Drupal Newsletter - February 2008 - Drupal 6 and Beyond

Letter from the Editor

We've all been waiting for it! After a year of development, Drupal 6 has finally been released. The general consensus among developers is that once CCK (nearly done) and Views (in progress) are complete, it will be ready for deployment on most sites. A large number of contributed modules depend on these two workhorses, which is why large chunks of CCK have been moved to core, and there is ongoing discussion around moving parts of Views there as well. Meanwhile, with Drupal 6 off their plates, developers are working around the clock to get your favorite modules ready for launch.

Boston DrupalCon is also around the corner. It would probably be enticing enough to attend just to hear Dries Buytaert's highly anticipated State of Drupal address (see last year's). But we have three stellar keynote speakers (Dries Buytaert, the original developer of Drupal; Chris Dibona, the open source program manager at Google; and Brian Aker, the director of architecture for MySQL) this year, and dozens of amazing presentations to choose from to create a rock solid line up.

With nearly a hundred volunteers, the Drupal Newsletter Team is committing itself to continue to bring high quality news and announcements from the world of Drupal. I have recently stepped up as an editor to help organize the effort, and we invite you to be part of this fantastic and dynamic group. March's newsletter is already in progress, so if you want to help contribute to that issue or join on an on-going basis, feel free to join us. We'd love to see your name in the bylines. As a sidenote, the Newsletter Team is also looking for a Druplicon mascot. We have a competition open at http://groups.drupal.org/node/8442, for any aspiring artists!

Aaron Winborn (aaron)

Table of Contents

Drupal as a Catalyst for Community and Change

by Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg (Alex UA)

Nick Lewis wrote a great post last month about six conditions that lead to the formation of online communities. These conditions were, in short: a meeting place for people who didn't have one, a sense of shared ownership, at least one strong leader, a shared identity, an opportunity for personal gain, and entertaining conversations. While I generally agree with this list, Nick conspicuously leaves out one of the most crucial conditions that leads to the formation of online communities: the technology that the community uses to communicate, organize, and coordinate. While this might seem like a minor oversight, it is, in my eyes, a major one. There is a revolution afoot, and Drupal is one of the vanguards of this movement. But, I sometimes wonder how many of the people who are involved in the Drupal Project fully appreciate the truly awesome role they are playing in this changing world, just as the inventors and early proponents of the printing press probably didn't anticipate that their invention would supplant monarchies and the Church with Democracies, Communism, Socialism, Fascism, etc.

The consequences of new technology can be usefully thought of as first-level, or efficiency, effects and second-level, or social system, effects. The history of previous technologies demonstrates that early in the life of a new technology, people are likely to emphasize the efficiency effects and underestimate or overlook potential social system effects. Advances in networking technologies now make it possible to think of people, as well as databases and processors, as resources on a network.

...These technologies can change how people spend their time and what and who they know and care about. The full range of payoffs, and the dilemmas, will come from how the technologies affect how people can think and work together--the second-level effects" (Sproull and Kiesler, Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization, 1991: 15- 16)  Quoted from John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Cyberwar is Coming!.

Back when the internet was just beginning to emerge, there was a lot of talk about the detrimental effects the internet would have on society. People were going to become less publicly social, less likely to make friends, more likely to spend their freetime in their pajamas, etc., etc. Some psychologists went so far as to come up with a new disorder for those who spent too much time online, Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD), and treatment centers were set up to help "cure" it. But, as so often happens with an emerging technology, most people failed to anticipate the societal level changes that this new technology would bring, which actually seem to have had the opposite effect as the IAD proponents expected. Two interrelated changes that can now be clearly seen are major shifts in the balance of power, espescially in the realm of communication and information control, and the emergence of thousands of communities, both on and offline, where none existed before. Most of the communities that have emerged seem to form around interests and ideology, though there is certainly a geographic aspect to them as well.

