It’s been hectic here, as is evidence by our late release. But don’t worry; we think you’ll find it’s worth it. We’ve also got a new newsletter management system powered by the simplenews module. We hope you’ll enjoy the new look.

Speaking of late, the freeze that was scheduled for last month still hasn’t happened, apparently as the lead developers wait for more cool stuff to get into the release. Let’s hope they get it done soon.

A major vulnerability was also found in flexinode module. Please go to http://drupal.org/node/32940 to see if you are affected. Don’t forget to subscribe to the security announcements mailing list to receive the latest updates http://drupal.org/security .

In other news, Neil Drumm has left CivicSpace Labs. In an email sent on Monday Neil said “The CivicSpace development team under Kieran's leadership is doing quite well and will continue to produce good software without me.” We hope all goes well with you Neil and best of luck in your new haunts!

Well, I don’t want to keep you from this month’s issue any longer, let’s begin!
Robin Monks,
Editor

In this issue...

• Upcoming Events – Find out what events are coming up for Drupal lovers.
• Drupal Interview – This month's interview with Robert Douglass.
• Summer of Code Projects – A look over what happened this summer.
• Drupal Development Quickies – What have the developers thought up this month?
• Drupal Tips – How to make Drupal do things you didn't think it could.
• Featured Site: Underlining Einstein – See what makes this month's features site tick.
• Case Study: HR Highway – Find out why HR Highway chose Drupal for their site.

Upcoming Events
Linux World Expo

Join us at the LinuxWorldExpo in London, Olympia, October 5-6, to learn about Drupal and meet face to face with other drupalers. We will be presenting the .Org village alongside Mozilla Europe, opensourcematters.org (formerly known as Mambo), Debian, Gentoo, OpenBSD and a lot of other great projects. More information at http://drupal.org/conference-london-2005.

Euro-OSCON

Much like the very successful meeting of Drupalers at O'Reilly's OSCON in the USA, the Drupal community will be hosting a conference during Euro-OSCON in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. This event will take place from October 16 to October 20 and will be both within the OSCON conference (paid) and separate from the OSCON conference (free).

The goals of the mini Drupal conference will be:

• to meet up with fellow Drupal coders and users,
• promote Drupal by showing off the power of the code and the community to the OSCON people,
• connect with other Open Source Software projects and
• ... just have a good time!

(Gaining world dominance is just something we do in-between.)

Watch the page at Drupal.org for the latest updates on our agenda. We will be discussing three important issues: the code (release cycle, new features), the infrastructure (the new hardware, the new infra team) and the community (promotion of Drupal, starting the foundation, revamping the module hosting and display).

You are encouraged to come to this event; we will try to organize a cheap hotel or place to stay for the Drupal people. So even when not attending Euro-OSCON, you can enjoy Amsterdam and meet with fellow Drupal coders. Bar Camp will also be taking place directly after Euro-OSCON http://www.barcamp.org/index.cgi?BarCampAmsterdam . The list of persons that will attend these meetings can be found at http://drupal.org/profile/conference-amsterdam-2005 . If you want to come as well, make sure to edit your profile at http://drupal.org/user/.

Bert Boerland will be coordinating this event. If you are willing to help him out, contact him at http://drupal.org/user/188/contact . If you want to discuss broader issues, please use the conference mailing list, http://lists.drupal.org/listinfo/drupal-con . Any feedback regarding the place, the agenda or potential sponsors is greatly appreciated. But most of all make sure to be in Amsterdam on October 16th!

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Drupal Interview

This month Robin Monks will be interviewing Robert Douglass about his Drupal involvement, Google Summer of Code (SoC) and his expectations.

Robert was originally an orchestral musician from Michigan, and moved to Germany to marry a German woman and play the French Horn. He taught himself to program while riding the train to rehearsal, and when he decided to switch careers, he became a Java developer working in the field of content management. Since then he has done ABAP, Struts, and Jython programming for companies like Daimler-Chrysler, Aventis and Cognis. He then found Drupal and put all that other stuff aside. For more information on Robert, visit his website at RobsHouse.net .

Robin Monks: When did you first start using Drupal?

