Views are a massive part of Drupal and you can't experience the power of Drupal without the Views module.

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In lieu of the fact that I was unable to go attend Confab this week, I wanted to represent the Content Strategy movement by sharing a notion I've been thinking about for quite some time. I believe there are three key ingredients to making an amazing website: 

1. Beautiful Design
2. Meaningful Content
3. Rock Solid Development

While this concept may seem self evident, I find most web projects do a great job at focusing on design and development, but fail to allocate sufficient resources, time, and consideration to the "Meaningful Content" chunk of the triangle. 

Fortunately, the evolving field of Content Strategy has produced a concepts, tools, and methodologies which have begun to shift people's opinions on the importance of this sector.

In an effort to support this momentum, I've compiled a list of resources to share with future collaborators, web practitioners, and site administrators. 

After all, the more we all know about Content Strategy, the better the web will become.

Hash tags to follow

• #contentstrategy (my personal favorite)
• #confab2012

People to follow

• @halvorson
• @karenmcgrane
• @arockley
• @RellyAB
• @confab2012

Books to read

• Content Strategy for the Web
• The Elements of Content Strategy
• Content Rules

Resources to check out

• http://blog.braintraffic.com/
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/content-strategy-storytelling/
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/06/03/content-strategy-optimizing-y...
• http://www.slideshare.net/KMcGrane/adapting-ourselves-to-adaptive-conten...
• http://boagworld.com/tumblog/the-truth-about-content-strategy/
• http://boagworld.com/site-content/10-ways-to-put-your-content-in-front-o...

 

• Determine current version of Drupal being used
• Downloading a clean Drupal Core
• Running an initial diff (show the difference) between the two
• Run a detailed diff on
  

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With the passing of the call for papers deadline last week DrupalCon Munich is now a hot topic. Witnessing a fever pitched last minute rush, we have well over 300 session proposals. It is now the role of the track chairs to evaluate submissions using the new selection process. You are encouraged to use comments to indicate sessions you would particularly like to see featured. Final conference program and pre-conference trainings will be announced May 29th via this web site.

This week Neil Kent, Events Director at Drupal Association, was in Munich to meet with conference suppliers, finalise plans at the venue and members of the local organising community team. We are pleased to confirm he has secured a limited number of double rooms at an exclusive DrupalCon rate at The Westin Grand Hotel. Following the successful forumla at DrupalCon Chicago, we are particularly excited to provide attendees exclusive use of the majority of the facilities in the Westin Grand Hotel, home of the conference. Drupalers will have the freedom to meet, code, socialise anywhere, anytime, any way they please.

Florian Loretan, Community Representative, was recently interviewed by both Lullabot and Modsunravelled podcasts. He explains the conference theme "Open Up! Connecting Systems and People" and describes how it will shape the conference. 

If you can't wait until August, the next warmup event to DrupalCon Europe is Drupal Dev Days, Barcelona. From our local team Miro Dietiker, João Ventura, Florian Loretan, Daniel Nolde, Andreas Sahle and Ralf Hendel will all be attending. Be sure to look them up to find out more about what we have in store for devops track and core conversations. For the more adventurous Drupal Camping is coming to Allersee, Germany. In the meantime why not sample some of the fabulous attractions Munich has to offer on our Pinterest board. 

The DrupalCon Global Team has seen several appointments in recent weeks. Kris Bytaert, one of instigators of the devops movement, is now devops track chair. Kris recently defined his vision of how devops at Munich. Rick Nashleanas becomes the first Global Content Manager, his latest blog post he discusses the value global chairs will contribute. Karyn Cassio has been appointed Global Community Track Chair, and blogs about how she hopes to encourage people to Come for the Software, Stay for the Community.

Tickets are selling fast. Following the success of Denver, we are confident the DrupalCon Munich will be a sell out. Go buy your tickets! Book a room at the Drupal Hotel!

Finally, if you have any questions relating to DrupalCon Munich our support team can be reached via our contact form in German or English.

Panels variants can easily be used to create a mobile version of your website. If you’re already using Panels, you need one module: Mobile Tools (http://drupal.org/project/mobile_tools). It contains a plug-in for Panels, making it easy to create a specific variant for mobile.

First, create your normal page layout using Panels. Then, create a second variant and when you add content (or in the content settings), choose "Mobile" for your build mode.

