Blog: Drupal

Or, Check Out the Patch

This year’s Google Summer of Code season I’ve got the distinct pleasure of mentoring Aron Novak’s work for a new aggregator in Drupal 7. Aron’s well into his task and has just rolled a patch for core and an alpha 2 version – time to share why I think that this patch is important and why you should have a look at it. If you’re into aggregation and Drupal, that is.

Drupal’s original aggregator module was designed foremostly for pulling news feeds into your site and displaying in a straightforward fashion: no workflow, very basic permissioning, no API for interacting with feed items, no event aggregation, no custom parsers – to name a few limitations.

Soon contrib modules mushroomed that addressed one or the other shortcoming of the core aggregator: a list of them would start with the aggregator 2 module which was published in the fall of 2005 and would include Leech (I don’t regret its demise), Aggregation (first time use of SimpleXML for parsing in Drupal), SimpleFeed (first extensible architecture) and FeedAPI

Leveraging Organic Groups and Context to Extend Custom Features Within Groups

We do a lot of work building portals and intranets that provide collaborative online spaces for professional communities. Some of these projects are completely private sites, and some are open to larger user groups. In each case we need to provide a toolset that could be configured differently for each site and frequently tweaked in particular groups. To do this we've built Spaces. It's a module that leverages Organic Groups to relate users and content to groups, and it extends context_ui to define 'features' that can be control individually in each group.  Spaces also makes assumptions about how you want groups to work and so is able to reduce the options available when creating groups and posts in groups, making the group creation and content posting processes more intuitive.

To get a sense of how this module works I have taken two screen shots from our own intranet package that we call 8trees. Here you are looking at our own team space on the 8trees install that we run for ourselves to communicate with our clients.  It provided us with a terrific way to test code and ideas on a captive and critical (but forgiving) audience. Clients never know there is anything but their own little space, but we move quickly and easily between them and have different tools (blog/book/casetrack/calander) turned on for different clients depending what stage the project is in. This is what spaces lets us do.

Included in the spaces suite is a core set of feature definitions that provide features for things like the blog and book modules. Additionally there are feature definitions for a calendar, a shout-box, and a case-tracker. When you create a group with Spaces enabled it changes the creation a bit, limiting the kind or group you can create to simply 'public' or 'private' and allows you to select what features should be available inside that group. If it's only appropriate for your group to have a blog, you can limit it to that. If your group needs a more substantial feature set, say a blog, book, and calendar, you can configure that for the group.  Spaces also lets you change labels in a group, so if a set of users doesn't want a 'blog', but needs a 'discussion' they can have it without need to to change any code or use the locale module. Here  is how the setup looks:

If you're not in Washington, DC tonight or just can't break away, you can still follow what's happening at the Drupal meetup. Ron will be streaming the presentations on Ustream, and I'll be streaming some videos to Qik, like this one. We'll be sending out notifications of when we're streaming via twitter here and here, but it will likely be from about 7:30 to 8:30 pm tonight.

Come Talk Shop with Others Using Drupal

Looking to fill the lazy days of summer with more Drupal? You're in luck. The next Drupal meetup in Washington, DC is in just a few days on Monday, July 14th  at Stetson's Bar and Restaurant. Lately the meetups have been drawing a crowd - 40+ people came out for each of the last three meetups. So no matter if you're a new or potential Drupal user, a new-to-Drupal programmer, and an expert hacker, there will be plenty of interesting people to talk to and learn from.

As always, we'll have several 5-minute lightening round presentations, so if you've been working on an interesting project or module, or have a question to pose to the group, be prepared to speak - and quickly. So far Jeff has offered to speak about the Spaces module and its roadmap, and Alex will talk briefly about aggregation in Drupal 7. The floor is open to anyone, so don't be shy. It would be great to have some newer Drupal programmers talk about what they're working on or a challenge they're facing and to hear from some new Drupal users about their experiences or how their organization decided to make the switch to Drupal.

More details are over in the DC Drupal group, and you can rsvp there or on Upcoming.org.

Drupal and SMS Integration, Ready To Go

The 1.0 release of the SMS Framework is now available for download from Drupal.org. The project has come a long way since it’s initial development release last summer and is now ready for use. Numerous fixes and functionality improvements have turned the SMS Framework into a robust tool for integrating SMS and Drupal.

This release introduces a rewritten SMS user module, which allows your users to provide and confirm their mobile information. Thanks to Tylor from Raincity Studios an SMS receive module and a gateway module for Mobile Muse are included in version 1.0. Expect to see more gateway modules with receiving support in future releases.

We’re already looking ahead to work on version 1.1, which will focus on improving international support, expanding documentation, and upgrading to Drupal 6. Please review and edit the latest roadmap on the wiki and submit feature requests to the project’s issue tracker.

Roadmap for 1.1

• Improve international support
• Standardized phone number format
• Drupal 6 release
• Write more API documentation
• Improve the SMS Blast module
• Ability to make double opt in optional
• More gateway modules that support receiving
• Improve sms_receive module
• Remove behavior mapping

I go into more details on these points here.

Connecting Washington, DC: One Bar at a Time

When we last left our protagonists, they were having a beer at the June DC Drupal Meetup at Stetson’s Bar, grumbling about the lack of wireless internet access. There had been an attempt earlier that night to get an access point working, but it had been thwarted by an uncooperative and inaccessible upstream router. Can you say “no DHCP lease for YOU!”?

And so it was resolved by the DC Drupal Meetup High Command that our protagonists would be deployed behind the lines. Mission? Restore wireless to the thirsty masses at Stetson’s before the next DC Drupal Meetup. Equipment was chosen, a date was set, and a plan was hatched.