I became active in politics through Drupal, and active in Drupal through politics. In 2004 I, like many of my peers, was completely pissed off about the direction of our nation, and I wanted to do something about it. I was involved in the Wes Clark campaign for a while, but when that campaign sputtered to a stop I started to look for another way to get involved. Then, one night at a concert I met some folks from Music for America (MFA), which would have been "Music for Dean", if not for the demise of the Dean campaign, and which, like much of the activities around the Dean movement, was powered by Drupal. I've already written extensively about my experiences with Music for America and the impact that I thought online organizations could have on politics in my Masters Thesis, titled Keys to a Future Majority, so I won't cover it again here. But, one thing has become abundantly clear to me over the past 4 years: Drupal was key in getting me, and likely thousands of other potentially very active individuals, completely invested in the future of our nation. If not for the forums where I first started to chime in on how to make things happen, the many MFA events and ability to volunteer for them, or the permissions which allowed me to take on a bigger role within the organization, I likely wouldn't have become so invested and involved in political/social change.

After the premature demise of MFA, I started to look for other ways to make change, and one of those ways was setting up new politically-oriented Drupal sites. One of these sites, Young Philly Politics, serves as a good example of the effect Drupal can have on an online community. YPP was started on Blogger by my brother , Dan UA, soon after the 2004 election. He set this blog up because there was no place for younger Philadelphians to talk about local politics, and in fact, because of corporate takeovers and downsizing, there wasn't even much local political discussion happening in the local media at all. Through meeting people and word of mouth the site started to grow, and by the summer of 2005 there were 5 or 6 regular contributors, and posts would sometimes get up to 15 or 20 comments. In July of '05 we moved the site to Drupal, partly to give us more options for posting materials (for example, being able to have a teaser and a full post) and partly because of Drupal's unreal SEO capabilities (a discussion for another time). However, what I personally didn't anticipate was how quickly this move would impact the community on, or importance of, the site. On the first day the site went live one of Philadelphia's 17 City Council people wrote a diary, and by the time the last mayoral race came about, less than one year after the switch, the site had become one of the most important political sites in the city, with Mayoral, Council, and other political aspirants duking it out with activists, reporters and editors from the local papers, Philly machine pols, and really just about anyone who had an interest in the races. As of this writing, the site has had almost 4,000 blog posts, about 24,000 comments, and over 2,000 registered users.

Why Drupal?

Obviously, the entire information revolution, and the communities and changes that are born from it, are not progenies of Drupal alone. In fact, the entire "Web 2.0" trend is predicated on people being able to produce content in many different places and share it in many different ways. Communities spring up in different places, at different times, and for different reasons, and they still are going to want to share all sorts of information with others.  Drupal's flexibility and adaptability (as well as the low cost of entry) help it to seamlessly integrate with whatever new technologies emerge. In a sense, Drupal is an online meeting space not just for people, but for technologies as well. It seems that as soon as a new Web 2.0 site or service emerges, some developer comes up with a module which allows for easy integration with a Drupal site.

Second, because Drupal was advanced in the US by a community of activists, and it is maintained by an amazing community of developers, designers, marketers, etc., it is more oriented towards community-oriented sites, which makes it better suited than any other platform to provide the services needed in this networked world.

Third, because of Drupal's technical prowess, it has garnered the attention, and enjoyed the investments, of quite a few large corporations and organizations, who pay developers to perfect and improve upon their code, to the benefit of all. This means that community sites, both big and small, benefit from investments that they themselves could never make.

I am certain that I am leaving out other reasons which contribute Drupal's transformative abilities, but whatever other reasons there are, one thing is clear: Drupal is a catalyst for community and change. And while the fascination with the technical advances and efficiency gains will remain at the forefront of most discussions of the platform, we cannot lose site of the societal level changes that Drupal is helping to bring about. The revolution may not be televised, but it is being blogged about, right now, on a Drupal powered site.

Editor's note: This article is cross-posted at zivtech.