Robert Douglass: I started using Drupal nearly two years ago. I was searching for software to run a blog, and somebody said that the taxonomy feature of Drupal was hot, so I tried it. For a while I didn't delve any deeper as I didn't even know PHP back then. Eventually, though, I wanted to change some things, and that's when I looked under the hood, at the code, for the first time. What I saw, I liked, and I learned how to program PHP in order to be able to work with Drupal.

When did you first actively "get involved" with the community?

I became involved in the community in the typical manner; by needing help and support. There were certain features (like MP3 support) that I wanted, but was missing, and the task of learning PHP and Drupal simultaneously meant I was looking for help quite often. The real breakthrough, however, came in Antwerp in February. That's when I met lots of other Drupal developers for the first time. The feeling in Antwerp was so "right" that I came home and quit my job in order to become a full-time Drupal freelancer.

OK, you've been quite active in the community so what do you feel was your biggest project with Drupal?

The biggest way that I have contributed so far has been the Google Summer of Code project. When Google announced the program, they gave the world less than a full day to respond and apply for participation. I thought it would be a great idea to do, so I took the initiative and applied on Drupal's behalf (with Dries' blessing). The program was a success, and the extent to which Drupal has benefited could not have been foreseen.

Exactly how many participants were there in SoC?

Google was gracious and awarded our project 11 stipends. The projects were very exciting and the students involved were a dynamic and diverse bunch. Of the 11 projects, 10 finished, and the contributions that were made to Drupal are enormous. I think it is important to step back and list all of the ways that we have benefited from Google's generosity:

1. Our participation in SoC brought a flood of new visitors to our website.
2. Half of the students involved had never worked with Drupal before. Google brought them to us.
3. We have 10 new modules or significant pieces of code to be thankful for.
4. Virtually all of the students have gone on to make major contributions in code, support and documentation even after the program has ended.
5. We will be getting $5,000 from Google to promote Drupal in various ways.
6. We have been featured in publications like The Economist and soon on RedHerring.com; this is great publicity.

That's really a great amount of code! Do you know if any of the students will continue to volunteer or be contracted to continue working on Drupal?

Indeed, that is already the case. Several students have continued to refine their SoC work. I expect to see at least a couple of the students in Amsterdam at the upcoming EuroOSCON event. I also know that Angie Byron (webchick) has been working as a Drupal freelancer virtually full-time since SoC ended, and is even being paid to continue work on her project, the quiz module.

Do you think Google has (or feels like the have) more "pull" on the project now that they've donated so much money to Drupal?

Google has played the role of the benevolent benefactor perfectly. They appear to be completely satisfied with their efforts without feeling the need to make the results directly relevant to their own business plans. I really get the feeling that they are trying to foster a healthy environment for free software and massive participation from the upcoming generation of techno-gurus.

So, what will become of the SoC money?

We have exciting things planned for the SoC money, and in fact some of it has already been spent. If you remember, back in August we released Drupal 4.6.3 to close another security issue involved with the XML-RPC library. The problems were all originating with the PEAR library that we had adapted for use with Drupal, and we decided to switch to a different library that was smaller, cleaner, less prone to security issues, and easier to use. Karoly Negyesi integrated the new library in order to make the release happen, and he will get paid for his work with money from Google. This is a great service to Drupal and we can be thankful both to Google and to Karoly for this great code.

The second thing that we are going to do with the money is hold a theme competition. An official announcement will come soon, but the basic idea is that there will be a submission period followed by judging, and the winners will receive cash prizes. This will hopefully put a lot of attention on Drupal theming and motivate people to get involved in new ways.

After that we'll have a little left over that will be used either for financing the efforts to make a Drupal Foundation, or to sponsor more useful code for Drupal core.

Do you expect to see any other good will offerings to Drupal (or free software as a whole for that matter) from large corporations?

I do expect it. I feel that the future health of large corporations is directly linked to free software, worldwide collaboration, open standards, and the public perceptions that accompany these ideals.

So, now that SoC is over, what do you feel will be your next big project in the community?

The big thing for me at the moment is the book that I am writing about Drupal. The publisher, Apress, wants to have it on the shelves by December, which means we are in the final stages of writing and editing. The book, "Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress", will cover installing and configuring Drupal, core modules, several important contributed modules, theming, and advanced techniques such as multi-site.

What do you think will be Drupal's next big step?

I think with the upcoming release of 4.7 we will attract a whole new wave of users and organizations that find great value in what we are doing. We've already built up a nice reputation for the quality of our work, but 4.7 is unlike anything out there.

