Drupal Newsletter for April, 2006

Welcome to Spring! Welcome to warmer days, green grass, BBQ season, days at the beach, picnics and Drupal 4.7. Yup, that's right Drupal 4.7. Now, before you go scouring for a link to the tarballs, let me warn you, there are none, yet. (for those of you on the opposite side of the globe, who will soon be up to your ears in snow, we sympathize, we're just beginning to feel our ears again up here :) ).

Thanks to the feverish work of many Drupal developers Drupal 4.7 should be released shortly, and all the hyped-about features, the AJAX, the better caching; all that Drupalistic goodness, will be yours.

In the Dev Zone of this issue (yeah, we changed section names again...) Karoly (aka. chx) has outlined his list of the top new developers who made this release possible, but this is no where near a complete list. On behalf of the Drupal community we thank every person who gave a line of code or a good suggestion, filed a bug report or said a kind word to the developers. Without you, well, there probably wouldn't be a 4.7.

I'd also like to thank all those that responded to the Drupal.org frontpage post asking for articles and personal experiences; thanks to the great response we have enough articles to begin on our next issue as well! As always, we still want to hear from you. Drop us a line at the official contact form. Read on for the complete Drupal Newsletter!

Happy Spring!
Robin Monks.
Drupal Marketing Coordinator

In this issue...

  • User Space
    • The Path to Drupal – Read how one Drupal user came from the early days of the web, to finding and using Drupal.
    • Preventing Content Spam – Hate Spam? Find out how the Spam module can help keep your site Spam-free!
    • The Drupal Experience of Donny Nyamweya - Read how iDonny uses Drupal for web development.
  • Drupal Sightings
    • Drupal @ SpeedGeek – Drupal was used in 5 out of 11 featured open source projects at SpeedGeek, and Simon Pavitt was there.
    • FP Passport – Find out how and why FP Passport uses Drupal
  • Dev Zone
    • The story of Drupal 4.7 – Get to see some of the new faces behind Drupal 4.7.

User Space
The Path to Drupal

Once upon a time, in the dark ages of the internet when only heretics used a WYSIWIG thingy-ma-jig and it took a degree in astro-physics to build a decent web site, I stumbled across a funky little beast of a laptop.

Thus it was, equipped with a 28K modem, my journey of World Wide Web discovery began. I happened across a little website called Geocities and set myself up with a free account. You have to understand, this was pre-internet-bubble days when Geocities was groundbreaking and Yahoo! was what you shouted when you were excited.

I signed up for everything free, and believe me, back in those days, everything was free -- hundreds of email addresses, as many free web site accounts as I could find. Then, the acronym assault began: HTML, DHTML, CSS, CGI, LOL and TTYL. When I asked what it all meant, I was told to RTFM!

So, I did what any self respecting internet newbie should do. I bluffed my way through it. I dibbled with this and dabbled with that. Somehow, a few years of my life disappeared with no access to the latest acronyms. My free accounts either had their dot com bubbles burst, or they got gobbled up into obscurity. Suddenly, I found myself unable to bluff anymore. I had to get serious.

I found myself faced with new acronyms. PHP, ASP and SQL were the new buzz words. Static websites were a piece of cake as WYSIWIG editors had progressed to such a point where respectable web developers and designers were using them. Photoshop even had a few nifty features to play with.

Static web sites put the developer in a bind though. Do you train the client or do you offer to do the updates yourself? When your workload becomes higher, the updates get slower and customers get tetchy. Things just become a messy pain in the rear.

One new buzz word popped up a few times before I took any notice and that was CMS. My first dip into the CMS foray was with the much-hacked and much-forked PHP Nuke. I didn’t know anything about PHP or database-driven sites, but hey, I’d bluffed my way through things this far, why stop now? So feet-first I went into my nuke-fork driven site and learned a little bit about not a lot. Hey, I got it working, and it did what I wanted, and that was enough for me.

In the back of my mind though, I knew there had to be more. Then one day, I’m not even sure how, I stumbled across this thing called Drupal. I became a lurker and hung around the forums to feel the vibe, and the vibe was good. A good many months went by before I took the plunge and downloaded a copy of the latest stable release. Weeks went by before I installed it.

