupal using Amazon Web Services.

Eric Johnson of The Case Foundation and Frank Febbraro of Phase2 Technology will lead us through their experience with: types of services, the providers, planning, preparing your Drupal site, preparing the AWS environment, writing scripts, testing and lessons learned.

read more

Catching up on some blog reading today I picked up on a thread Dave Winer's been writing about. He's using ImageMagick to resize images and produce thumbnails. Throughout the thread I kept thinking this sounds a lot like a standalone version of the Drupal imagecache module. Perhaps, I thought, the answer could be setting up a Drupal site to do the conversion. Nah that's too much I said to myself.

However, the more I thought about it the more sense it made. Then I got to today's post where Winer mentions a small web server for doing the work. "I'm still bugged that: 1. It seems slower than it should be. 2. A window flashes every time it creates a thumbnail," Winer says in the post. OK this is the prefect situation for building a one-off clone of imagecache. The next paragraph says, however, that he doesn't want to build it in PHP as it's another language to pick up.

read more

Drupal for Education and E-Learning is now available from Packt Publishing. This book covers Drupal 6, and describes how to build a community site to support teaching and learning. This book is designed for people new to Drupal, with no prior development experience. The hands-on, step-by-step instructions guide you through installing Drupal, configuring contributed modules and themes, and working with some of Drupal’s most useful and powerful modules, including CCK, Views, and Organic Groups. The book also covers site maintenance, upgrades, and backups – these essential steps, while not as fun as site building, are essential for keeping your site and data secure.

Additionally, the book covers some of the basics of when to use different types of resources in the classroom. Frequently, people talk about incorporating video, or audio, or social bookmarks, etc, into the classroom, but they never discuss effective uses of these tools. While this book is not exhaustive in these discussions, I attempted to create some context around creative and effective use of the social web in a learning environment.

read more

DrupalMAO relaunched yesterday with a new Thanksgiving episode. Along with a new theme (that's still in development) they're also adopting a new concept. Instead of skimming the Drupal Planet for interesting posts themselves, Dave and Jerad are now using the Drupal Digest ranking system and talking about the most popular posts. So you can now have a say in what topics will be discussed in the next DrupalMAO by voting on your favorite posts!

read more

Content Construction Kit (CCK) is one the most important and at the same time most mystifying features of the Drupal platform. In this drop I'll provide a high level overview explanation of CCK and why you might want to use it on your site.

What is CCK?

CCK is a contributed module that allows you to:

1. Add fields to an existing Drupal content type
2. Create new custom content types

Drupal Content Types

It's important to understand a bit about Drupal content types. Drupal comes standard with blog, page and story content types. The main difference between these content types is the way they are organized by the system.

read more

If you are looking for a quick and easy module to embed videos from social video sites such as YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo etc. Then look no further than the Video Filter Module for Drupal. This is a highly flexible and easy extendable filter module to embed any type of video in your site using a simple tag. Included codecs for the module currently include:

• YouTube
• Google Video
• GodTube
• DailyMotion
• Eyespot
• Jumpcut
• Revver
• Vimeo

The module also includes some well written documentation for adding more codecs to the module if you need to.

read more

Drupal Camp Ireland (credit: Galooph)
The third ever Drupal Ireland meet-up took place on Saturday 15th November and it was a huge success. Over 70 people attended, which is an amazing 5 times more people than there was at our last event, just a few short 6 months ago!

When in Drupalcon Szeged, Heather and I saw how active other groups were in different countries and regions and thought "wouldn't it be great if we could build a Drupal community in Ireland?" So we decided to run a day long Drupal event in Dublin to promote Drupal and help grow our community.

read more

Over at the Acquia weblog, Jeff Whatcott is asking for people’s Drupal disaster stories. I asked a handful of people in the office what they would add to the list and before we knew it, we quickly had a decent list of avoidable disasters.

Building websites with Drupal can be like raising an unruly child that only does what it wants to do. We’re fond parents, however, and we love Drupal. Every item in this list is a usability issue, so we’ve posted this to the Top User Experience Improvements in Drupal 7 wiki page with the faith that D7 will play well with others and not bring as many people to tears.

read more

This video shows the user how to use the views module in Drupal 6 to create a page that list nodes with a certain taxonomy term. For the screencast I created a view that lists all of the nodes tagged with cck or views at http://www.learnbythedrop.com/cckandviews.

We are working on the specification for a module that will be able to integrate content from PubMed, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 18 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to 1948.

I found the following blog post written in 2003(?) that is talking about a PubMed module but I couldn't find it in the repository. I contacted the author, but I thought I could already post a first spec stump while I wait for his answer.

In a first use case we imagine the module could be used to auto-generate reference lists for scientist's profile pages:

read more

Recently I worked on a site that required a lot of modules, and when we moved it to our customer's production server it literally took seconds to load a page. Removing modules was not an option.

Many people would just say that Drupal is bloated and slow and leave it at that. Sure with a plain vanilla LAMP installation and loads of Drupal modules things can get slow. But don't let that discourage you.

The following are my favorite Drupal performance hacks, with their advantages and disadvantages:

read more

Robert Douglas, Peter Wolanin and I are scheming up what we hope to be a jaw dropping presentation of ApacheSolr + Drupal integration at DrupalCon DC. We’re going to show a prototype of d.o. and g.d.o hooked up the Apache Solr search server. We all know that d.o. and g.d.o. are notoriously hard to search through.

For instance, take this query:

http://drupal.org/search/node/views (searching for views).

read more