Someone recorded the State of Drupal presentation I gave at the Open Source CMS Summit at Yahoo! last month. I'm not the world's best speaker, but the talk does touch upon a number of points that I want the people in the Drupal community to take note of. As not all Drupal contributors were able to attend the conference, I'm reposting the video on my blog.

My copy of Pro Drupal Development arrived in the mail the other day. So far it's very programmer-targeted, but good. I need more time to just sit down and read it. :-)

I did notice one thing that caught my eye, though. In the Acknowledgments, the authors thank

...the members of the #drupal internet relay chat channel, who put up with the constant questioning of how things worked, why things were written a certain way, or whether or not a bit of code was brilliant or made no sense at all.... Among them are... Larry Crell...

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Start: 2007-04-30 18:00 End: 2007-04-30 20:00

Normal bi-weekly meeting, at Four Friends Coffeehouse.

136 Monroe Center St NW, Grand Rapids, MI
Google map

MapAPI module is a helper module for the upcoming Map module. By itself MapAPI doesnt do anything.

The motivation behind this module was to create a game that is powered by drupal core. The first step in our work is to release flexible API that can allow us to build that game; MapAPI is it.

MapAPI allows you to create game maps based on coordinates. each map can contain arbitrary number of tiles and each tile can contain any number of content items.

MapAPI was designed to be very extendable by new modules that will be introduces for the game. New modules can introduce any new serialzied content array indexies to be stored in the content table. the type of information stored in the table is non-important for the MapAPI, the important part is that it can store ANY information and pass it back to the parent module for processing.

TODO: add some code examples, etc

The module is based on the free gabbly.com chat widget technology. It allows you to embed a chat system in your site with minimal work.

The chat window uses AJAX to avoid page refreshes.

Standard Gabbly chat widget features include:

• Mute individual users from conversation
• Sounds on/off
• Show/hide user list
• It doesn't require Flash, just JavaScript.

In addition to the standard Gabbly features i've added:

• Ability to provide your site users with multiple chat rooms.
• Access control for chat usage
• Make chat rooms semi-private so people cannot just guess the name and join from outside of your site.
• If you allow anonymous users to chat, they can configure their nick name. Logged in users must use their Drupal username.

This module adds specific functionality, useful to phpBB forum users, to a specific node type.

You must have a phpBB installation as well as CURL enabled on your server.

Three fields are added to a specific node types create/edit pages.
Checkbox--If checked when the node is submitted a NEW topic will be created in the phpBB forum
Teaser--Optional teaser field that will be added to the new phpBB topic
Forum Topic Number--Number of the topic associated with node(pre-existing, or new)

The site administrator must set the forum URL, forum number, authorized forum user/password, and the node-type

There is also an access control element to limit the users that have access to this functionality.

still on BETA

2 modules together:

1. Every PHP project will be scanned to find translatable strings. Users can translate online all strings. PO and POT files will be generated, RSS/XML uptades as well.
2. Look for updates on servers and automatcly update

Delevopers:
Help is always welcome!
Based on Translation template extractor module.

This module is sponsored by Titan Atlas, a brazilian computer company (www.titanatlas.com)

The biggest gripe my team has about the drupal APIs is that once you're inside a tree, you can't search easily. I've always wanted to try making my own Firefox extension - this seemed like an ideal starter project.   Initial specs were much larger; I built a section to let you add new Drupal sites to search on. We really wanted to get this out, so I removed those bits.   The resultȼ/p>

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Project Name: Panels (http://drupal.org/project/panels) Project Maintainer: merlinofchaos Module Description: I was inspired by a client (Lee LeFever of CommonCraft) to give this module a shot.

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CiviCRM v1.7 has been in beta for quite some time. We've had 1000+ downloads and hence a fair number of installs and upgrades. The rate of issues being filed has dropped significantly and we will push out a final release next week. As with other CiviCRM releases, we will periodically update the final release with critical bug fixes and security updates. We hope a longer beta period results in far fewer revisions.

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Maxlength allows you to set maximum lengths to the body field of any content type. Texarea HTML tags do not have a maxlength attribute, this module fills that gap using JavaScript.

When the maximum length is enforced for a certain content type, while editing content of that type a counter will tell how many characters are left.

