Hello everyone, if your wireless drops or if you do not have a laptop just use your smart phone. The mobile site has a useful interface to view the schedule by day and by track.

I am hosting a BOF in room 206 at 4:15pm today, Monday to present how we created the mobile version of the DrupalCon website. The mobile version will automatically load for all webkit based smart phones.

With entities Drupal took a huge step forward in providing conceptual clarity in how it deals with things like users, comments, taxonomy terms and nodes.

I believe there is one more step to take to bring even more clarity that will hopefully be possible in Drupal 8. This is the content of my Core Developer Summit lightning talk- hopefully it is not completely off the mark.

With entities Drupal took a huge step forward in providing conceptual clarity in how it deals with things like users, comments, taxonomy terms and nodes.

I believe there is one more step to take to bring even more clarity that will hopefully be possible in Drupal 8 (or 9!). This is the content of my Core Developer Summit lightning talk- hopefully it is not completely off the mark.

It goes something like this:

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Compared to Tattler, one of the weaknesses of Managing News is the lack of topic monitoring - where a user inputs a keyword phrase representing a topic and the system takes care of tracking this topic across pre-selected RSS sources.

Soon after we started using Managing News, this requirement came up.

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Mike Carper (aka mikeytown2) talks about the Boost module, which a lightweight performance enhancement for small-scale sites that don't have a lot of dynamic content. After adding some apache rules to the .htaccess file, then Boost will translate Drupal pages into static HTML files and serve those directly instead of going through PHP and MySQL. Carper talks about some of the other caching configuration options, and says that this module is perfect for sites on shared hosting that are looking for a performance boost. He says that Boost can actually make your site slower in some cases where you have a lot of content that is frequently updated. In those cases, Varnish would probably be a better solution, but the Boost module is intended to be a quick and easy solution for smaller websites looking for better performance.

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Mike Carper (aka mikeytown2) talks about the Boost module, which a lightweight performance enhancement for small-scale sites that don't have a lot of dynamic content. After adding some apache rules to the .htaccess file, then Boost will translate Drupal pages into static HTML files and serve those directly instead of going through PHP and MySQL. Carper talks about some of the other caching configuration options, and says that this module is perfect for sites on shared hosting that are looking for a performance boost. He says that Boost can actually make your site slower in some cases where you have a lot of content that is frequently updated. In those cases, Varnish would probably be a better solution, but the Boost module is intended to be a quick and easy solution for smaller websites looking for better performance.

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This tutorial is sponsored by the Save Joseph campaign, a grassroots effort to find a good friend, stellar artist and all around amazing person a satisfying, creative job in the next 8 days. I know the Drupal community could use this kind of talent. Learn more about the effort at savejoseph.org. If you have any ideas on how I can get the word out about this, let me know!

My use case was that I wanted to be able to use social media icons for menu items so that we could re-arrage, add or remove items directly from the menu management interface:. The result is what you see below:

To use images for menu items in Drupal, the first step is to create an override theme function for theme_menu_item_link() in your theme's template.php file. The idea is to first run your image handling bit to switch out text for images, and then hand it over to the parent theme to do the rest. In my case, I'm using the Zen theme.

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When working in setting up and developing websites (among other things) we often have to choose between getting stuck in and getting stuff done the known way or trying to invest time in coming up with a more automated way or efficient way of doing things. Usually at some point we become aware of whether we made the right choice – and I find that moment is normally accompanied by a certain sinking feeling.

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For the growing universe of developers turning to Drupal as a solution for mission-critical or highly ambitious applications, the question is less and less "can we build it?" and more and more "how do I scale it?"

For those of you considering attending DrupalCon Copenhagen this August looking to answer those kinds of questions, I humbly submit that in addition to immersing yourself in the inspirational slipstream that is the Drupal community, you come a day early — and get your employer or client to find a little extra budget ;) — to attend the Scalability and Performance Workshop on Monday August 23rd:

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Evolving Web had a great time at Drupal Camp NYC last weekend. The camp was a huge success thanks to the excellent turn-out and presentations on exciting topics such as administrative interfaces, Context, and Drupal security. The team of organizers who put the camp together did an amazing job. Here are the slides from our sessions at the camp:

An introduction to installing and configuring Nagios as well as extensions and plugins such as logging and graphing and how to setup automated responses to problems.

