Last year was one of the most exciting years for Drupal. We saw Drupal 5 mature into the powerful engine that it now is, and have spent the last few months anxiously awaiting the release of Drupal 6. The user base of Drupal.org has grown exponentially, to about 250,000 registered members presently, with about a thousand new users registering every day. The Drupal Association is positioning itself as a leader for the Drupal community, and has recently held its first General Assembly. We held the largest Drupalcon to date in Barcelona in the fall, and this spring we have the chance to do even better with Drupalcon Boston.

Contributed modules for Drupal have been phenomenal as well. In addition to the ongoing improvement of the basics such as CCK and Views, we have witnessed such ground-breaking contributions as Embedded Media Field (integrating third party media providers as node fields), Ubercart and a new-and-improved Ecommerce, and the newly released Theme Developer (touted as Firebug for Drupal).

Drupal has also come into its own on the Internet, and we are witnessing a revolution in the works. Drupal is being used for countless blogs, social networking sites, corporate and non-profit sites, ecommerce, and more.

The Drupal Newsletter Team is currently restructuring itself. Facilitated by the Drupal Groups (also a new phenomena from 2007), we are committing ourselves to consistently creating and promoting high quality news from the world of Drupal. We welcome you to join the ongoing discussions, and to volunteer as you are able to help us with future issues.

In this first issue for the new year, we will explore some of these themes. We're highlighting Drupalcon Boston, which will be held in early March. We have an interview with Greg Knaddison, who you might be more familiar with as Greggles. Warner Brothers Records recently launched their site to be powered by Drupal, and we present their case study here. We've reviewed several modules for this issue, and much more.

As the editors of the Drupal Newsletter, we thank you for reading this issue, and invite your feedback in our new format. We also want to thank the volunteers of the Newsletter Team, who are working hard to provide content for this great periodical.

The Editors

Drupalcon Boston

• Drupalcon is just around the corner. Sponsorships with improved benefits are available.
• Business and Job fair - Looking for Drupal talent, this is your best chance ever to hire Drupal experts. Want to win some new business. Monday, March 3rd 3-5PM, 2008
• Industry networking events - There will be a non-profit, education, media, news, government, and healthcare networking event Monday evening.
• Conference social - Acquia is a hosting a conference wide social at Felt, an upscale billards club with games, and a DJ.
• If you need help getting to Drupalcon, check out these posts on traveling to Boston inexpensively, and getting your boss to pay
• Showcase and case study contest - Help Drupal marketing by entering your best site into the showcase contest. If you've been meaning to write-up a case study, now's your chance to win some prizes.
• Tracks: The conference will have five tracks: Business and marketing, Design and User Experience, Site Building, Community and Core, Birds of a Feather.
• Sprint: On Friday we will be at MIT Strata center for the Drupal 7 sprint.

Announcements

• Drupal wins!
  Drupal was named as Overall Winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award by Packt Publishing earning a cool $5000 to help make sure we keep up the fantastic work.
• Drupal 6 RC 2 Released
  With the second candidate released earlier this month, Drupal 6 is nearly ready for production. The bug fixing continues and the critical issue queue is almost depleted, which bodes well the release of this highly anticipated version of the World's Best Open Source CMS. Amongst the improvements slated for the new version are better handling of different languages, theme system improvements, an improved installer, and support for OpenID.
  For more information go to http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0-rc2
• Drupal 4.11 and 5.6 Released
  New versions of Drupal are available and include important security updates and bugfixes. It is recommended that you update as soon as possible.
• The Drupal Association Requests DrupalCon Proposals
  Aspiring DrupalCon organizers are invited to submit their proposals for North American or European DrupalCons for 2008/2009. Details are available on their website.

Blog Posts of Note

In his post On Hiring Drupal Talent, Dries Buytaert, Drupal project lead, recently observed that the demand for Drupal developers at the present time exceeds the available talent. He asked, "(H)ow can we grow the pool of Drupal talent and help Drupal companies scale? But also, how can we raise the bar for Drupal professional services firms?" There are many interesting ideas worth reading in the comments.

