New Launchpad plugins for Drupal

Free software development is an essentially social activity and we’ve built Launchpad to help those interactions — both between people and projects — along the way.

By working on free software through Launchpad you build a picture not only of what you’ve done — reporting bugs, creating branches of code, etc. — but your team memberships can also show what roles you have in different free software communities.

Part of what we’ve been doing recently is to open Launchpad to make it far easier to use that information elsewhere; in particular, the web services API, the bug tracker plugin API and Launchpad becoming an OpenID provider.

Today we’re releasing two modules for Drupal 5.x under the AGPL:
openid-launchpad: delegate your Drupal site’s user authentication to Launchpad
openid-teams: assign Drupal roles to logged-in users based on their membership of specific Launchpad teams.

Using these modules, you can create a Drupal site that makes use of each person’s participation in your community, as reflected in Launchpad. For example, if you want to allow only members of a core development team to post release announcements to your project website all you need do is create a Drupal role with those permissions and then assign it to the Launchpad team of your project’s developers.

The Ubuntu Fridge news site is one of the first sites to use the modules. It passes user authentication to Launchpad and also grants an editor role to members of the Ubuntu Fridge Editors team in Launchpad.

To use the modules you’ll need to be running Drupal 5.x and also be using our modified version of the Drupal OpenID module (GPL). Full setup details are available in our help guide.

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Tips for Google CSE plugin for Drupal

Drupal, there are a few things you can do to make life easier for your visitors:
Add some rewrite rules (to the .htaccess file) to redirect requests for the old search engine to the new one. This can help visitors who know how Drupal works and were typing their search manually, etc.

RewriteRule ^search$ /search/google [R=301,NC,L]
RewriteRule ^search/node$ /search/google [R=301,NC,L]
RewriteRule ^search/node/(.*)$ /search/google?query=$1 [R=301,NC,L]
RewriteRule ^search/taxonomy_search$ /search/google [R=301,NC,L]
RewriteRule ^search/taxonomy_search/(.*)$ /search/google?query=$1 [R=301,NC,L]
Disable the built-in search engine module to reduce memory overhead and speed up page requests.

Use some CSS to hide the google.com background image added to the search boxes:
input.form-text {
background-image: none !important;
}
If you have custom search boxes replace them with code that calls the Google CSE engine, i.e.:



Put together this can make the GoogleCSE almost(*) completely transparent to your visitors.

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Creating the Student Blog in Drupal using Cloning

Blogging in Drupal encompasses a range of learning activities. When incorporated into a course as a regular part of the coursework, blogs provide an incredibly powerful means of tracking student growth. For students who are disorganized (that is, students whose backpacks resemble tumbleweed), the blog can also be an organizational tool. Most importantly, though, blogs create a record of student work that can be accessed at any time. As such, blogs provide a convenient window into both process (how students work) and product (the end results of student work). In this article Bill Fitzgerald, we will see how to create a student blog.

For the purpose of this article we will clone the already existing Teacher Blog and create the Student Blog.

Setting Up the Student Blog

To create the student blog, we need to do two things:

- Give users in the student role permissions over the blog post content type.
- Clone the teacher_blog view, and edit it to display student blog posts.

Assigning Permissions

To allow students to blog in the site, we need to allow users in the student role the ability to create blog posts. Click the Administer | User management | Roles link, or navigate to admin/user/roles. Click the link to edit permissions for the student role.

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Drupal: Making Life Easier with Installation Profiles

This is the first in a series of blog posts we'll be writing about Drupal, the open-source Web content management platform that I have come to know and love over the past year or so. If you have used Drupal, if you are evaluating different CMS solutions out there, or if you don't know what I'm talking about, read on and keep checking back for more posts about this popular and powerful community-driven software.

For this first post, I will skip over the question "What is Drupal?" and let you visit drupal.org to get some basic information for yourself. Once you have that, come on back...

OK. You're back. Let's get started.

So, what's the first thing you do with software? You install it. Right! This process for Drupal has a few requirements, which I will gloss over in this post, but if you've run any LAMP-based software, you should be good to go (see "Helpful Links" below). Now, whether you're new to Drupal or you've gone thru the installation process many (MANY) times, you should know that Drupal has a very helpful aspect built right into its core: Installation Profiles.

An installation profile "turns on" functionality and pre-configures a Drupal installation so that, instead of starting with a blank slate after install, you have a customized installation tailored to your needs and closer to being production-ready. For a developer, this is an ideal scenario - installation profiles help us eliminate redundancy in our work. Because, really, who wants to do the same ten or twenty tasks every time you start a new project? I sure as heck don't. Also, for a Drupal newcomer (welcome!), finding an installation profile can be helpful to jump-start your site.

Drupal has a directory of contributed installation profiles here. You may find a helpful profile in this list that fits the kind of site you want to build. However, if you don't find the perfect profile, or if you find one that's good but outdated, don't despair! Look for a similar profile, or go ahead and download the outdated one. Install Drupal using that profile, play around with it, and look at the list of modules used. From that pre-configured site, even if you don't end up keeping the installation, you will have an idea of the settings and modules you will want to use on your actual site.