This module provides your sites visitors to browse and search jobs, or post their resumes for employers/recruiters to see. It also allows job seekers to apply for jobs. In effect, your site can be a mini monster.com or hotjobs.com. It can be setup for one single firm (e.g. a recruiting company), or as a general job site (e.g. like monster.com).

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Start: 2007-05-19 14:30 End: 2007-05-19 17:30

Lets make the first Florida Drupal Users MeetUp a success!!!

Go to Group. Drupal.Florida for more info

Everyone is welcome. Come to the centrally located Orlando Public Library it's easy to get to see this map

* Agenda o Short presentations about what kind of Drupal work is going on in Florida and code we've contributed.

So you're coding along, developing your site, minding your own business, when you load a page you see some totally vague, obscure error message such as:

Where do you even start debugging something like thatȼ/p>

Well, you could start with looking at line 504 of node.module...

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Start: 2007-05-22 19:00 End: 2007-05-22 19:00

It looks like the group is picking up steam. We have 143 subscribers and had a big turnout in April.

Lets setup the next meeting for the 22nd. This gives us about 4 weeks to figure out what to talk about.

Start your commenting engines!! (seriously comment on what you want to talk about otherwise I'm going to talk about my pets all night).

When: Tuesday, May 22nd 7pm
Where: MNN 537 west 59th st.
Where in NY terms: 59th btwn: 10th and 11th
How to get here:
Subway: A, B, C, D or 1 trains to Columbus Circle (59th) then 2 block west towards the Hudson.
Bike: West-side Greenway to 59th st (next to the sanitation plant) then Right 1 1/2 blocks. Nice easy ride
Car: Leave car at home.. See Bike or Subway

There was a push a while ago to get Drupal to use the tango icons, which was then pushed back, since Tango's license is CC and not GPL. I don't fully get the distinction, but here are the GPL icon sets I have found:

• Lullabot Icon Set #1
• Morten's Iconify Module
• Mark James' Mini famfamfam set

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Start: 2007-05-01 18:00 End: 2007-05-01 20:00

Let's do this people!

Date: Tuesday May 1, 2007
Time: 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Location: Achieve Internet
Street: 1767 Grand Ave., Suite 2
City/State/Zip: San Diego, CA 92109

Phone: 858-453-5760

location map: http://tinyurl.com/ytyfhd

Drupal is not jut a CMS.

Drupal.org is not just a place where you can up/download software. Or ask questions. Or even answer them.

Drupal is not just about open source.

Drupal is about people! People helping people. People laughing, people having fun, share their inner sub culture and people helping and supporting people when they are in need.

And IRC is a great place to do some funny plumbing (from one week ago or so)
[20:34] * bertboerland thinks vertice needs a group hug
[20:34] now all together
[20:34] *hug*
[20:34] *hug*
[20:34] *hug*
[20:34] *hug*
[20:35] * walkah *hugs* all of drupal
[20:35] #drupal even
[20:35] Ok that was weird =)
[20:35] awwww.
[20:35] * walkah *hugs* eaton
[20:35] lets pretend this never happened
[20:35] * walkah *hugs* bertboerland
[20:35] * greggles sends sexual harrassment lawsuit to canada
[20:35] * merlinofchaos laughs
[20:35] someone touched my butt!
[20:35] sorry
[20:35] hehe, you guys..

Thanks to Kolgen & Laenen, I had the opportunity to meet Bob Young last night. For those who don't know Bob Young, he's the former CEO of RedHat, one of the biggest open source companies in the world, and the founder of Lulu.com, a print-on-demand books service for do-it-yourselfers. Lulu.com is a service that you'll want to keep an eye on ...

Bob is smart, funny, knew about Drupal, and repeatedly called Kris and myself "young kids". Well, thanks Bob! ;-)

This module is under development! There is no stable release yet. Do not install it until a stable release will be out.

Allows creating and administering nodes of a type called 'person'. This type of node holds data that describe a human person like: first and last name, gender, personal data, career infos, etc. The content type provide some basic fields but you can use CCK to customize as you like the person node.

Administrators can decide wherever the Person nodes are linked or not to system users. The ability of auto creating Person node when a new user is created was inspired by the usernode module. Moreover they, or allowed roles, are able to create standalone Person nodes. Those nodes are not linked to any user.