It’s as easy as that!

Author Lynette Miles

Lynette Miles is the co-author of Drupal Building Blocks, and has worked in the tech industry for her entire professional career. She became involved with Drupal in 2006, and participates in the documentation team as well as coordinating the Views bug squad.

It's not a secret that Drupal 8 most likely will have in core the option of using Twig templating system.

The discussion about it happened quite fast between March-April 2012. See this issue: [meta] New theme system, where Dries commented: "I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm in support of rethinking the theme system. I'm also comfortable that the team will come up with a good solution."

Why to use a template system when PHP can be already be used as a template system?

Reason to use a template system is mainly to separate the presentation from business logic. When you use PHP as template system you are giving too much power to the presentation layer. So it's easy that things get messy mixing code and layout, and even worse: having security issues in custom themes.

John Albin stood up in Denver and said "We hand themers a loaded gun and tell them to hammer in a nail with it. Oh, and be careful"

So a template engine enforces a clean separation, using a tag-based syntax, so no PHP knowledge is needed and improves reusability of templates.
Web designers with non-programming background are the ones who most will appreciate this separation. And also preventing they do not to shoot themselves in the foot, compromising the security of your web site.

If you are not sold still, read these two articles and comments discussion of the convenience of a template engine that is not PHP:

Templating Engines in PHP, and the follow up. By Fabien, main developer of Symphony and Twig.

Twig

Twig is quite powerful, supporting macros, i18n, extensions, template inheritance, etc. From a developer point of view, Twig is that complex that almost in the line of "what's the point of learning such a complex templating language when we have PHP?"

But from a designer point of view it's more about "I have complete control to do literally anything with the content without having to bother the programmer at all".

Pros

• The main benefit of bringing Twig to Drupal will be security. The rest of pros/cons are not so important as providing a default secure HTML output.
• Powerful, expressive template language with easy syntax and very cool features
• It's widely supported among IDEs (Eclipse, PHPStorm, etc).
• Not NIH syndrome in Drupal community: It will bring Symphony and Drupal communities closer, since we are sharing more and more components
• Re-use in JavaScript? There is a github repo at least that provides Twig in JavaScript .

Possible Cons

• A little steeper learning curve for Drupal.
• (Just wondering) How tightly coupled is Twig with Symphony?
• Performance and memory could be an issue (See http://www.phpcomparison.net ), although the bottenecks of your website probably are in other places.
• (Just wondering) Headaches about versioning? If Twig is evolving constantly, how Drupal 8 core will handle it when development gets frozen.

Drupal and Twig

Some implementation details are in this post Drupal 8 Theme System Sprint. (Jacine, chx, and John Albin)

* chx's sandbox: Drupal 8 with twig

For Drupal 7 we have some also these two experimental modules

* ReneB's sandbox Twig for Drupal (Twig implemented as a theme engine)
* smokris' Twig template engine (Twig implemented as an input filter)

See also

ReneB presentation slides: Twig for Drupal @ Frontendunited Amsterdam 2012

Note: When googling about Twig, notice that most of articles, benchmarks, etc are based on old versions of Twig.
Twig has evolved a lot in the last months.

Sometimes Drupal opens up a big can of whoop-up process on ya, and Rules Scheduler is one of those gems.  Rule Scheduler allows you to use rule triggers to schedule rule sets.

Use Case:Ever want to send an email the day before a scheduled event?  We use CCK Sign-up and wanted to send an email to users one week before an event, as well as the day of.  We also needed to send teachers views of the roster of students

Here’s the 2 minute mojo on it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55HwOzFHoB8 and it just highlights the mistakes I was making.

The recipe came out of Drupal documentaiton, and these two tutorials got me 90% of the way:

• Tutorial 2: Publish content exactly 24 hours after it was created
• Tutorial 3: Publish content based on a CCK date field

working with scheduled rules

And I thought I was home free, however I ran in to a pretty stupid problem that took me a minute to understand = all the identifiers need to have tokens in them with unique values or else they overwrite themselves in the database.

Solution? Easy = add some tokens – [node:nid] worked for me

The nicely scheduled rules

Another fun feature in this project was revisiting one of my favorite modules: Rules Views Integration.  The cool thing about scheduling a rendered view in a rule set is that the rule gets rendered at the last minute and so you can schedule (in our case) a class roster to go out and it’ll have the most up to date information possible at the time of sending.

