Image by tronathan via Flickr

Drush is, as the project website describes, a a command line script and shell interface for Drupal. If you are a Drupal developer pretty soon you end up using this tool. If you are a Drupal website administrator, the sooner you use it the more productive you are.

This “module” has a Drupal 7 pledge, so don’t worry about its upgrade and start using right away, that’s my advice.

Why use it? Lots of reasons. The main reason I use it is it simplifies my life while maintaining a Drupal site. Prevents lots of errors due to typing errors or working on wrong directories (just to give you two examples). Also it is the first step towards the automation of Drupal maintenance. For instance, the Drush Make extension, which can create a ready-to-use drupal site, pulling sources from various locations.

Drush detects your site based on your directory context. Let’s say your command shell is in /home/mysite/sites/all, it will read your config file from /home/mysite/sites/default/settings.php.

Some examples of using this tool are:

# drush dl drupal (downloads the latest stable version of Drupal)

# drush dl cck views (downloads the latest stable versions of cck and views)

# drush enable views (enables the views module)

# drush disable views (disables the views module)

# drush cron (runs all cron hooks)

How to install it? Well, it is not a Drupal module, you have to install it in a different way. These are the instructions for installing Drush on Ubuntu.

Well, it makes a lot of sense using this tool, so don’t hesitate to install and use it.

Related Articles

• Drupal 7 – faster than ever (googlecode.blogspot.com)
• Drupal Modules that Improve Accessibility | groups.drupal.org (groups.drupal.org)
• Open Atrium: A Drupal Based Intranet Ecosystem (cmswire.com)

August is always an exciting time of year. School gets back in session, last summer vacations and road trips are usually squeezed in, and the international DrupalCon takes the stage. This year its in Denmark: DrupalCon Copenhagen. If you don’t have tickets, you better get them very soon! Because it’s next weekend… see ya’ll there!

Join me after the jump for information on how you can help Drupal 7.0 release with stronger documentation. You can also learn who is using Drupal for their sweet sites, and how to get a ‘Tweet Button’ on your site.

DRUPAL NEWS

Drupal 7 Docs Needs Your Help!

Drupal 7.0 is very close to release, but there are still a few critical bugs to flush out. The Drupal 7 Documentation Team wants to ensure that Drupal 7 documentation is better than good, so they have reached out and asked for your help.

SEO checklist is, as its name suggest, a comprehensive checklist of which SEO-related modules are installed in your site. It does so following a set of best-practices on how to improve your site visibility. You must install this module if you are new to search optimization on your site.

After using this module, you should also use Scribe SEO Analyzer. This module analyzes your nodes and tell the content writer how to tweak the content in order to get more search traffic.

This module is paid for and maintained by Volacci, the Drupal SEO company. One of the members of the Volacci team wrote the book Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization. A very interesting book with good insights on how to improve your site visibility. Specially chapter number 2, it is a must read.

But at the end of the day, it is all about content. In order to draw traffic to your site, you need good content. You can not avoid that.

Related Articles

• How Getting Overly Obsessed with Search Engine Optimization Can Kill Your Online Business (searchenginejournal.com)
• New Scribe SEO Content Keyword Search and Link Building Tools (famousbloggers.net)

I’m attending the TCANZ Conference 2010 in Wellington, New Zealand. Chris Daish and Matthew Hunt presented a session on “intranet publishing with Drupal, an open-source content management system”. These are the notes I took during the session. All credit goes to Chris and Matthew. Any mistakes are mine.

The session was about Drupal and its use as an intranet. Drupal is a modular, open-source content management framework.

It’s an enormously versatile tool. Chris compared it to a Swiss army knife. When you implement a system on Drupal, you choose just the modules you need.

Looking at CMSes in general, at one end of the spectrum you have huge, complex, expensive CMSes. At the other end of the spectrum are things that offer really just the promise of a CMS. Drupal sits neatly in the middle. It offers flexibility as well as some useful pre-built parts.

A few stats

Drupal started in 2001, with modest beginnings as a bulletin board. Now there are estimated to be over 7 million sites running Drupal, and about 2000 developers at any one time contributing to the core Drupal software. The Monty Python website is built on Drupal!

It’s a very healthy open-source project and one that Chris can confidently recommend to clients.