Drupal 6

Here are some quotes from the Drupal community about the release of Drupal 6, and what it means:

  • Webchick | Drupal 6: Brought to you by hundreds of contributors
    How many people contributed to Drupal 6? It's very difficult to define. Depending on your calculation method, that number ranges from around 250 to more than 700. And the actual number is *much* higher than that, of course, when you factor in the entire iterative process of how an idea turns into an improvement in Drupal. Every contribution matters, from initially reporting bugs/features, to adding further clarifications, to thoroughly reviewing patches, to making minor tweaks that aren't large enough to warrant credit alongside the primary patch author(s).
  • SEO Expert Blog | Drupal 6 Released - AHAH Forms
    One of the most exciting new features to me — I only recently learned about — is that the AHAH (Asychronous HTML and HTTP) framework made it into the Drupal core. This means you can create asychronous HTTP request, commonly referred to as AJAX, without writing a single line of JavaScript code.
  • Robert Douglass | Drupal 6 has been released - go blog about it!:  
    Now that it D6 is out, it is up to us, the "Drupal Community" to spread the word. We will only continue to thrive if we are successful in bringing new talent to the project, and remain an attractive option for businesses looking to launch a website. Your role in this effort is to write about the new Drupal on your own websites, blogs, news groups and email lists.
  • Blog Money Wiki | Drupal 6.0 released today!
    What is great about Drupal 6, for me, is the multiple languages support because I create websites both in english and in french. There’s also drag and drop functionalities in the admin area which will make it easier to work with. I already was using the Administration Menu module to quickly access the admin pages, and now it is fast to work within the page too!

DrupalCon Boston

Marketing and Business Conference Tracks

They’ve selected the first 14 of 16 sessions for the Marketing and Business Tracks at Drupalcon Boston 2008.

Design and User Experience Conference Tracks

The lineup for DrupalCon Boston's Design and User Experience track has been released:

The track has a strong mix of sessions aimed at hardcore designers, novice Drupal themers, and longtime community members and developers.

Site Building Conference Tracks

Announcing the Site Building Conference Tracks of DrupalCON Boston. 54 strong proposals for only 16 conference slots. Decisions were made carefully

+ Indicates a multi-presenter session.
* Indicates an invited presenter.

Community and Core track

Official announcement at Achieve Internet:

Announcements & Upcoming Events

Blog Posts of Note

  • From Improving Drupal's Page Loading Performance, by Wim Leers:

    Faster servers with more memory stop improving your web site's performance at some point. Yet, even before your web site gets big, there are other places to look at to improve performance, where greater effects can be achieved, even at lower costs – significantly lower costs actually.

  • From Drupal 6 - Bringing CMS to the Masses, a review by Tarn Aeluin:

    Two of the most used components have been reworked quite a bit for Drupal 6. The Forums modules and the Book module have a lot incremental improvements that add up to a much better user experience. In the Book module there are now nice AJAX controls for re-ordering your book index - this is really nice.

Case Study

FastCompany.com redesign is powered by Drupal

You may have already read this, but it bears repeating.

The release of Drupal 6 isn't the only big news in February -- this week also marks the launch of a newly redesigned, Drupal-powered FastCompany.com! Fast Company Magazine has covered cutting edge business and tech industry news since the heady days of the early 90's, and the massive redesign of the magazine's site was a major undertaking for its publisher, Mansueto Digital.

The new site combines the magazine's print content with web-exclusive features, integrates the social features of Fast Company's long-running Company Of Friends business network, and gives members tools to filter through the web's river of news to find business topics they're interested in.

The Drupal Dojo

The Drupal Dojo is both a group of volunteers passionate about spreading their Drupal knowledge and people interested in learning more about Drupal in general. With a (usually) weekly screencast and a whole slew of lessons and resources on their website, this is the place to be if you're aspiring to know and learn more!

The past couple months the Drupal Dojo has been ramping up for Drupal 2.0, a total overhaul of the Dojo website, to bring even better information and resources for aspiring Drupal Ninjas.

We need you! Volunteers are always needed - don't be afraid to jump in, we'd love to hear from newbies and seasoned Drupallers alike. The coming months are looking bright with lots of work to be done! You can see what is hot on list in the monthly "Next Steps" post on the group site. Join us at http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-dojo for discussions or #drupal-dojo on IRC Freenode.net.