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Drupal Wins Two Awards For Best CMS Of 2008

Drupal the open source CMS system has this year scooped two separate prestigious awards for Best CMS system of 2008, picking up both The Open Source CMS Award for 2008 along with the Packt Publishing Best PHP Open Source CMS for 2008.


The Drupal Association has announced that Drupal has won two prestigious Packt Publishing 2008 Open Source CMS Awards this week - the Overall 2008 Open Source CMS Award and the Best PHP Open Source CMS. This marks the second consecutive year that Drupal has won Packt Publishing’s Overall Open Source CMS award. In addition, on Monday, Packt Publishing recognized leading Drupal contributor Earl Miles as a 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valued Person (MVP). Drupal won the awards in both the popular vote and the judges selection.

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Drupal in Education and E-Learning Now Available

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.

On a related note, we have also decided to be more organized and systematic with regards to putting out occasional tutorials. They will be collected under the tutorials tag, and can be seen at http://funnymonkey.com/tutorials (or subscribed to via rss).

For people new to Drupal, Drupal in Education and E-Learning includes details on:

1.Drupal terminology;
2.User creation;
3.Role based access control;
4.Installing modules and themes;
5.Using taxonomy to categorize posts
6.Backing up and upgrading your site.

Using the menu and block system to simplify and streamline the navigation of your site.

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Updating Drupal 5 Modules to Drupal 6

About 5 months ago I was worried when the department I was working with in NYC was getting ready to migrate sites from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6. I had started working with Drupal during the late 4.6 days but wasn't really a developer until a few months into Drupal 5. Even then I was making beginner mistakes of hackng modules (but not core) to get my desired results.

Fast Forward 1 year and a few months, after hours of reading other people code, blog post, going to DrupalCamps, DrupalCons, and Lullabot trainings, I finally feel comfortable developing in Drupal 5. Of course this is all in relativity, you have modules like Views and Panels which remind you there is so much more to learn.

I moved onto a new position here in San Francisco right before major migrations started at the other company. I'm thinking "Phew, saved my ass from having to do that, more Drupal 5 sites here I come." But sure enough, after a few months the overwhelming power of Drupal 6 came along and of course this new platform I'm working with is needing to be upgraded.

Because the Drupal community is so awesome (understatement), a majority of contrib modules have already been migrated. We're basically building the platform from the ground up and eventually migrating old sites to the new platform when all custom pieces are in place and well tested. Till then we're able to release new sites based on Drupal 6 that aren't dependent on all features from the previous platform. The flexibility of this is great for numerous reasons and the person streamlining this process has done a great job of laying out the groundwork to build upon.

Custom modules appear to be the only things we needed to migrate to D6. It finally felt like enough time had been provided to learn the major changes that effect modules from D5 to D6. Well, it appears not much time was needed at all. With the assistance of Coder module, I began seeing a pattern of; change hook_menu, fix l() and url(), use menu_get_object(), hook_form_alter() with $form_states. I'm sure there's plenty more but these appeared to be most common.

So i'm gaining confidence in the types of changes being made using Coder for module upgrades. I've heard of a module called Deadwood that will do most of these changes automatically. After dropping a Drupal 5 module into a deadwood folder in the files directory clicking a few buttons a Drupal 6 module would magically appear in a goodwood folder. This worked great, the easy stuff that I was accustomed to was getting done and I would spend a just little more time using Coder to catch some things that were missed.

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Christmas Drupal Themes: Enjoy the Magic of Christmas!

With Christmas coming soon, many are thinking about how to decorate their web sites. As Drupal has grown in popularity, more and more people have started using it. But unfortunately, there are not so many choices of Christmas Drupal themes. We spent a great deal of time in searching them and were unpleasantly surprised. But nevertheless, we would like to bring to your notice some attractive professional Drupal themes created especially for this joyful holiday.

When selecting a theme it is probably best to consider the needs and preferences of your project. But if your main goal is to decorate your web pages, to meet the holiday in the proper way, to impress your customers and visitors or just create a festive atmosphere, then the following Drupal themes for Christmas will be right for you!

* * *
Christmas Drupal Template # 112

This stylish Christmas Drupal template will greatly work for beauty salons, fashion houses, boutiques, model agencies, design studios, fashion blogs, women’s portals, personal pages, online galleries and etc. The black background makes the template more elegant and powerful. It contrasts well with bright colors and makes the other colors stand out. The red color is used as an accent color, it brings text to the foreground. So, on the whole, the template looks bright and welcoming and evokes cheerful feelings.

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Piwik plugin for Drupal

If you are using Drupal to power your website, you may be interested by the Piwik Integration for Drupal plugin.

The module automatically adds the Piwik tracking code in your drupal website, as well as providing the following features:

- Selectively track certain users, roles and pages
- Monitor what files are downloaded from your pages
- Cache the Piwik code on your local server for improved page loading times
- Direct access to statistics in reports section (D6+) using Piwik widgets and API

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