I got a little nervous at first because the installation instructions weren’t as easy as I was used to. There weren’t any magic widgets that did all the dirty stuff for me. Luckily, I had learned enough from the nuke-fork days to get myself a basic install up and running. Then there were the modules, I pretty much downloaded everything that had a cool sounding name and bunged it in there. What struck me at this point was that, although instructions were lacking, I hadn’t actually had any major difficulties yet. Everything seemed intuitive and, to me, logical.

Everything was where it should be, with modules in the modules folder and themes in the themes folder. One thing that begun to dawn on me was that, out of the box, Drupal did many things very well. Then I started switching modules on, and wow, it did even more things. The unnecessary complexity of the nuke-fork site I had been working with suddenly became a great waste of my life. I wanted to scrap several months’ worth of work and start again with my new-found Drupal bluffing skills.

I’m not a qualified programmer by any means. I’m not even an unqualified programmer. I see a manual and my eyes start to burn like a vampire who’s just seen a garlic covered crucifix. Yet somehow, Drupal just seemed to work for me. I look at the forums and I see much Drupal bashing and I can’t understand it. Here is a powerful tool being given to the web community; a product of the sweat and tears of many dedicated programmers.

I’m not saying that there’s nothing wrong with it. Drupal has a lot of things that don’t appeal to all, but the beauty is in the way in which other functionality can be integrated into it with relative ease. Somehow, I understand it. There is a beauty to its simplicity. Simplicity is an unfortunate word to use as it so powerful and complex in delivering its simplicity.

Now I’m supposed to figure out what AJAX is all about.

Mark Ashmead

Preventing Content Spam

Spam! We all hate it when it turns up in our email inboxes, and it's just as annoying on our websites when it appears in comments, trackbacks, or posts.

Fortunately, if you use Drupal, your worries are over. I've been using the Drupal spam module on my website at townx.org for about a year, and it's fantastic! It combines multiple algorithms, including Bayesian filtering which gets better the more you use it, blacklisting of spammer
URLs, blacklisting by IP address, and custom filtering by regular expressions.

It is highly configurable, allowing you to automatically delete spam, delete spam after a certain number of hours, send emails to notify comment posters if their comment is treated as spam, etc. Recently, the
functionality has been extended to trackbacks too, making it even more essential. I recommend you get hold of it at the Drupal module page for the Spam module. Thanks go to Jeremy, http://drupal.org/user/409, for creating the Spam module :).

Elliot Smith
[ http://townx.org ]

The Drupal Experience of Donny Nyamweya

I first encountered Drupal when it was availed by my hosting provider in early 2004. I had previously evaluated and used other GPL and commercial CMS applications. It took time to get up to speed in Drupal in comparison with simpler CMS applications such as Mambo/Joomla, and Magnolia which lack in flexibility.

However, Drupal is easier to understand and is more feature-complete when compared to more complex and 'bloated' CMS applications from the likes of Microsoft and Vignette. Drupal's flexibility, apparent complexity, and ability to be configured and tweaked for virtually unlimited uses have facilitated its continued use in all my web projects.

As a web production manager by employment and a freelance CMS consultant, Drupal's flexibility, constantly growing toolkit of modules, and vibrant user community are priceless in implementing this CMS. The daily use and maintenance of Drupal-based websites has enabled me to regularly support new members of the Drupal community, my small way to show appreciation for this valuable infrastructure.

Donny Nyamweya
[ http://www.cmsproducer.com ]

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Drupal Sightings
Drupal @ SpeedGeek

Drupal featured heavily in the SpeedGeek demonstration section of the open source 'Penguin Day' in Seattle on March 25, 2006. As part of the NonProfit Technology Conference, they gave 11 projects relevant to the nonprofit sector the opportunity to highlight their work in 5 minutes while the other participants circulated around the demonstrations, learning a bit about each one.

Of these 11 projects, it was significant that 5 made use of Drupal in one way or another:

Along with CivicSpace and CivicActions, who contributed to other parts of the day, these projects show that there now seems to be an ecology of Drupal projects which complement and build on one another and which are combining to help Drupal become the first candidate when selecting a CMS for a non-profit project.

