Blog: Drupal

Meet Drupal Developers and Users and Talk About Your Latest Projects

The next Drupal Meetup is right around the corner. This coming Monday, May 12, we'll be meeting at Stetson's Bar and Restaurant at 7:00 pm to get together and talk Drupal. We'll be in the room upstairs.

As usual we'll kick off the meeting with several five minute lightening round talks. This is your chance to share your latest project or module with the group. Since this meetup is for people of all levels of Drupal expertise - including experts, newbies, those interested in becoming newbies, and users - we do ask that you focus on the big picture needs and functions and keep out the Drupal jargon.

So far, we have these talks on the schedule.

• Showcase of Green Media Toolshed: A community-powered set of tools for communications experts that allows them to create and customize group workspaces - and control the branding and urls. This is done with new advances made the to context module.
• Announcement of ChinaOSL, a two month long code camp happening this summer in Bejing

If you want to talk, post your topic here or come prepared to take over the floor.

Plug In Gives You the Best of Both Email and Web Forum Features

"Reply ABOVE this LINE to POST a COMMENT." This is how automatic email notifications from the teams' intranet blog posts look these days. And it's true! Now I can just reply to any email notification I receive and my comment will appear on our intranet. The only bad thing is that I don't have an excuse anymore for not replying right away ;-)

Typically there are two ways to carry on online discussions and to keep up with the replies - mailing lists (that may have a web interface) and web forums (that may have email subscriptions). Though each of one has its own advantages and drawbacks, trying to mix both usually ends up in long threads of differently formatted messages. Besides, mailing lists are usually exposed to spamming (worse yet if spam ends up on the web) and the "from" address is really easy to forge.

As usual, we wanted it all - the reliability and readability that come with authentication in a web forum and the ease of replying through a mailing list. Since we already had the Notifications and Messaging framework and an excellent mailhandler module to fetch incoming emails, it was just a question of putting the pieces together and adding some extra security/authentication into the recipe to get to this. 

Check the new "Mail2web" plug-in in the Notifications module. This first version is for Drupal 5. And by the way, we just released the Drupal 6 version of both Notifications and Messaging modules. The Mail2Web Drupal 6 version, however, will have to wait for the mailhandler module.

Being paranoid about security and spam, we added a more secure method for message authentication than the ones currently used. Our outgoing emails have some digitally assigned parameters that are checked when the reply comes back. Thus only emails posted as a direct 'Reply-To' operation will get in as responses. And replies to a given thread will get only into that thread, nowhere else. But best of all, these tokens are completely invisible for a regular user and should work with most email clients without the need to install any extra software. (You can set an expiration time frame for replies too).

So what do I need to to do to get it working?

Use FeedAPI, Feed Element Mapper, and Embedded Media Field to Aggregate Video from Blip.tv

Sean Effel from Drupal Therapy just put up a wonderful screencast on how to pull blip.tv videos from RSS feeds into Drupal. In the screencast, Sean shows step by step how to set up your Drupal  site with the FeedAPI, Feed Element Mapper, and Embedded Media Field modules to aggregate video feeds from blip.tv.

If you're interested in pulling video into your website or online app, you'll definitely want to check this out.

Streamlined, Centralized Drupal Building Logic

Last month at DrupalCon Boston I presented with Jeff Miccolis on implementing a formal context system in Drupal. We had a lot of ideas to share and some proof of concept code to demo. Since then we’ve been working hard to clean up our code and our concepts.

The basic idea behind the context module is to allow different parts of the Drupal stack to expose key pieces of logic to other parts in a standardized fashion. Context_ui extends this core functionality by allowing users to create context definitions - bundles of views, content types, panels, menu items, and blocks - that can be used to model “sections” or “features” on your Drupal site, among other things.