Why would you consider Drupal for your intranet?

• It’s open-source.
• You can start small. You don’t need a huge amount of technical expertise to roll out a small Drupal installation to a couple of business units, and learn from there. Then you can expand it as you go.
• It’s a child of the social networking era. A lot of the features built into Drupal are about social networking and knowledge sharing. It’s a really good fit for organisations that want to share information via an intranet.
• It offers excellent taxonomy support, via controlled vocabularies, tagging and different ways to classify your content. You can drive your entire intranet using metadata.
• It’s flexible and adaptable, because of its modular nature.
• It’s an active project, so it can react quickly to technological advances and also to your changing business needs.
• There’s a lot of support information out there, including a number of books about Drupal, forums where you can get answers very quickly, and online documentation.

Example sites

Chris showed us some examples of intranets he and the team had put together using Drupal.

• CEO (Chief Electoral Office) – A site for managing elections. This is a very simple site that people in the field can use to do things like order forms, find contact information and read the news and alerts. It was pretty much Drupal out of the box, and does its job very well.
• The next web site was a more active site that encourages people to contribute content to the intranet, by displaying prominent buttons on the front page. It also displays live Twitter feeds and hooks into the IT support system.
• The People’s Times, which is a way for small clubs and societies to generate their own websites. Drupal can spin off these websites very easily and economically.
• A site for an organisation that encourages teaching excellence in the tertiary sector. The site allows teachers to have their own space to share techniques and hold discussions.
• Chris walked us through a case study of the way he used Drupal for the REAA (Real Estate Agents Authority). At that time, the REAA was a new organisation set up to regulate the real estate agent industry. The organisation faced a number of challenges, because there were a number of new processes that they had to put in motion and impose upon the estate agents. They needed tools to support the processes and call centre, and to get everyone registered by the deadline. Chris used Drupal to build a number of systems for REAA, including a knowledge base and an intranet.

How to get your Drupal site going quickly

Now Matt took over, to look at the shortcuts you can take to kick start your own Drupal installation.

• Open Atrium is a pre-configured installation of Drupal, tailored to act as an intranet. It includes blogs, calendar, a Twitter-like sharing mechanism, areas for specific groups and a project tracker. You can get a site up and running very quickly. Just a few hours, and you’re on a roll. Open Atrium was originally developed for the World Bank, and is now available to all.
• Drupal Commons provides an installation profile based on social media. It creates a massively social site where you can create your own networks. It’s geared towards Facebook, LinkedIn and commercial products like Jive.

More about core Drupal features

Matt gave us more information about the core Drupal features that come out of the box.

• Basic search, plus the faceted search add-on that ties in with your taxonomies. The built-in Drupal search does not index attached files or multiple sites. The faceted search includes these abilities too.
• Workflow. Drupal offers rules and workflow. You can define your specific workflow, such as the states, the affected content types, and the user roles that are able to perform each step.
• Taxonomies. You can set up controlled vocabularies, keywords, hierarchical taxonomies.
• RSS feeds. You can build feeds from your content, using taxonomy terms or your front page, for example. You can also integrate external feeds, to create content, users, taxonomy terms. For example, your Active Directory server can send you a feed that you use to create users on Drupal.
• Integration. The Drupal framework can integrate with various systems such as document conversion from Microsoft Word (via Docvert, a freely available conversion via Open Office). Drupal will also integrate with other content management systems like Alfresco, KnowledgeTree and Nuxeo.

My impressions

Drupal is a very solid tool indeed. I haven’t seen much about it before, so I was delighted to have this useful introduction. Thank you Chris and Matthew!

Reading DrupalCon 2010 and the future of Drupal – Last week a few members of the FreshNetworks

Things have totally changed again. I have now applied to do a Masters of Enterprise in Business at the Manchester school of business. The online material is not that great at describing it. It is a research Masters where Masters of Enterprise is the prefix, MEnt (similar to Mphys or Bsc). The degree itself is a generic business degree so the core modules will help me learn things such as marketing, setting up a business and dealing with finance. I then get to pick courses in my “Subject Area” which will be something vaguely IT based that I pick. I have to produce 2 dissertations, one of them focuses on the business side of my idea and the other on the subject side of my idea. I don’t exactly know what this means! However I think it will be something like a report on the marketability of the idea whilst the subject dissertation outlines some area of research into the idea itself.