Case Study

Warner Brothers Records rockin’ it with Drupal!Warner Brothers Records just launched their new web site which is now running on Drupal. The site is part of a Drupal multisite setup, created with help from Bryght to meet the needs of WBR and provides the ability for each of their artists’ sites to share the same Drupal codebase (Drupal v5, of course). All code revisions are managed with SVN on a SAMP (Solaris/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack with APC for caching (go open source!) The video files are delivered using the Akamai CDN network. There are some fun, unique features so be sure to check out the draggable node panel and the nice jquery/interface/ajax(ahah) artist slider! This writeup explains some of the information and details on the setup, modules, content types, and custom parts. The site was designed by Prod and the site setup, customizing and theme done by Chris and Sarva Bryant from Alian Design. Warner Bros. Records provides their own hosting and infrastructure, maintained by in-house tech geeks Ethan Kaplan and Shaun Haber.

The Drupal Dojo

The Drupal Dojo is a group focused on teaching people about Drupal. Every Sunday, we bring in an experienced Drupaler to give a presentation using a VNC (where their screen is broadcast live), TeamSpeak, so we can hear them explain things as they go, and IRC, for questions.

Often there’s so much Drupal content out there, be it in the API or the handbook, that it’s very difficult to know where to start looking – the dojo session helps break it down into manageable chunks. And when the teachers hit problems, we can see them debug their code live, helping us understand the debug techniques that are so instinctive to some and so obscure to the rest of us.

We’ve had some important members of the drupal community explain the modules they’ve built – we had chx, writer of the new hook_menu and much of forms API give a presentation on the forms API. We’ve had the writer of views, merlinofchaos, give a session, and we’ve had (Kreynen), one of the major contributors to the tinyMCE module, explain the new version in detail. If you listen to the Lullabot podcasts, they interviewed the dojo creator Josh Koenig about it, and they were really positive about it.

And although we’re focusing on learning, we also end up having a lot of fun – in term of the IRC channels, we’re a social gathering point between #drupal-support and #drupal itself. We hang out, we share work, we learn!

Feature: Getting Drupal Done

Drupal is constantly moving forward, and the community of users and developers is growing. There are issue queues to process, patches to test, questions in the forums, discussions in IRC, email threads to read, sites to launch, sites to upgrade, bugs to fix... How does one person keep up with it all? The answer is, one person doesn't. Drupal's success - and the success of the individuals involved in Drupal - is linked to its community, and all the small and not-so-small acts that individuals perform everyday to make Drupal great.

There are a number of folks in the Drupal community that "get it" and make consistent contributions. The following interview is dedicated to uncovering a few of the tips, tricks and practices used by one of those individuals to Get Drupal Done.

Greg Knaddison, aka greggles

What sort of work do you do with Drupal?

My time is split between working on the modules I maintain and working on site development. Maintaining modules I spend about half my time reading issues and half writing code, testing code, and making actual commits. When doing site development I spend my time understanding client needs, communicating with clients, architecting sites, configuring web servers, configuring the Drupal interface, theming Drupal's output, and actually writing code. Those lists are both in order of frequency of tasks, so as you can see I spend most of my time reading/writing and not so much actually coding!

What sort of work do you do on Drupal?

Due to the nature of Drupal most sites tend to be community focused sites. However, I've built a couple random web applications with Drupal which is really fun.

Describe how Drupal fits into your average workday.

Since I'm traveling so much these days, my basic routine is currently out the window! For the next year I'm traveling through Spain and Argentina with questionable internet access. So, I try to batch things up and use my network time as efficiently as possible. I make great use of Thunderbird's offline mode, Google Reader offline, and local development environments.

When I'm at home or in the office I do tend to follow a cycle of "email and RSS, get a todo item from the list, implement item, repeat". The "list" of todo items may be a module issue queue or something from our internal work tracking system, or occasionally a frantic email, but that's the basic workflow. I find that by having a pattern and a set of goals in mind before starting a work session that I can then be very productive about getting into the "flow" of work.

How do you organize your workspace?

My workspace is my laptop. That's all that I've got, but it works for me. Being an InsprionE1705 (17" monitor) it's practically a workspace unto itself. It's a dual-boot Windows/Ubuntu machine right now and I spend 98% of my time in Ubuntu.

When I have a desk, I tend to make a big mess of notes, food, cups, and gadgets around my computer and then clean that up at the end of the day.

Describe your development environment (hardware, OS, software). Any favorites regarding productivity?

I've decided that I'd rather have a heavy and overpowered laptop than a travel laptop and a desktop. That way I can work from anywhere which usually means home/office/client time, but now means hotel rooms, parks, and cafes!

I make heavy use Xemacs, cvs/svn, Firefox (and firebug), and all the best parts of the command line. The real benefit of using a tool like Xemacs is that whether I'm working locally or via remote shell on a server half-way around the world I've got my favorite editor available. It makes me far more efficient when taking care of production machines.

