drupal

Or how to get what you want without cutting code...

I have a Drupal 5-based website for use by my extended family and friends to keep up with my own family while we are overseas. Most of them are far from being sophisticated web users, and seem to be having a challenging time remembering how to log into my site. So what I needed was a way to get them onto the site once and then persist their sessions for a period of time.

Arto is on a tear!

He's working on some Top Secret (for the next X minutes, that is) really cool code for Drupal that is blowing those in the know away.

Check his blog soon to catch up on what this coding maniac has created now.

Back in July I wrote about a development meeting I attended with a bunch of really smart guys. One of those guys was Arto Bendiken.

In the past couple of months, he's added at least 4* new cool Drupal modules to the contrib repository, of which I'm aware (there may be more gems to find -- I didn't even look!). In just the past few days, he added an absolutely amazing module called Trace which is developer's and maintainer's dream come true.

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a development meeting in Stuttgart, Germany organized by the folks I work for. It really had the atmosphere of a small DrupalCon or similar FOSS conference -- a lot of intense thinking and discussion, but a lot of fun and really cool stuff at the same time.

Since some of the stuff we worked on is not ready for public consumption (though most will actually be contributed to the open source community eventually), I'll not write about it now.

It seems the real bloggers of the world -- well, at least the ones that get read or have their URLs forwarded from friend to friend to colleague to associate -- post something new nearly every day. Too few postings and people aren't interested. Too many, and the quality clearly suffers. So there is a sweet spot in there someplace.

But where do they find the time?

I don't know if the lack of comments up to this point was because nobody cared, or because of a software problem. I found the software problem myself when I tried to leave my own comment. I guess that's what happens when one uses the tip of the development branch of software just before the 4.7 release of Drupal. I've now upgraded to 4.7, and all appears well, including the comments.

So perhaps someone will do that. Or not. :-) This is admittedly among the least exciting blogs on the planet.

I implemented a custom module for my employer to do real-time search transactions against a remote web service. Then I started to think about creating another one for a similar transaction against a different remote service. And I knew there would be more to come.

The module is pretty basic on the Drupal side. Present a form, do the lookup on submit, output the results if any followed by another form. All of that boilerplate would be the same between such modules above. Only the form and the output might vary a bit, and the ultimate backend data source would be different.

Based on a suggestion by Robert Douglass that the poll module be removed from core, and the follow up by Gerhad Killesreiter that perhaps the archive and blog modules should likewise be removed, I posted an old idea I had about how to provide better support for important modules and more diverse use of Drupal:

Moving modules out of core often means they fall of the face of the earth and no longer get support and updates. That's not good.

Happy May Day with 2 big announcements from the Drupal community. First, the long-awaited release of Drupal 4.7.0 will make many a web site developer happy. Growth in usage and development has increased exponentially in the past 18 months, and now is the time to join the growing ranks of those who use, implement, customize and develop Drupal. Second, the official kick-off of the Drupal Google Summer of Code program applications.

I'm using Drupal as my framework to develop a whole bunch of web applications for my employer. For the most part, it has been really nice. There is a tremendous amount of leverage available by having so many parts of a web application already built for you.