The hope is then once I have finished this degree I’ll be able to bring back the knowledge into The Tribes Online. We’re working on things to some degree this year but it means when Rob is out of university we can start building things properly! Also I hope to meet lots of interesting people on this course to help me get connected to Entrepreneurs in Manchester. Unfortunately this also means I’m dropping back to work at Heidmar throughout the holidays.

Aegir and our hosting plans

We’ve been playing around with a development server in my house. For the less technically minded readers you may not find this interesting but I think its well cool! I’ve spent about 6 months getting this set up (and failing) due to my lack of understanding how linux works but we’ve finally set up a box with Aegir installed. It is an incredibly cool piece of software that allows us to host loads of drupal sites using one interface. If I want to set up a new church website, instead of going through all the normal drupal settings I just click “create new site” enter a few settings and everything is set up automatically. So here are some things I’m excited about:

• Our business model will require us to have a huge number of customers (over 300) before we make enough money to sustain us at all, let alone grow. Therefore we need to make sure all our variable costs are as low as possible. We need to make sure that the process of Church is interest => Church site set up and money paid is as small as possible. This will allow us to divert our resources into building the fantastic fixed cost that is the free product.
• Drupal Gardens is an awesome example of a company doing what we want to do for churches. (However, the creator of Drupal works for this company so its not something we’ll be able to do easily alone! They are giving away free sites during beta so you can get a free one now and try it out. Its very easy).
• Drush – Aegir works with drush. This allows us to administer drupal sites through a Command Line Interface (CLI). Hopefully it means we won’t need to administer any ftp accounts. All modules and install profiles can be downloaded using drush and using SSH to remotely access the command line.
• Drupal Projects- If we sign up for a Drupal project on drupal.org we’ll be able to do pretty much all of our development on that website. They offer everything we need, issue queues, groups to discuss ideas, a file repository so people can work on things remotely and submit patches. This means our development process will probably be able to happen entirely online. As a company we’ll discuss most our things on the issue queue and all the code will be submitted to a repository, and then automatically pulled from the repository to our server where our customers will benefit from it.

Why is this cool?

This means we can work with an entirely open development workflow. Yes, we will be a software company aiming to make money but even the bleeding edge stuff we’ll be working on will be downloadable. All our servers that make us money will use that code using tools that are available to everyone, we are literally just pulling an install profile from an online server. Anyone could do this. This means it will be almost as easy for another church to get involved in the development of our software as it is for us to get involved! (also it will be easy to steal everything we do ).

What is stopping us?

In order for this to work, me andrew and rob need to stop using our mouths. Unfortunately the voice and the brain is a very inefficient collaboration tool. Every conversation I memorise is locked in the minds of the original people who had it and cannot easily be shared. Every time we meet up, skype or talk over the phone we are dis-empowering future collaborators. The thing is, we like talking, its really fun. Recently I found out that Andrew was sad because his olives went mouldy. Things like that are what bring people together and we as a company need also be friends for it to work. But things that make us friends hurt us as a open-source company because they make it harder for others to get involved.

This will just have to be something we work on and try to do well. I do not plan to have this problem solved right away. But in a years time I hope we are part of the way and in 2 years time if we are still deciding software issues over the phone I will have failed.

After years of inactivity, iPage were relaunched in October 2009. With the new management system, iPage is a leading hosting company, that provide quality service for very low price. Everyone can start a website with iPage in minutes; the registration takes less than 5 minutes. The hosting control panel is easy to use even for new members, does not require any experience or technical skills.

Reliability Support Price & Features User Friendly Overall Rating

iPage Hosting Full Review

Our experience with iPage is very positive. We tested several accounts at this web hosting and hosted different websites with them. The file transfer speed is very good, so all iPage hosted websites have a very good loading time. The control panel is remarkable, easy to use, full with many helpful tools: email forwarder, domain pointer and registration, one click installation tool for different CMS and Blogging scripts, visitor stats script, data backup and restore manager, easy drag and drop site builder, Google webmasters tool integrated, and much more.
iPage Hits

* Unlimited web space and data transfer
* Unlimited mysql databases
* Unlimited domains allowed
* FREE domain name for life
* FREE site builder tools
* FREE ecommerce solution
* FREE Google and Yahoo Marketing credits

iPage Misses

* no upgrade possibility yet to VPS and dedicated hosting
* iPage do not offer windows shared hosting
* not recommended for Joomla, WordPress, Drupal hosting – slow database connection

We recommend Midphase Hosting for Drupal, Joomla or WordPress based websites.

Try

Found webhostingtop

Image by Phillie Casablanca via Flickr

Views Nivo Slider is a an Image Slider based on the jQuery library. IMHO, it is one of the nicest image slider available for Drupal. Even though configuring it might not be intuitive the first time, this wonderful module has plenty of documentation and examples. So Kudos to the module development team!

Well… I would like to recommend this module in case you need an image slider in your front page (or landing page). It made one of my clients very happy, and again. I would like to congratulate the team for not only the module, but also for its documentation.

Related Articles

• 10 jQuery Slider Techniques and Plugins (webdesignledger.com)
• 10 Fresh and Useful jQuery Plugins (webdesignledger.com)

Those of you managing Drupal sites with large menus (even better if translated) will know that it can take some time (understatement) to edit your menus and re-organize them.

The menu_editor plugin install easily without dependencies and offers a new entry in the menu edition area.

Once you select “POWER EDIT” (which it really is), you get access to a single page where you can edit each menu entry (link, name, language, status). With this, editing your menus becomes a pleasure and not a torture.

There are two new features included in the new version of  Scribe SEO plugin, Scribe keyword search tool and Scribe link building tools that I am sharing with you today.

Also a very nice free SEO report still available for your to download now at Scribe SEO site, it’s very useful to learn SEO, easy to emplement it, especially if you are running a multi-authors blog or you are publish a lot of new posts everyday, this will save your time and give you the power of customizing your content for search engines.

Hopefully by now you’ve discovered our new website design – maybe you’re even reading this after clicking the link on our home page. However you got here, we hope you’ll agree that this design is a big step forward in many ways.

Though the new design definitely features a much brighter look, the changes aren’t just cosmetic. We’ve changed how the site is built, added tools to improve usability and tried to put things where they’ll be useful and easy to find, especially our online services that are available for you 24/7.

We’re using new software, called Drupal, to manage the website. It’s the same software that the Ottawa and New York City libraries have recently adopted, along with the White House, to help manage their online information.

This software will make it easier for us to update the site, and we  look forward to taking full advantage of new features to keep the website vibrant and interesting with useful new content that’s easy to find and easy to read.

We also used an innovative approach to select the design. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel and design the site from scratch, we decided to start by finding websites that we liked, whether they were for libraries or any other type of organization, to get an idea of how our site should look and feel.

When we found a design that we liked, we also wanted to make sure that it wasn’t just someone’s opinion, that there had been a formal process to ensure that it worked well for users. We confirmed that our favourite was the result of several thousand dollars of work with a professional design company, including focus groups and user experience testing. We had a winner.

So in addition to a brighter, friendlier design, our new look makes it easy to move around, keeping the information accessible from anywhere in the site. The line of tabs across the top for the different sections is persistent navigation, meaning it’s available on every page, and there’s also an always-available search bar so users can search either our catalogue or our content from anywhere in the site. Finally, In addition to links within the subject pages, there’s also left-hand navigation that expands when there are additional pages related to where the user is in the site.

Speaking of the search bar, we’ve added a feature that our catalogue doesn’t have yet; when you do a search in the search bar, your search terms are included in the web address of the search results. This means that you can bookmark your search results in your browser for future use. It’s a small thing but it makes it easier to get back to your search results  and we think that’s important, especially so for hard-to-find items.

The slideshow on the home page is a great place to start any visit to the website. It lets users quickly scan through to see what’s new at the Library. We’ll be featuring new arrivals, upcoming events, Library news, links to interesting sites and more. The pictures can be enlarged or clicked to access additional information.

We’ve also added several features that make the new site accessibility compliant.

• The size of the font can be increased or decreased to improve readability
• All images use alt tags for compatibility with screen readers
• We ran the site’s colours through several tools to confirm that it was readable for those afflicted with colour blindness

Finally, the colours for the design couldn’t be more local. While walking in Waterworks Park last fall, one of our staff found a leaf on the ground that hadn’t turned just one single colour, but had streaks of several different colours running through it. We scanned the leaf and used software to match the colours to create the palette that we use today.

So that’s the story of our new site. We love it but that only matters if you do too so we’d appreciate your feedback. If you’ve got comments for us – good or bad – or suggestions for things you’d like to see on the site, please feel free to add a comment to this article or drop us a line at patkinson@st-thomas.library.on.ca.

This is the question I got at many events where I presented about localize.drupal.org. We've just rolled out support for suggestion exports for translators about a month ago to make quality control and management easier, but that does not help people much who are just looking to download what's available.

I've also announced about three months ago that translation downloads were becoming stable and continually generated in a nice pace. However, the usability of those downloads left a lot to be desired. When looking at project pages on the site, you were shown a bland list of links to major Drupal versions the project was compatible with which all led to a long list of filenames on an FTP browser frontend. Also, some files being months old looked shocking given I've told you the downloads are now stable and up to date.

Well, as of yesterday, some nice big green buttons landed on several areas of localize.drupal.org which all lead to a new downloads center. If you are on the front page, or a language page, you get to the initial download page which shows Drupal core translation downloads. Project pages however prefill the project selection for you appropriately, so you get to go to the downloads respective for the project. Drupal.org project links were also updated to point to these paths.

We actually have some pretty good data about these translation files that was not available on the plain FTP browser. While some files might be as old as three or even five months, we check the translations for updates and sometimes conclude we don't need to generate new files. Unfortunately some translation teams are not (yet) too active, so it can easily happen that months old files are the most up to date possible. So when on the download page, you can hover over the download links and get some additional data like file size, file date and the last up-to date check time.

Finally, while this was about giving more visibility to downloads, we really love those, who actually contribute. So when you visit the download page for a project, the contribution form will be prefilled with the project, letting you to jump to the project's page on localize.drupal.org directly, or even hop to the translation interface if you also select a language. Contribute and feel the Drupal love!

Ps. Usability feedback on the process is more then welcome. While I think we have far better then what we had before, it can definitely do with some improvements. Also, do not forget to check out the Localization update module to automate downloads, so you don't need to do it manually. A huge timesaver!

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ikutin lewe ah, yang blog-nye buat laporan die ude nulis di tempat laen .. :p ane uda bikin tulisan

Enter into your local phpmyadmin web portal Locate the database associated with the website Locate t

Download remote website files from your ISP’s FTP server to your local computer Install and se

Image via Wikipedia

In my humble opinion, should be part of core. But since this module already has a Drupal 7 pledge, we are OK with the situation as it is (actually there are so many modules that are part of core, problem is upgrading core would be suuuch a huge task…)

Well, pathauto automatically generates an URL path alias every time you create a node or object. It does so according to a set of defined rules or patterns, which can be found and set at:

• For 5.x: Administer > Site Configuration > Pathauto
• For 6.x: Administer > Site Building > URL aliases, in the “Automated alias settings” tab.
• For 7.x: Administer > Configuration > Search and Metadata > URL aliases, in the “Patterns” tab.

You can also modify the created path just by editing the node. Having the URL path created according to a set of rules, allows your site to be more user and search engine friendly. Which is really good these days.

A warning, having pathauto running on your site does not mean you have to do the proper information architecture work. Sooner or later your site will be a mess if don’t do a proper information architecture planning job.

Related Articles

• Open Atrium: A Drupal Based Intranet Ecosystem (cmswire.com)

When you going to add or edit path / menu in your site, it is necessary to check the menu are already taken by the site, other wise it will conflict.
When you create internal menu the drupal system automatically check with you site. but when you create external or via coding the below code will help to validate the path already taken or not.

All the internal or external menus are stored in the table “menu_router”.

/*
* Find the path is available
* Parameter menu path
* return TRUE if menu exists else return FALSE
*/

function is_path_exists($path) {
return (db_fetch_array(db_query("SELECT * FROM {menu_router} where path = '%s' ", $path))) ? TRUE : FALSE;
}

I was the first woman at any DrupalCON, the only woman in Antwerp. Until the brouhaha over the keynote, I never really thought about why I went there in the first place. But the decision to travel there was triggered by a tiny and important event, so I'd like to share it.

I had been communicating back and forth with Matt Westgate about some e-commerce functionality. At the end of one of his emails, he tacked on the following:

PS - You headed to Belgium?

This question wasn't a part of an outreach initiative to involve women in open source. I doubt he questioned that my interest might be affected by my gender. It was simply, "we're having an interesting conversation that would be even easier to have in person". Before I read that email, the thought of traveling to DrupalCON hadn't crossed my mind. But my response to that simple question was to make it happen! And thus my life was changed.

But five years later in San Francisco, when the number of women in attendance had risen from 1 to 300, I was settling into a BoF session when I was presented with another innocuous question:

This is a technical BoF. Are you sure this is where you intended to be?

This question was not intentionally harmful. It was an offer of help, in a tone of "hey, do you need some help finding your way to a session you might enjoy more?". But this "help" was based on the unconfirmed likelihood that I might not belong in a technical session. If I was new, I might have doubted my own aptitude and diminished my participation.

This post is not about lambasting the BoF guy or calling out the similar encounters we encounter every day, such as asking if I'm on the documentation team, a designer, or just there with my partner. This happens regularly and quite cordially, usually perpetrated by someone who you wouldn't call 'sexist'. But good or bad, tiny exchanges make up our community as a whole, and have a much broader impact. What if Matt, without any derogatory judgment, questioned my interest in showing up in Antwerp? What if he hadn't bothered to ask? Five years later, would I be contributing to Drupal, running a company that employs other Drupal contributors, and helping to support the local Drupal community?

More importantly, what if more people reach out to others in similar ways? How many others would there be out there doing more good for Drupal? Setting aside the topic of what is/isn't "offensive", how do we focus on being more inspirational, and asking questions instead of making assumptions?

Drupalchix

Image by LollyKnit via Flickr

As stated in the Drupal website, Simplenews publishes and sends newsletters to lists of subscribers. It is one of my favorite modules, the reason being that it is quite easy to configure and very powerful once you use it. If your client needs a newsletter solution that integrates with Drupal, Simplenews might be the answer.

It is easy to install, just download the module, unzip it in the sites/all/modules directory, then enable it and done. You just need to configure it. By default it creates a newsletter taxonomy and a newsletter issue content type. All you have to do is create a newsletter in the configuration menu, assign a content type to it, and that’s it. You are ready to send newsletters with your Drupal site.

You only need to have your mail system in your server properly configured. You can also complement its funtionality with a long list of modules, such as:

• Simplenews Content Selection (for selecting which nodes to send)
  
• Simplenews Template (for adding headers, footers and personalized stylesheets to different newsletters)
• Simplenews Analytics (for adding Google Analytics tags to links in all Simplenews emails)

Related Articles

• Getting Started with Drupal: A Comprehensive Hands-On Guide (sixrevisions.com)
• Basic Libraries Distros | groups.drupal.org (groups.drupal.org)

Download the Drupal code and install it to /var/www/drupal

All the prerequisite are the same as for OpenPublish.  Please see these before you start, this includes creating a database.

Just a note, once you have the system up and running, you will probably remove the login box, the URL to allow you to logon and administer the site is

The admin page is http://x.x.x.x/drupal/?q=user

Navigate to /var/www/drupal/sites/default

mkdir files

chmod o+rw files

cp default.settings.php settings.php

chmod o+rw default.settings.php

chmod o+rw  settings.php

http://x.x.x.x/drupal/setup

This will start the installation.

Once done you will have an empty web site.  One useful tool to have is a Wysywig creator for you content, I am lead to believe that

Wysiwyg with TinyMCE is a good bet

Download from the respective sites.

Copy or move the

cp -R wysiwyg /var/www/drupal/modules/wysiwyg

Copy or move the tinymce directory into the all/libraries

cp -R tinymce /var/www/drupal/sites/all/libraries/tinymce/

Go into the Drual configuration and enable the wysiwy module

Administer –> Site building –> Modules

Go to the bottom and enable the module.

To check if everything is OK

Administer –> Site Configuration

You should see the Wysiwig menu at the bottom, try logging out of the web site if this does not show.

Choose the Wysiwyg menu as you need to now enable the editors in the site, this area also allows you to download other editors.  The choice is entirely yours.

You should be up and running, I now just have to figure out how to use the bloody thing