How can you join in on the fun?

  • Join a lesson. Whenever we have live lessons, you can watch the teacher live in your web browser and join the discussion in the #drupal-dojo IRC channel. Along with asking the teacher questions, we also have really useful and informative discussions in the channel. Even if you feel you know a subject pretty well, it is interesting to hear someone else's angle and pick up extra tips. If you can't make a live lesson, you can download the screencast and learning materials later.
  • Share what you know. We're always looking for teachers to have either live or pre-taped screencasts. Even if you don't consider yourself an "expert", there's always something that can be taught to a newer member. If you know even how to install Drupal, you know more than someone else. Feel free to hop over to the group page and create a "discussion" about the lesson you'd like to do and we'll get you all set up to be the next Dojo rockstar!
  • Make Dojo 2.0 a reality. With the Dojo 2.0 initiative, we're looking for help in a variety of tasks. This is a great way to learn by doing, whether you are new or an old hand. Anyone and everyone can help out. We have a job for everyone including design, documentation, video, coding, sysadmin, project management, you name it. Areas of particular focus for the next month include getting wireframes created for the new website (in preparation for opening it up for everyone to submit their cool design/logo ideas), getting some nice 15 second video spots and background graphics for the Dojo to add to videos and cranking out a few Drupal 6 lessons/videos.

Views 2 Sneak Peek

by Aaron Winborn (aaron)

Views has been getting some attention from developers, particularly now that Drupal 6 has been released. Considered the next best thing to a core module by many, Views allows you to dynamically grab specific content from a site and display it just how you want it. The killer package of one, two, three CCK, Panels, and Views, this is one of those powerhouse modules that will probably put developers out of work one day.

If you're already familiar with Views 1, you're going to be amazed with Views 2. The original developer of the module, Earl Miles, more commonly known as merlinofchaos, decided on a complete revamp of Views to coincide with the version upgrade for Drupal 6. This has included a complete rewrite of its base engine, allowing for, get this, creating views from not only nodes (the basic content of a site), but of users, comments, and taxonomy. Additionally, it has hooks to allow tables of other types of data, current and future, to harnass its power.

The User Interface (UI) of the administrative sections of the module will be greatly simplified, using tabs in place of the original field sets, so that all the information you need is available without needing to scroll. Also, rather than the single page and/or block that used to define a view, administrators may specify a number of displays, which may be output in various ways. A new feature of Views are relationships, which will allow you to grab data from related nodes. Thus, borrowing from a Views development wiki, while viewing a page of albums which has a nodereference to artists defining a relationship, by activating that relationship, you can view fields from the album OR the artist.

Borrowing from the great work that went into the recent (and largely unheralded) overhaul of Panels 2, Views will also allow attaching styles to a view from the administration screen. Decoupling some of that from the original Views filters, we'll also have Rows, with the familiar "List View" and "Table View".

Note that all of this is in flux, as active development continues. However, if you're brave, anxious, or just curious to take a peek, you're welcome to grab the latest HEAD version of Views from the Drupal CVS. Just be careful, and absolutely do not use it on a live site until Earl gives us the go ahead. ;)

Besides merlinofchaos for heading up this great effort, kudos go very much to yoroy, couzinhub and alpritt for help with the UI design, and to fago, adrian and Crell for help with patches! (Please, forgive me if I've neglected to give credit where credit's due. There are so many great people helping to make this happen!)

Past Events

  • DrupalCampWisconsin -- Saturday, January 19th
    The latest in a long line of DrupalCamps was held this weekend at the Milwaukee School of Engineering in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Read more at Larry Garfield's blog.
  • Drupal China Shanghai meetup -- Saturday, January 26th -- David O says,

    The Raincity Studios Shanghai squad and friends at Shanghai PHP user group rallied together to sponsor the "SDUG" event. This afternoon-long event, at The Net Circle's hip office, featured experienced speakers and peer interaction for over 60 people this past Saturday, January 26th, 2008.

