This video screencast is part II of a series that documents the development of a new, real-life Drupal website from the ground up. It shows you how to install a number of the more popular add-on modules from the contributions repository, and it steps through a detailed demonstration of how to configure these modules. The add-on modules that are covered include Views, CCK, Pathauto, and Category. Video produced by GreenAsh Services, and sponsored by Hambo Design. (28:44 min — 35.1MB H.264)
This video screencast is part I of a series that documents the development of a new, real-life Drupal website from the ground up. It shows you how to download Drupal 4.7, install it, and perform some basic initial configuration tasks. Video produced by GreenAsh Services, and sponsored by Hambo Design. (11:35 min — 10.2MB H.264)
After much delay, the stylish new 3rd edition of GreenAsh has finally hit the web! This is the first major upgrade that GreenAsh has had in almost 2 years, since it was ported over from home-grown CMS (v1) to Drupal (v2). The site has been upgraded from its decaying and zealously hacked Drupal 4.5 code base, to the latest stable (and much-less-hacked) 4.7 code base. It sports a snazzy new theme, complete with fresh branding, graphics, and content layout. It is using quite a few new modules that are only available in more recent versions of Drupal, including views, pathauto, and the improved captcha module. And, best of all, it has finally been switched over to the category module, which was built and documented by myself, and which had the purpose from the very beginning of being installed right here, in order to meet the hefty navigational and user experience demands that I have placed upon this site. Read on to find out how, and why, the upgrade in all its pain and glory was carried out.
The Summer of Code has finally come to an end, and it's time for me to write up my final thoughts on my involvement in it. The Import / Export API module has been a long and challenging project, but it's also been great fun and has, in my opinion, been a worthwhile cause to devote my time to. My mentor has given my work the final tick of approval (which is great!), and I personally feel that the project has been an overwhelming success.
In a small, poorly ventilated room, somewhere in Australia, there are four geeky fingers and two geeky thumbs, and they are attached to two geeky hands. All of the fingers and all of the thumbs are racing haphazardly across a black keyboard, trying to churn out PHP; but mostly they're just tapping repeatedly, and angrily, on the 'backspace' key. A pair of eyes squint tiredly at the LCD monitor before them, trying to discern whether the miniscule black dot that they perceive is a speck of dirt, or yet another pixel that has gone to pixel heaven.
The Summer of Code is now past its half-way mark. For some reason, I passed the mid-term evaluation, and I'm still here. The API is getting ever closer to meeting its success criteria, although not as close as I'd hoped for it to be by this point. A very crude XML import and export is now possible, but the ID and reference handling system - which is set to be one of the API's killer features - is only half-complete at present. Unfortunately, it's going to stay that way for a while, because I'm away on vacation for the next full week.
It is said that a house is the sum of its parts. If you take away the doors, the windows, the roof, the floorboads, the inside walls, the power lines, and the water pipes, is it still a house? In developing Drupal Lite, I hope to have answered this question in relation to Drupal. What are the absolute essentials, without which Drupal simply cannot be called Drupal? If you remove nodes, users, and the entire database system from Drupal, is it still Drupal?
The mid-program mentor evaluation (a.k.a. crunch time) for the Summer of Code is almost here, and as such, I've been working round-the-clock to get my project looking as presentable as possible. The Import / Export API module has made significant progress since my last report, but there's still plenty of work left to be done.
It's been almost two weeks since the 2006 Summer of Code began, and with it, my work to develop an import / export API module for Drupal. In case you missed it, my work is being documented on this wiki. My latest code is now also available as a project on drupal.org. Since I've barely started, I think that this is a stupid time to sit back and reflect on what I've done so far. But I'm doing it anyway.
Every time that you perform any action in a desktop application, you can hit the trusty 'undo' button, to un-wreak any havoc that you may have just wreaked. One of the biggest shortcomings of web applications in general, is that they lack this crucial usability (and arguably security) feature. However, implementing an 'undo' (and 'redo') system in Drupal should be a relatively simple task - much simpler, in fact, than you might at first think.