How do you keep up with Drupal news and developments? What practices do you use to keep from getting bogged down or distracted?

In general though I put everything I can into RSS via Google Reader and digest all my information there. That includes 25 different Drupal related feeds and probably 30 more technology/web feeds. It's the best system I've found to stay up to date on the topics. I get information about new issues for the modules I maintain, Drupal planet, all sorts of great stuff.

I also read basically all the mailing lists. I use GMail for the mailing lists which does a great job of allowing me to quickly ignore entire threads. I read and use the issue queue and groups.drupal.org but not the forums very often.

Any tips and tricks regarding Drupal productivity?

Two words: Command. Line. The ability to do use tools like wget, tar, find, grep, cvs, sed, awk, and to use them locally or on a remote server has been the best thing I've learned in my life.

Beyond that, Firefox's "Find as you type" feature and the Hotkey module make navigating any Drupal site several times faster.

Share your biggest "breakthrough" or "ah-ha" moment regarding working within the Drupal community.

Modules are easy to write. Seriously. It was actually the module_builder module which made me realize that. Oh, and reading the Pro Drupal Development book then took my understanding to a whole new level. That book is amazing. Realizing that (and learning to make patches) makes life easier when a module doesn't do exactly what you need. You then patch the part that's broken and submit that back to the community or just write your own module.

Any advice for newbie developers on how to Get Drupal Done?

Just to approach your work with a scientific mindset and be methodical. It seems to me that people often will install twenty modules, tweak all the settings, and then wonder why their site is broken. Do one thing (or one set of things) at a time and use a test site. Then once you are happy promote the smallest possible set of changes to your production environment.

Many thanks to Greg.

Events

DrupalCon Barcelona was held September 19-22 in Barcelona, Spain. Read the wrap-up or view presentations, notes and videos.

Groups

¡Bienvenido al grupo de usuarios de Drupal de Cuba!http://groups.drupal.org/cuba

Media

• Drupal Joins 'Go PHP 5' Movement
• http://gophp5.org
• http://stopphp5.org

Modules

• Fivestar
  The Fivestar is a great module if you want to enable ratings on your site's content. Powered by Voting API, once installed, you may configure and customize any content type, including comments, to allow users to rate. It comes packaged with several rating icon packs, including stars, hearts, flames and more, and is easy to configure with your custom rating icons. The installation is a breeze, and the documentation is thorough. The administration screens are simple to understand, and it mimics the functionality users expect when submitting ratings. This module is a must for a social networking site.

• Ohloh
  Speaking of ratings, Ohloh is a site that tracks developers and programmers of Open Source projects, such as Drupal. You can see your standing amongst giants like dries or killes, and proudly toot your own horn with this module.

• Top Node
  Top Node lets you set up custom URL paths that display the first node from a view. This allows you to set up a URL like news/today or comics/latest or even blog/random whose node changes based on the content listed in the selected view.

• Views Slideshow
  Slide shows aren't just for images anymore! An add-on to Views, this module will turn any content view into a jQuery slide show. When setting up a view to display nodes, you'll have a drop-down box in the View Type select box, where you will see options for your Slideshow type. With a few tweaks to your stylesheet, you'll be off and going in no time. For some demonstrations, you can see slide shows of Photos, Video, and even Audio clips.

Resources

• Drupal School: The Art Lab has some great, short video tutorials of tasks like adding regions to themes, themeing in general, and more seem to be added regularly. Editor Elliott Rothman makes great use of various capture techniques to ensure that the video is easy to follow. You'll learn just as much about screencasting as you will about Drupal.
• The tongue-in-cheek approach might throw you off the track at first, but there's a lot of useful stuff in the Drupal group Drupal for Evil. For example, I was just pointed to two great pieces of information by pwolanin on the Form API through posts by Moshe and webchick. It's great Drupal info mixed in with a thirst for ruling the world; what could be more fun?
• Drupal for Seasoned Professionals is a "Quick Guide to Code and Community" penned by Greg Knaddison of PingVision. It lives up to its name by giving a rather comprehensive overview of the community and its development practices - all the things a proficient developer comes to learn within 6-12 months of coming to Drupal.

CREDITS

Michael Samuelson (mlsamuelson)
Trevor Twining (trevortwining)
Greg Knaddison (greggles)
Hayley (niuserre)

Aaron Winborn (aaron)