We’ve been looking forward to DrupalCon Copenhagen for so long, it’s hard to believe that it’s less than a month away! In addition to all the sessions, training, code sprints, and other great content you’d expect from an international Drupal conference, this year's European DrupalCon should also be one of the most fun yet; as mortendk, one of the conference's organizers (and bona fide Drupal rock star) puts it, this August 23-27th, something will be awesome in the state of Denmark.

Palantir’s contingent to DrupalCon Copenhagen will include George DeMet (gdemet), Tiffany Farriss (farriss), Larry Garfield (Crell) and Ken Rickard (agentrickard). As usual we’ll be presenting and participating in a number of sessions:

Show the different coloured backgrounds to events based on tags

first go to admin/content/taxonomy/add/vocabulary and create a new taxonomy called calendar >

link it to event node type and add terms eg dropin, office, outreach, shop that reflect the

type of events that you wish to highlight.

then at node/add/event create a few test events all with different taxonomy terms

at admin/settings/date-time/formats add a new format g:ia and link it to a new format type

hourmin_g:ia > save

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Khalid Baheyeldin (aka kbahey) has been involved with Drupal since 2003, and focuses on the performance & scalability in Drupal. He talks about his strategies for diagnosing the performance bottlenecks in a Drupal site, and mentions some of the various tools that he prescribes as a solution.

For more information, be sure to check out Baheyeldin's DrupalCon presentation slides and talk titled 2.8 million page views per day, 60 M per month, one server!

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Khalid Baheyeldin (aka kbahey) has been involved with Drupal since 2003, and focuses on the performance & scalability in Drupal. He talks about his strategies for diagnosing the performance bottlenecks in a Drupal site, and mentions some of the various tools that he prescribes as a solution.

For more information, be sure to check out Baheyeldin's DrupalCon presentation slides and talk titled 2.8 million page views per day, 60 M per month, one server!

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This week we had the pleasure to welcome Mike from Drupal Easy in our Krimson office.
Mike has been working in Antwerp the whole summer and is returning to his homebase Florida next week.

Open Atrium (http://www.openatrium.com) is best described as an "Intranet in a box" that sits atop Drupal 6. With the release of Open Atrium 1.0-beta4, Development Seed made a few crucial changes to the way OA is configured and structured. Now at beta7, there are still some older OA sites out there that are still running versions prior to beta4. Those sites require a little extra work to upgrade since they need to be upgraded to beta4 first, and then can be upgraded to beta7 and beyond.

It should also be noted that each release of Open Atrium contains a version of the Drupal core as well. I do not personally know if there are any potential issues with upgrading the version of Drupal independently of Open Atrium, but I do know that updating Open Atrium will typically upgrade the Drupal Core as well.

The basic steps for upgrading Open Atrium to beta4 are straightforward, but there are a couple pitfalls that you should watch out for:

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We now write Drush Make files for even our smallest one-off builds. This discipline saves us time and makes us more efficient as a team by knowing what code actually powers a site. It also helps us transition projects to our partners or to the shops that will be supporting the sites we build, helping us more quickly cut the long tail of a build. To give a sense of just how much this can help internal processes, I'll explain how I was robbed of three days this week by jumping onto a project we worked on before we formalized using Drush Make in our build process.

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This video introduces you to the Vi (and Vim) editor. Vi is the most common text editor that you will have available to you on *nix systems so it pays to at least learn the basics in case you end up somewhere where that is all you have to use. Vim is also actually a very serviceable editor which many people (mostly hardcore geeks) use as their day to day editor. We'll talk briefly about Vi versus Vim, then open a file, move around, and close the the file. Our next video will dive more into editing files with Vi.

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This video introduces you to the Vi (and Vim) editor. Vi is the most common text editor that you will have available to you on *nix systems so it pays to at least learn the basics in case you end up somewhere where that is all you have to use. Vim is also actually a very serviceable editor which many people (mostly hardcore geeks) use as their day to day editor. We'll talk briefly about Vi versus Vim, then open a file, move around, and close the the file. Our next video will dive more into editing files with Vi.

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Come to Drupalcon Copenhagen

The views module is often used in place of or in addition to Drupal's core search module or other search modules when more control is required. By adding exposed filters, a site's visitors can narrow a search by the value of any field and many node object values.

The results can quickly be themed to highlight the search keys just like core search.