    • After an intro by Raincity Studios' CEO Robert Scales, Drupalist Alex Rollin provided an overview of Drupal including development history, comparing with other CMS's, and using Drupal in China - with translation assistance by Raincity employee Xiong.

    Following a pizza break, during which the attendees chattied amongst themselves, Raincity Studios' Developer Makara Wang presented about coding CCK and Views, plus offered a few application cases and problem solving skills.

    The final presentation was by Wen Feng, Member of Standing Committee in PEA, and covered strategic PHP coding and cases of e-business development.

    Charlotte comments that the turn out was better than expected considering a rare snowstorm in Shanghai. Based on interest and feedback, the aim is to host a similar event in Beijing and find ways to encourage communication within the local Drupal community to create more ways for "birds of a feather" to meet others of a similar level of expertise and interest area.

    More coverage including some photos can be found at Raincity Shanghai Kicks off Inaugural Drupal Users' Group.

  • Portland meetup with Lullabot -- See grantkruger's review.
  • GHOP -- The Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP) officially ended earlier this month. Make sure to read the GHOP Status Report if you haven't already. And if you missed it but still want to take part of this high energy coding frenzy, take a look at Drupal Really Open Participation (DROP).

    The GHOP contest officially ended on February 4, 2008. This contest was an absolutely amazing success, and resulted in a number of new contributors to the Drupal project. If you're interested in learning more about the contest, there was a recent Lullabot podcast about GHOP, and there will also be a session on GHOP at Drupalcon if you're interested in learning more about the program and what has been achieved in the past two months, and would like to talk to a few of the students face-to-face.

Groups

  • Views Developers

    This group exists as a place for people interested in the group to talk about Views development; all development talk is encouraged here, from people who want to work on Views core to people who are interested in Views' API for their own modules. This is a good place to:

    1. ask questions
    2. talk about problems
    3. propose ideas.
    4. talk about views related projects.

    This group is now unmoderated, and anyone can join at any time. Public posting of ideas is encouraged.

    What I want most out of this is to keep track of what views related projects are going on and their status, and proposals for what people would like to see as Views moves forward.

Drupal in the Media

A Plan to Offer 50 Sites on Politics in 50 States in The New York Times highlights Politicker.com: Inside Politics for Political Insiders, a multi-site Drupal-powered installation developed by Advomatic for The New York Observer (another Drupal-powered site). From the article:

The plan is to pull together 50 Web sites, one for each state, into a political hub called Politicker.com. Each site will serve as an intensely local source for political articles, speculation and scandal, Mr. Kushner said.

Ten sites are online already, and the 11th, covering Kentucky, is scheduled to go up this week. Mr. Kushner hopes his multimillion-dollar investment — he would not be more specific — will attract an influential readership and, in turn, advertisers who want to reach those readers.

“Instead of taking out ads in five papers across the state, if you want to reach the most influential and politically active people, all you have to do is buy an ad package on the site,” he said.

The Observer Media Group, which owns both the namesake newspaper and the Politicker brand, has kept relatively quiet about the development of the state sites. They will most likely become more prominent when a national site aggregating the local content starts within the next few weeks.

“We view this as one of the most ambitious projects right now in journalism,” said Robert Sommer, the president of the Observer Media Group. “We’re basically creating 50 news bureaus with full-time reporters in each state.”

Noteworthy Modules

  • Hierarchical Select 2

    From the project page:

    This module defines the "hierarchical_select" form element, which is a much enhanced way for letting the user select an option in a hierarchy. Out of the box, this module implements the hierarchical_select hooks for the taxonomy (which automatically includes support for the forum module) and content_taxonomy modules. It also converts hierarchical vocabularies that are used as exposed filters in any View to a hierarchical select.

    Any module that uses a select form element, of which the options are ordered hierarchically, can take advantage of this new form element. Especially when there's a deep hierarchy, or when there are a lot of options in each sublevel, this form element greatly simplifies the user's search for the right option.

