On The Radar: 17th July 2010

There’s now a range of approaches for laying out webpages in Drupal - from the standard core approach, then panels and now context. Over at Lullabot’s blog, new team member David Burns writes an excellent article assessing the different options. It really is a must-read, but the most important information is right at the end:

As you can see Context and Panels modules do very similar task with very different approaches. But what is important to all of us is that they provide a solution. There was a minor disturbance in the force (aka our community) seeing two vital groups of developers addressing a similar issues without collaborating. Well good news, this year at DrupalCon San Francisco, these bright individuals were forced into a small room to settle their differences. By the end of this meeting there were hugs and tears of joy (okay, maybe just hugs).

What does this mean for Drupal? It means that the power of context, the ability for content on a page to be more dynamic and share information between each other will be an initiative that hopefully we will see built into a future release of Drupal core. Our modules can tap into a context api which will be full of valuable information about the user, node, views, blocks, and menus that exist within the page. This is huge.

This really is a great development, and we’ll be watching out for news and reporting it here on Drupal Radar.

Over at the Development Seed blog, Adrian Roussow outlined the next big steps for the Aegir project that will allow it to manage Drupal sites across different servers. This will be a big step towards a better development-staging-production workflow for Drupal developers.

Meanwhile Chapter Three’s Paul Suway has been asking for sysadmins and developers to contact him with their ideas for future development of the Pantheon project. Pantheon is a server platform (as an Amazon AWS machine image) designed for hosting high performance Drupal sites. he says:

We’re specifically looking to talk with people who haven’t spent a lot of time yet using Pantheon. We want to learn what you dislike about server administration and love about your current development process.
If you can talk to us this week, we’d love to schedule a 15-20 minute skype call. Email me at Paul [at] ChapterThree [dot] com if you have the time free.

The Drupal Association released details of their research into the organization of DrupalCamps. The aim is to find out how best the Association can encourage, inform and help with the organization of future camps. The research found a very wide spread of budgets and attendances, but highlighted the good value for money of these events compared to larger events such as DrupalCon - the average cost per participant was $35.96. It’s clear the Association wants to encourage more such events, so if you’re interested in organising one, this report is well worth reading.

As Drupal 7 gets nearer to a Release Candidate, it’s interesting to see some new projects get released that use the new features. One of those is Drupal 7 MS SQL driver that uses the new abstracted approach to databases in Drupal 7 to provide an interface to the Microsoft SQL server. This is likely to increase take-up of Drupal in commercial organisations. For its part Microsoft is also seeking to get close to, and support Drupal - and is a key sponsor of Drupalcon Copenhagen.

Also, in the work towards Drupal 7, Dries reached a milestone when he made his 25,000th commit! Though Chx pointed out:

That’s number of changed files. Not actual commits. (A cvs commit is not atomic like that) HEAD has 13365 changesets so far.

Phase2 released version 2.1 of their popular OpenPublish distribution, targetted at online newspaper and magazine sites. The main improvement in this release is to make it much easier to create custom themes.

And one other project release that caught my imagination this week was the Evernote module. Developer Chris Shattuck says:

The first goal is to leverage the Evernote API to make it a blogging platform. Because Evernote is a great way to gather ideas and information […] the result of bringing Evernote and Drupal together is a rapid blogging tool that will integrate into many people’s workflow.

After installing the module, you set up an [Evernote] account and a ‘feed’ which will pull in notes that match certain criteria, such as notes with a particular tag. To publish to your Drupal site, just add the tag you specified to the note you want to publish. That’s it. On cron runs, the Evernote module will grab any new or updated notes and post them to your site.

Finally, here’s a roundup of some of the other new projects on Drupal.org (for which there has been an actual code commit - placeholder projects are ignored):

• Views Slideshow Galleria module brings the style of the JQuery gaelleria display for images to the Views Slideshow plugin.
• Twitter Backtweets module uses the api from backtweets.com to pull in tweets that reference the page and add them as comments.
• Tray module provides a facebook-style toolbar attached to the bottom of your browser window - but it’s actually a them region - and blocks can be placed in this bar. A button is displayed that can pop-up each block. It could be the login block, a user menu block, or any other block. It’s a very interesting idea, however there’s a lot of crossover with the Application bar module, and there is some debate around merging the two modules.
• Context OG module provides Organic Groups related conditions and actions for Context module.
• Domain Access Solr Facet module provides a facet for Solr Search that allows results to be filtered by the domain using Domain Access module. This allows you to restrict results to only nodes from the current domain, or allow results from all domains.
• Webform Register module adds user registration capability to webforms, so in one page you can collect a range of information and setup a user account. It’s ideal for more complicated membership application forms, or other situations where you need to collect a range of data from new users, but need to get them to set up an account too.
• Handbook theme is specially designed to be used for user guides, handbooks and other book-like sites. It provides clear and straightforward markup designed for maximum readability.

One more before we go - Boris Mann is joining Drupal Radar as a contributor. He’ll be writing articles and helping to grow our Radar Database feature and make it more useful for other sites via RDF or an API. Watch out for his byline soon!

And that’s your ‘On the Radar’ summary for the world of Drupal this week!