I predict that our user and developer base will grow dramatically in the next half year, and that we will need to address some organizational and structural bottlenecks that exist in the way that we do things. This is an inevitable result of rapid growth, and I predict that we'll do a good job at scaling. Our leaders are sharp people.

Anyone who is going to be attending the conference in Amsterdam might want to attend the discussion that I'll be leading to address exactly these issues. I intend to look at the way patches are processed and brainstorm ways that we can make the process of change more organized and efficient.

Any lingering thoughts for our readers?

I look forward to meeting lots of new Drupal enthusiasts in Amsterdam! I would also like to just mention what a great job I think Kieran Lal and Co. are doing over at CivicSpaceLabs.org. The upcoming 0.8.2 release with CiviCRM integrated is going to be a significant milestone for Drupal, and anybody reading this who isn't familiar with CivicSpace has waited too long, in my opinion, to head over there and check things out.

Summer of code projects

The following is a list of the Summer of Code projects:

Google Sitemap module
Author: Matthew Loar (SamAMac)
Mentor: Gerhard Killesreiter (killes)
Description:
A module which implements the Google SiteMap specification

Netnews (NNTP) module
Author: Jan Blom (janb)
Mentor: Károly Négyesi (chx)
Description:
The NetNews module provides synchronization between a Drupal forum and a netnews newsgroup.

Quiz module
Author: Angela Byron (webchick)
Author: Robert Shedd (sheddr)
Mentor: Robert Douglass (robertDouglass)
Description:
The Quiz module provides the ability to create questions and assign them to quizzes.

Simpletest module unit tests
Author: Thomas Ilsche (thomasilsche)
Author: Kuba Zygmunt (kubazygmunt)
Mentor: Moshe Weitzman (moshe weitzman)
Description:
Kuba and Thomas worked on creating unit tests for the Simpletest module, a testing framework for Drupal.

Subscription module
Author: Elek Márton (ee)
Mentor: Károly Négyesi (chx)
Description:
Subscription is a module based on the Subscriptions and Notify modules. It allows users to merge and manage subscriptions in more complex ways.

Task module
Author: Michael S. Bryant (michaelsb)
Mentor: Gerhard Killesreiter (killes)
Description:
The task module lets users manage tasks in a simple, yet powerful way. A task can be anything from a simple to-do item to a more complicated project-related task.

Upcoming.org Integration
Author: Stephan Jaensch (sjaensch)
Mentor: James Walker (walkah)
Description:
The upcoming.org module enables you to import events and venues from upcoming.org and display them in a calendar using the event module.

WebDAV module
Author: Fabiano Parolin Sant'Ana (wundo)
Mentor: James Walker (walkah)
Description:
Provides a WebDAV interface to Drupal

(Various AJAX improvements)
Author: Steven Wittens (Steven)
Mentor: Robert Douglass (robertDouglass)
Description:
Steven worked on various AJAX improvements for Drupal, such as a JS-based file uploading script.

Drupal Development Quickies

• Adrian has introduced a new forms API. After Dries big call, a lot of hands rushed to help the big transition; the final API is thanks to (besides Adrian): Asimmonds, Chad (thehunmonkgroup), Chx, Dries, Eaton, Gordon, Junyor, Tobias, Killes and Webchick. We hope you like arrays...
• Dries, Kjartan and chx refactored the node definition system. One hook to rule them all.
• killes has moved revisions to their own table. Almost ever since I joined the project this patch was in the queue. Life will never be same now that it's committed. More seriously, along with the previous item, if you had a module which defined a node type it won't work now.
• chx removed > from the end of files. You are advised to follow suit.
• Steven introduced JavaScript enabled uploading.
• m3avrck, nsk, Thomas et al: added a mysqli database backend.
• Goba, chx, Jose, et al: reworked the URL rewrite hook so URLs can be rewritten.
• James (and Boris) consolidated all feed-related settings in one place.
• Jeremy added tokens and their validation to forms. Evil spammers, die!

FYI: On October 18, I will talk about Drupal at EuroOSCON, Amsterdam.

Karoly Negyesi,http://drupal4hu.com/

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Drupal Tips

Get the newest modules -- fast! (Contributed by Angie Byron)
This tip comes from kbahey: To view a list of newly released modules, use the URL: http://drupal.org/taxonomy/term/14. This will show you the newest modules at the top of the list!