    Optional and multiple select form elements can be used.

  • Mini Panels (part of Panels 2)

    Think you know your Panels? Well think again! Think Panels 2. Earl Miles (merlinofchaos) snuck this one in before the D6 launch, taking us by surprise. Even before it had a chance to settle into its new release, he was off to work on Views 2 (which is where he is right now).

    Panels 2 makes life oh so easy for the administrator. As we're used to from the first version, you can create a panel page to display various blocks of content in columns and rows in a page's content area, automatically creating menu paths on the fly. New, however, are Mini Panels, which are panels that may be used as blocks. Additionally, you can set custom styles from the admin pages. A panel is easily created with a multi-page form, with a wizard that guides you through the process.

    There's even more, but you'll need to download the latest copy of Panels and try it out yourself.

  • Image Gallery

    The Image module has long been a staple of most sites that display images, especially with the extra functionality provided by modules included in its package, such as Image Attach and Image Gallery, and other contributed modules, such as Image Assist. Recent improvements made to Image, including integrating the Gallery with Views, help to keep the module current. Read the Creating image galleries tutorial at Drupal.org for more information.

  • Embedded Media Field
    The Embedded Media Field module, with its companions Embedded Video, Embedded Image, and Embedded Audio, makes it easy to embed third party images, video, and audio as node fields. Integrated with CCK and Views, an administrator simply needs to create a node type with a field for the desired media, allowing editors to cut and paste the desired video URL or Embed Code into the field. Out of the box, about 20 providers are supported, including YouTube, Revver, Blip.TV, Flickr, Picassa, Odeo, and PodcastAlley. The provider is automatically parsed by the module, and displayed appropriately, in various sizes or with thumbnails (when supported by the provider's API).

    Also included are Embedded Thumbnails, for custom thumbnail support, and Embedded Media Import, which allows importing content from playlists and photosets (although currently only Flickr is supported for that). The module's official release (just hours ago!) has better Views support than the earlier developer's release, including filters and arguments for providers. There is also limited support for local files, so that editors may FTP a video and display it through the field.

    You can see a live demonstration at Drupal Hub, where you add your own nodes to try it out. When adding content, you'll see the list of providers supported on the submission page.

Getting Drupal Done Interview

by Michael Samuelson (mlsamuelson)

Any seasoned Drupaller will tell you that in addition to Drupal being great software, it's also a great community.

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.

Joon Park, aka dvessel

What sort of work do you do with Drupal?

I freelance but I'm considering a move towards working for a Drupal shop or whatever else is out there. All theming aspects is my main concern. Knowing the internal theming system, jQuery and web standards in general and I try to apply that to the issue queue. In the future, I want to put more effort on actual design and architecting flow.

Describe how Drupal fits into your average workday.

It's quite random and depends on the situation. If I have a client job, I'll work on that for a good part of the day. When I'm free, I'll check the issue queue and help where I can. Other times, I'll just work on a personal experiment to see where it leads me. Multitasking is not my strength so I focus on one thing for however long it takes. Not exactly a shining example of how to get things done.

How do you organize your workspace?

My workspace contains a 15" MacBook Pro attached to a 20" Cinema Display and that's connected to a clamped vesa mount. When I'm working with code for extended periods of time, I'll tilt it into portrait mode so I can see more of it. There's also a 6x8" Wacom tablet and two external drives for storage and backup. Various other hardware all around my workspace. A light table for tracing, wide format Epson printer and scanner but they haven't had much use lately.

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

I'm using Mac OS X Leopard with mostly small and focused shareware. The app that contributed most in my productivity is LaunchBar. I have shortcuts assigned for searching api.drupal.org, browsing Drupals repository over the web and tons of others. It's just an amazing and transparent tool.

Hazel is another nice piece of shareware. Simply setting a few rules and my system organizes itself based on my activity.

