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In this post, we describe some of the issues facing large or complex software projects using Drupal's CCK content type extension facilities. We then propose a remedy in the form of CoCKTaiL, a high-level language for CCK types and associated UI elements and relations. Tools and potential applications will be described in future work.

Drupal's Content Construction Kit (CCK) is a powerful feature, much loved by Drupal developers, who use it to rapidly define data types and relations for applications. Using a UI, developers can easily create new content types by specifying fields, UI widgets, relations, and more.

The ability to interactively create new types and supporting UI's is a great timesaver in the early stages of many Drupal development projects.

For larger projects, however, the nature of the design and implementation process for CCK types leads to difficulties in evolving and maintaining projects which include CCK components, and these difficulties contribute to the lifecycle cost of large Drupal applications.

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Not only is there a need to get modules ported to Drupal 6, but also themes. Because someone wanted to use the plutado theme on a Drupal 6 environment, I ported this theme. Attached you'll find the patch.

On this link you can find more info when you decide to join the porting-force.

Observe:

An incredibly long standing issue, that keeps popping up, gets a handful of follow-ups, none of which actually address or even mention any of the technical problems that need to be solved.

Instead, all it gets is a bunch of "+1 Subscribe" follow-ups. Whenever I see such a comment, it tells me this:

I really want this feature, but I'm not prepared to do anything about it. I won't spend any time educating myself about it, exploring the problem space or prototyping possible solutions. I fully expect others in the community to solve it, while I reap the benefits.

Go ahead, call me cynical and misguided.

You know you are a has been if you launch a new site using a kick ass CMS and the projectlead of the CMS is not even blogging it.

Sleep tight Metallica.

One of my most popular Drupal modules - Global Redirect - has just had an update from 1.2 to 1.3. This update includes several fixes for the following:

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As I've mentioned before, version control with Drupal is tricky because a lot of configuration changes are stored in the database. Version control is vital because you should be maintaining multiple workspaces so you do not work on production. The last thing you want to do, then, is to make this worse by putting PHP in your nodes and blocks.

2bits wrote up a great post explaining that you should free your content of PHP. Yes! Read that! Follow it and add it to your Drupal bible.

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John Eckman of Optaros sat down with Jeff Whatcott, Acquia's Chief Communicator, to talk about Drupal and Acquia. Rock on, Jeff.

If you can't see the video above, you can view it directly at blip.tv.

The Interaction Design and Information Architecture program at the University of Baltimore and a team of eight graduate students have completed a usability study on Drupal. The result is a great report (PDF) and an incredibly valuable video which they shared on drupal.org. It is too important not to share, so the video is also embedded below.

The results are consistent with the results from usability tests done at the University of Minnesota.

The results can't be ignored.

I printed the report, taped it on my wall, and I won't release Drupal 7 until I crossed of at least 90% of the problems they identified.

The Interaction Design and Information Architecture program at the University of Baltimore and a team of eight graduate students have completed a usability study on Drupal. The result is a great report (PDF) and an incredibly valuable video which they shared on drupal.org. It is too important not to share, so the video is also embedded below.

The results are consistent with the results from usability tests done at the University of Minnesota.

The results can't be ignored.

I printed the report, taped it on my wall, and I won't release Drupal 7 until I crossed of at least 90% of the problems they identified.

I was writing an install profile for a out-of-the-box workflow install profile to be used by media organizations today, when I ran into the rote task of adding roles and permissions.

(for reference, see my last article on workflow configuration in drupal)

So being the programmer who will write something in a day which takes an hour to run to save 5 minutes, I decided to scratch a long standing itch:

The Drupal User System API.

I love the simplicity of the drupal user system, but like many things in drupal, it wants you to use forms to admin it, and the DB model is inherently tied to the controller (not good).

So I decided to contribute this to the helpers module. It provides some simple functions like:

helpers_user_help($section)
permissions_get(unknown_type $rid)
permissions_set(unknown_type $rid, unknown_type $perms = array)
role_add(string $name)
role_get(int $rid = 0, string $name = “”)
user_add_roles($uid, $roles = array)
user_delete_roles($uid, $roles = array)

Simple stuff, but AFAIK, lacking in drupal.

In addition, I also wrote a full set of simplete tests for it which can be found in the tests directory.