Change any string (Contributed by Karoly Negyesi)
All strings in Drupal can be changed. Just switch on locale module, then under admin/locale/language/add create a language, with a custom code and name. Now you can manage strings under locale/string/search. "Untranslated" (in this case: unchanged) strings fall back to English. Read the handbook page at http://drupal.org/node/24593 for more information.

Remote authentication (Contributed by Karoly Negyesi)
If you want to use remote authentication against your site, then create a role with no permissions and put a user under this role. So it's nopermissionuser@my.drupal.site.

Keep tabs on project issues (Contributed by Angie Byron)
This tip comes courtesy of sepeck: Want to keep up with changes to your favorite module? Interested in chipping in your two cents about Drupal core development? Want to be pinged back when someone responds to your specific issue? Check out the project subscribe options at: http://drupal.org/project/issues/subscribe . Here you can choose selected projects (or all of them, if you have lots of hard disk space to burn!) and receive e-mail about all issues, or only your own issues.

Featured Site: Underlining Einstein

UnderliningEinstein.com is a website for a local Denver cover band. Users can listen to demo songs, view the set list, see upcoming show dates, and view pictures and biography information on the band.

The site was developed by Chad Phillips (thehunmonkgroup on IRC) and currently runs on Drupal 4.6. The following contributed modules were also used in the making of the site:

• Event -- for a listing of the band's upcoming shows
• Front page -- this enables the sleek splash screen with the band's logo
• Flexinode -- this is used to create a special node, 'Show Date' for entering and displaying show info
• Live discussions -- to create a 'Hot Topics' section on the homepage
• Contact directory -- for keeping track of the band's venues for booking purposes
• TinyMCE -- enables non-HTML savvy band members to create/edit posts in a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) environment
• Taxonomy access -- for protecting some restricted access areas of the site

The site is striving for a minimalist look, and the Chameleon theme was an easy choice. Future plans are to write a custom CSS for the Chamelon theme, integrate a few more pictures into the site and install an embedded flash player.

Contributed by,
Chad Phillips

Case Study: HR Highway

Originally HR Highway was written in ASP with an Access database, which was not efficient. The navigation was a nightmare, and doing any updates or work on the site was nearly impossible. The site was looking old, and all the valuable resources it had to offer were going to waste so I started looking for a solution.

I looked into content management systems because of my limited exposure to web scripting languages like ASP, JSP, ColdFusion and PHP.

As a Debian GNU/Linux user, I looked to open source for a solution and found many seemingly well written projects, which, upon closer inspection, were limited in what they could do. Extending the functionality of these projects was not possible for someone with little experience.

When I first installed Drupal, the thing that struck me the most was the ease of install. The configuration interface was well laid out and made sense. I did not like the categorization they used (called taxonomy) but once you sit down and discover how it works you wonder why anyone does it any other way.

I also found it very easy to add more functionality by installing some of the many freely available modules. By looking at the themes available, I could tell that I could make it look how ever I wanted it to, without changing the functionality of the site. With the ability to configure the 'blocks' to show what I wanted, where and when I wanted it to, made access to the site's resources seamless.

After playing with the site and reading through some of the well written documentation, I came across a site called http://drupaldocs.org/ and found a whole system dedicated to the programming of Drupal along with excellent tutorials on writing your own modules. I had very little experience in using PHP, but understood the basics of it. After understanding how a module works and how to access the information on the drupaldocs.org site, I started to learn the Drupal API and found that complicated and laborious tasks could be achieved in a line or two of code, with extra functionality that would usually take hours to write by hand.

The new site looks great, and the look can be changed in a few hours using the theming system without having to rewrite the whole site over, so getting the look up to date no longer means you have to develop a new site. The navigation has become useable, and the resources are no longer hidden to the end user. And with the contributed modules, my own modules, the module system and the API it, no longer takes weeks to add new functionality to the site, but only a few days or even a few hours. Administering the site and keeping the content up to date is so easy that you no longer need a developer or designer to do it. Anyone who can work a computer and has write access can do it themselves.

Contributed by,
Gareth Gregor

For more information about Drupal, visit our website at http://drupal.org/.

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This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/.