Simon Pavitt
[ http://www.headware.co.uk ]

FP Passport

FP Passport is a blog by the editors of Foreign Policy magazine. Here you can read about the bread-and-butter foreign policy issues of the day -- Iraq, the spread of nuclear weapons, energy dependence, etc. -- as well as under-the-radar stories and angles unearthed from a wide range of sources in America and abroad.

We chose Drupal to power this site for its extensibility and large set of built-in features. More importantly, we chose Drupal for the strong international community surrounding the project.

Thanks Drupal community!
Thomas R. Stec

Dev Zone
The story of Drupal 4.7

There is a tale to be told about Drupal 4.7, namely about the people who have joined the community in the last year. It's not like the old hats have not worked hard but, well, that's expected from us (hey! now I am an
old hat!), right?

This is the way I see things. Others probably would emphasize on other people or other aspects. So if you are not listed here, that means nothing more than you are not in this list. So, without much further ado, the
people:

Wesley Tanaka

Wesley (wtanaka) from China has only been with us for 19 weeks. He sometimes patches, but it's not the patches we love him for. Since the release of the first beta of Drupal 4.7 in the beginning of December, he has opened no less than 136 issues against the Drupal project. No one else even comes close to this number. Please, please keep it coming!

Markus Petrux

Markus from Spain also joined 19 weeks ago. His nick is the same as his real name: markus_petrux. He is the second behind Wesley with the issues -- since beta one, no less than 92. To put these numbers into perspective, the third one comes in with 50 and only eight people are above 20. Also, he persists for the betterment of Drupal's security. Thanks for the persistance and your patience with me!

Karthik Kumar

He is from India and with us for almost a year. On IRC we know him as |gatsby| and on Drupal.org as Zen. I had complained to the devel list in January that the form API conversion of core was not of uniform quality because those that converted the core were learning and forming the form API at the same time they were converting the core. Now, Karthik changed that. He almost singlehandedly filed off most raw edges from the form API conversion. I had thought it would have taken another release and a legion of people before this work was done. Well, Karthik did it!

Earl Milles

His nick is merlinofchaos, and he is indeed a wizard from USA who joined 39 weeks ago. Maybe his core work is not among the biggest, but I am sure that his modules will be immensely popular for 4.7. Views, for example is an infinitely configurable module which lets you control how lists of content (nodes) are presented. And there is the node access arbitrator which lets you use two node access modules together. And... Give him some more donuts!

Chad Philips

He has been known as hunmonk for 48 weeks (with this nick, a bit less because in the beginning he used thehunmonkgroup for his nick) and is from the USA. His understanding of the innards of form API is among the best. The project module you use to file issues would not be 4.7 compliant without him. Nor would be form API be able to handle that... Thanks for pestering me with all those multipage problems with form API!

Angie Byron

She is from Canada and joined us 43 weeks ago; we know her as webchick. She was participating in the Summer of Code. Back in July, when Drupal.org was down, she drew the frowning Druplicon, and since then she showers us with nice graphics based on our beloved Druplicon. The married Druplicon couple on the front page was also by her. But that's not enough -- she is into documenting and programming too, synchronized the handbook and the help pages in Drupal, and made most of the form API documentation. Oh, and in case you have not noticed: the truly hilarious 4.7RC announcement is also her work.

Richard Archer

Richard lives in Australia and joined us 29 weeks ago. He was a real surprise: he became the menu maintainer in almost no time. The menu system is our most complex subsystem, and yet he mastered it in no time and provided a lot of good and important patches. Alas, he does not frequent the IRC development channel, nor has he come to DrupalCon, so I know little of him. Let's hope we meet someday.

Daniel O'Pry

We know him as dopry; he is 48 weeks "old" with us and currently residing in the USA. With Kjartan missing since August and walkah busier than...well...walkah, we were in a desperate situation regarding bugs in the file subsystem and the upload module. When all hope had faded, dopry took up the torch and put all those bugs to fire. Great work, Daniel!

Karoly Negyesi,
[ http://drupal4hu.com ]

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