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Any reasonably complex Drupal website involves using Views for listing items and CCK for the creation of custom content types. Since each website has a unique look, a large part of creating a Drupal website is theming Views and CCK nodes. This is especially true for Views, since most CCK theming can be done via CSS (or for more complex stuff it goes to Forms API, beyond theming), but Views usually needs to be themed.

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The following presentation was created and delivered by Tom Friedhof at the June 2008 LA Drupal Users Group meeting. You can download a pdf version via this link.

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Yay! I wanted this to happen long ago, but by delaying we managed to get Views, CCK and OG to all roll release candidates on the same day!

Release announcement here: http://drupal.org/node/277856

So Lullabot just bragged on Drupal, rightfully so. I was thinking, "Well of course, they can handle 20k comments in 24hrs... Drupal is scalable!" Still, it's nice to see that in action.

Of course, as my family and I finally broke down and got a Wii this summer, the first video gaming experience my wife has finally admitted to liking, I had to go and enter the contest for a Wii Fit.

Of particular interest to me, although admittedly off on a tangent for this example, is that I've just finished writing the last chapter to Drupal Multimedia (available in September!), where I pontificate a bit about the future of multimedia handling in Drupal. And I just had to bring the Wii into the fray.

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Administrators are shown with a themable marker whether content is new or has been updated in the Administration section of their site at webSite.com/admin/content/node. Additionally, in node lists, the module tracker informs any logged-in user if he or she hasn't read a particular (recently created) node (using the marker new), or if a node he/she's read already was modified (using the marker updated). You, the themer, may want everyone, including “anonymous users”, to be informed of updates to nodes right inside their content. This information may specify who last edited the node and when. Note that the last editor of a content may not be the creator of that content, and I'll take this into account in my “solution”. In the following theming tweak, you'll add Last edited by name some time ago information to your nodes' content. Read more →

This is part two of my series, The DX Files: Improving Drupal Developer Experience.

Many Drupal APIs accept a boolean argument (TRUE or FALSE) to determine some behavior. I believe that practice should be banned in all but exceptional cases, instead using a defined constant with a descriptive name.

Here is a perfect example from Drupal core:

Now, quick! Who can tell me what passing FALSE as the second argument and TRUE as the third argument means?

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I've just noticed the new spam on my site. It has become more polite, really sneaky basters ;-)

Several comments appeared that encourage my blogging, but it stayed vague, like:
- Entirely wonderful thank you - just what I needed!
- This is really helpful! Thanks.
- This is great! Nice blog.

Until you click on the user name, that you notice ... it's spam !

Dam, thought finally some people got interested in my blogs. Well I'll better have the Update module active.

P.S. See you at Drupalcon when your going.

Yesterday, I heard from my friend Jon Armstrong about some nervousness he was having about Dooce, the site he maintains for his wife Heather. This incredibly popular blog migrated to Drupal recently and when I ran into Jon at South By Southwest, he was very happy with the move. However, on Monday, Heather announced that she was giving away a coveted Wii Fit, and that people could "enter" as many times as they would like simply by commenting on the post.

Bang! The starting gun went off. Later that day Jon posted Drupal is RAD to his blog about how impressed he was with Drupal: "In an hour, there have been over 1,200 comments." But word kept spreading around the internet about the Wii Fit giveaway and the speed of comments was growing exponentially. They're running on a single web server and haven't really "tricked out" their box with any special performance tuning or anything.

However, he wasn't going to be able to sleep with one eye open watching his server load and he messaged me on Twitter. Of course, confident in my Drupal sites, I was fast asleep.

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Yesterday, I heard from my friend Jon Armstrong about some nervousness he was having about Dooce, the site he maintains for his wife Heather. This incredibly popular blog migrated to Drupal recently and when I ran into Jon at South By Southwest, he was very happy with the move. However, on Monday, Heather announced that she was giving away a coveted Wii Fit, and that people could "enter" as many times as they would like simply by commenting on the post.

Bang! The starting gun went off. Later that day Jon posted Drupal is RAD to his blog about how impressed he was with Drupal: "In an hour, there have been over 1,200 comments." But word kept spreading around the internet about the Wii Fit giveaway and the speed of comments was growing exponentially. They're running on a single web server and haven't really "tricked out" their box with any special performance tuning or anything.

However, he wasn't going to be able to sleep with one eye open watching his server load and he messaged me on Twitter. Of course, confident in my Drupal sites, I was fast asleep.

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