TextMate is used extensively with the CVS bundle. I don't create patches with it but it's handy for reverting changes, getting a quick diff overview between revisions and peeking in at which version a line was changed in with the annotate command. With that information, I can run LaunchBar to lead me into the repository over the web and find exactly which issue caused that change.

The rest are CSSEdit, Xyle Scope, FireBug for the client side work and debugging. VMWare Fusion with two installs of Windows XP to test IE6 and IE7 with the free version of MS Visual Web Developer to debug IE. Photoshop for my graphics work. 4GB of RAM keeps everything working smoothly.

The last piece of hardware is my sketch book. It's used to scribble out ideas or to solve complex problems that can't be realized in my head.

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

I started using NetNewsWire recently. It's a really sweet feed reader. I have everything in there. My issues on Drupal and everything else I'm interested in. As far as being distracted, I always am. I have to work on that.

Any tips and tricks regarding Drupal productivity?

Nothing specific to Drupal. Everyone has their own habits, tricks and everything else. The best advice I can put out is to know your tools. Whatever it is, if it's worth using it's worth knowing well. That way, it will help productivity all around, not just Drupal.

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

Speaking from a theming point of view, Dreamweaver is a horrid tool. I've learned this almost two years ago when I started with Drupal. There is a culture of engineers in the community which is good in some ways and bad in others but the good has taught me that all the things I perceived as voodoo can be understood. This is thanks to the clean API where I learned PHP and observing how others work. It's scary at first but knowing the deeper issues with web development helped me in a big way. It expanded my abilities by allowing me to execute ideas instead of just having them.

Any advice for newbie developers on how to get Drupal done?

Work one step at a time especially for complicated problems. Don't get intimidated by it. Knowing the API and the "Drupal way" helps too. It gets easier with more experience of course but having a workflow where you can readily find answers and practicing good debugging techniques will get things done sooner. I wish I knew this sooner. New comers with a programming background should have no problems.

Thank you, Joon Park

Editor's Note: dvessel is listed in the D6 maintainers.txt file, as well. He deserves a tip o' the hat for all his work there!

Overheard on IRC

<merlinofchaos> Theming Views 2 will be so easy people who got good at it in D5 will feel cheated =)

Resources

For previewing live demos of Drupal themes, you used to have the Drupal Theme Garden, but it was closed last year with the release of Drupal 5, partly due to lack of volunteer maintainers, and partly due to security concerns (since themes can run PHP code). If you're still mourning this loss, you might not have realized the several alternate sites that have popped up to fill the void.

  • Theme Garden
    This useful site highlights nearly 160 themes freely available for Drupal, with live demonstrations of each theme. If you want to see how the Ubiquity or Dreamy themes look and feel without actually installing it on your own server, then this garden is worth checking out.
  • Drupaler Theme
    This is another live theme preview site, in a slightly different format than the Theme Garden. Drupaler Theme allows user ratings and offers reviews for individual themes, so might be of more interest for people looking for theme commentary. It also categorizes its themes, making finding related themes somewhat simpler.
  • Themebot
    This portal offers themes from various CMS's, including over 200 for Drupal. Again, it offers ratings and reviews, with a handy thumbnail gallery and star ratings.
  • "Official" Contributed Themes
    Obviously, don't forget the original Drupal project. Dozens of contributors continue to make themes available through Drupal's CVS repository, and they are published here with screenshots. They may not have live previews, but many developers offer their own live previews, and you can usually find them at the aforementioned sites as well. This is usually the first place most people will go to, both to contribute and to browse for new themes.

Submissions

Submissions, queries, corrections, and comments should go to the Drupal Newsletter Group, or contact aaron. Everyone is free to join the Drupal Newsletter Team!

Credits

The Newsletter could not have happened without the tireless persistence of the following contributers and editors. Thanks to them all (and to the others who have helped anonymously)!

Aaron Winborn (aaron)
Hal (Hal)
Michael Samuelson (mlsamuelson)
Joon Park (dvessel)
Brenda Boggs (brenda003)
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg (Alex UA)
Kyle Else (tourguide)

Original Article: