drupal

A popular joke of the 21st century has been that the Web is "ruled" by teenagers. That saying may be a joke, but the truth is: we live in an era in which a self-organized group of college students, without any funding can take on global organizations like HSBC.

How come?

Because large organizations are too damned SLOW! Web is extremely fast-paced and the large bureaucratic beasts are often just way too late to the party.

To give couple examples:

1) In most organizations people who can quickly react to an emerging topic, on the Web, concerning the organization, are not allowed to. The messages "have to go through proper channels" and channels take time.

Solution: either remove the channels or make sure they do not take so much time. Can you achieve 10-minute turnaround? If not - relax the preemptive oversight. Educate your employes of what's acceptable and what is not. Let them take initiatives of engaging in the conversations on the Web, let them make mistakes (they will make some), make sure they learn from those.

2) Use agile technologies. Forget about "enterprise" this and that. Forget about IBM. Use what is already available: Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube, GoogleMaps etc. For the part you need to build, use Drupal, WordPress, DJango, RubyOnRails. Use technologies that can give you results QUICKLY.

I've been a Java architect long enough and I know enterprise Java technologies well-enough to allow myself say this: most organizations that build websites in Java (or any other heavy-weight technology like that) are just wasting their time. Java is great and there are many incredible things you can build with it if you are an Internet backbone company like Verisign, but Java is not for your blogging needs or even for your website of average complexity.

Be responsive, be quick, be agile. Worn-out phrase or not, I will repeat this: please, please, do not be afraid to make mistakes.

Quick Note: the Administration Menu module in Drupal seems to have some weird bug in ver. 5.2.5 which causes menu items listing to disappear on admin/build/menu configuration page.

Solution: disable and remove Administration Menu module, download 5.2.6 or later version, install that one. If the problem persists run "menu_rebuild();" from hook_init() of any module or even from page.tpl.php. Problem should be gone.

Enjoy.

Geeks among us often wonder what a website is built with. Is it a Java/J2EE home-cooked mess? Is it a .Net nightmare? Or is it a common CMS installation styled to the extent of not being recognizable (i.e. not being ugly, anymore :) )?

Most 5-minute drupal installations will respond to requests like http://example.com/user/ and http://example.com/admin/ and you will see familiar Drupal interface: either the ugly tabs, or the Garland itself.

More paranoid (or careful?) admins may have the default URIs disguised for public eyes. If we are doing analysis using an automated tool (somebody?) it's better to have an alternative method since other CMS's may respond to the same URIs and automated tools don't have eyes to see the ugly tabs.

What may help in a complex analysis of a site is looking at its HTML source. If in the header you see URIs like "/misc/drupal.js" you know this site is running Drupal! If the website admin had enabled javascript aggregation, though, you won't see anything like that and will have to hunt for "/sites/default/files/js" pattern.

Also, please note that Drupal does not load drupal.js if no other javascript is requested from code, so you may not see any of those on the home page. It's the best to look at the "Add Comment" pages, since those usually have some Javascript.

Happy hunting! :)

David E. Williams, from the Health Business Blog recorded an interesting podcast with Dr. Jason Bhan, co-founder of Ozmosis.

Ozmosis is a social network for practicing physicians to share knowledge and communicate. Revolutionary in its nature, Ozmosis uses the rich experience of existing social networks, plus a proprietary "trust" technology, to create a breakthrough environment where physicians can quickly get answers and improve their knowledge.

Ozmosis was made possible by Drupal. Examples of Drupal usage that benefit public are numerous, but if I am not mistaken, this is the first major case of Drupal being used in Healthcare. It's great to see Drupal helping revolutionize the way things are done, especially in such an important area.

Listen to the podcast: [ http://www.healthbusinessblog.com/?p=1804 ]

We've blogged about hardcore Drupal Form Manipulations using CCK Node Types and hooks. If it is part of your module (as it should) you need to install CCK type during module setup. In the .install file of that module you can import CCK definition with a code like:

function ourmodule_CCK_install() {

	$modulepath = drupal_get_path ('module', 'ourmodule');	
	$cck_definition_file = $modulepath."/custom.cck";

  $values['type_name'] = '<create>';
  $values['macro'] = file_get_contents($cck_definition_file);
  
  include_once( drupal_get_path('module', 'node') .'/content_types.inc');
  include_once( drupal_get_path('module', 'content') .'/content_admin.inc');
  
  drupal_execute("content_copy_import_form", $values); 
}

where custom.cck under your module folder is the file that you can export from CCK if you have cck_content_copy module installed.

Via: AgileApproach Blog

Drupal Form-Handling support goes far beyond just the documented part of so-called Forms API. You can do pretty much anything with forms in Drupal and you can use/display the forms anywhere.

Here is an example. Let's assume we want to construct a custom node type with custom fields, using CCK. Then we want to display this form into some non-standard page. To further complicate things, let's assume we also want custom verification and processing routines.

And last but not least - we want to use full power of Drupal and write a minimal amount of code. Following is a snippet demonstrating key points to achieving this task (thorough understanding of Drupal is required):

Some of the blogs I often find to have useful Drupal information (in alphabetical order):

2Bits
    http://2bits.com/taxonomy/term/17+18/0
Agile Approach
    http://agileapproach.com/tagcloud/drupal
Boris Mann
    http://bmannconsulting.com/taxonomy/term/5/0
Bryght
    http://bryght.com/taxonomy/term/40/0
Development Seed
    http://www.developmentseed.org/taxonomy/term/42/0
Dries Buytaert
    http://buytaert.net/taxonomy/term/1/0
James Walker
    http://walkah.net/taxonomy/term/5/0
John and Cailin
    http://www.johnandcailin.com/category/blog-tags/drupal (LOVE THEM)
Lullabot
    http://www.lullabot.com/tracker/feed
Moshe Weitzman
    http://www.tejasa.com/taxonomy/term/33/0

One of the hottest subjects in Web technologies, these days, is finding effective ways to exploit Collective Intelligence of masses. Most everybody has heard of the so-called Web 2.0 and hundreds of different definitions of what it is or is not. In simple terms, Web 2.0 is a phenomena characterized by vastly increased direct participation of the user community in content authoring, mostly through blogs and discussions around blogs. Web 2.0 has brought us to a state where more and better content is freely available online than ever before.

There is a major problem with collective intelligence, though: information pieces are often disbursed. The more we move from the early days of the Internet as static data publishing platform towards the Internet, an aggregator of Intelligence, more do modern search engines fall short of providing adequate results. Current technologies are often unable to put information in context and help us connect the dots. It is for that reason that there is an increased demand for tools that can extract context off of content and can aggregate different data sources in a meaningful way.

One of such tools that has caught some spotlight lately, has been Calais Web Service, released by the news giant: Reuters.

"The Calais web service allows you to automatically annotate your content with rich semantic metadata, including Entities like People and Companies and Events & Facts like Acquisitions and Management Changes." -- opencalais.com

What is exceptional and interesting about the Calais web-service, putting it beyond and above other free terms-extractor services (like the one from Yahoo!) is that Calais provides context to extracted terms. For instance, when Calais web service analyzes a piece of content and finds "George Bush", not only will it extract and return it as a term (keyword) relevant to the text, but it will also tell you that George Bush is a Person. Likewise, it will tell you that United States is a country. This may seem trivial and simple, but if you put the added information (entity type) to a good use, you can build systems much more intelligent than you could with other, flat terms extraction tools.

Calais is a free Web Service. You can plug it into your applications and/or content management systems and use it, without any charge . Frank and I, spent a lot of our time last month integrating it into Drupal CMS and are glad to announce that it is now available for both Drupal 5 and Drupal 6. It is also the first integration of Calais API with a major content-management system.

You can download Calais integration module from:
http://drupal.org/project/opencalais
You can also watch a short screencast Frank recorded to demo main features of the module: http://calais.phase2technology.com/content/calais-demo-screencast

The screencast was recorded before the code was finalized, so the module can actually do more than you see in the screencast. You are encouraged to download and test-drive it.

And last, but not least, we would like to express our gratitude to our friends at the Calais team, for their invaluable help and support.

We are doing it!

Drupalcon 2008 Boston Live

Check it out at: http://drupalconlive.com

We all know that Drupal has a lot of modules. But do you know – exactly how many?

<[ Find out here ]>