NB: I also ran in to a problem where cron wasn’t sending my emails initially.  I have no idea why it was stuck, however Ultimate Cron has been a good friend of late and unlocking and running the tab got it back on track = I haven’t seen it stall in a few weeks now.

Ultimate Cron unlock and run run run

 

Something else I haven’t gotten into yet, however, is the use of the Rules Scheduler Views.   Something tells me there is some magic to be had in there, used correctly.  At this point however I’m just using the off-the-shelf defaults.   I know of no Views Bulk Operations for scheduled rules, so perhaps the default info is all there is to know.  In any case, it’s an elegant solution to working with drupal’s cron functions.

TweetRecently I had the privilege of being part of a team that converted the BMJ (British Medical Journal) to Drupal. The BMJ (British Medical Journal) is one of the world’s top five international peer reviewed medical journals with more than 1.5 million unique visitors and 6.8 million page views per month.You can read the about the project and it's success at http://drupal.org/node/1557636

17 MayDrupal Government Days Brussels videos online

It seems like a lot is moving in Drupal for government, after Drupal got serious momentum when the White house launched their Drupal site the Drupal Government Days in Washington DC on 18 May, 2012, will be the third dedicated Drupal Government event.

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With something as simple as the post title, I've already broken one of the rules I'll be setting forth here—that of expectation setting. This is not a post about ignoring your clients or putting them aside or picking only the right clients and shunning the rest. This real subject of this post is the '-tion' (pronounced shun) suffix at the end of the three key thoughts: communicaTION, expectaTION and execuTION.

When you're building a web site for a government agency, the importance of finding the right tool for the job can mean the difference between a simple web site and a true solution. For the team at New Amsterdam Ideas, OpenPublic was the right tool for the job of revamping the site of New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman. I sat down with Andrew Hoppin and Sheldon Rampton from
New Amsterdam Ideas to learn more about their experience building with OpenPublic.

One of the goals of Drupal 8 Multilingual Inititive is to refactor Gettext file handling by a component. The first effort was Make gettext .po generation its own abstracted functionality by Gábor Hojtsy, Sutharsan, fubhy, sun and clemens.tolboom

While I (clemens.tolboom) was working on that issue I skimmed over the Translation component delivered by Symfony to see whether we could match their architecture (why reinvent components?) or even take over their components.

Progressing further and discussing progress with Gábor Hojtsy and sun on #drupal-i18nsun suggested to create a new issue trying to use the Symfony Translation component and see what happens with Let Symfony Translation component handle language messages.

This lead me into a new world of GLP versus MIT, php development, git squash, github pull requests etc.

Here are some experiences from my pull requests for Symfony (click closed button to see all.)

Experiences Licenses and the copy paste cat

My initial D8MI related pull request Drupal gettext was a bummer as I added a slightly changed and objectified copy-paste version of some parts of gettext.inc forgetting GPL does not allow loosening the license into a MIT version.

git squash et al

By having a pull request the receiving party wants a clean commit. But as a developer you commit every new feature into a local commit to make cherry-picking possible. For this to work you need to squash all commits into the commit belonging to the pull request.

Thanks to stloyd pointed me to Using Git Rebase to Squash Commits explained a great deal to me and http://symfony.com/doc/master/contributing/code/patches.html

Should we go using Symfony Translation component

The Symfony Trans2drupal pull request is developed based on the patch for Drupal Let Symfony Translation component handle language messages. That introduces a brittle dependency as it is not committed. It is not actively commented too. So that's not comforting.

The flip side is we can drop a lot of code and focus on our Drupal code when the pull request lands. In writing the code I learned new ways of coding (more PHP less Drupal) which is nice.

Image taken from http://www.mjdinteractive.com/mjd-blog/2012/04/drupal-8-to-utilize-symfo...

• planet
• planet drupal
• symfony
• phpunit

It’s 2011, and the world is going mobile. People don't just use their desktop computer or laptop anymore to visit the sites you build. They're coming at you with smartphones, tablets, TV screens— and who knows what they’ll bring next year? With all this device-switching going on, one of the questions that site builders ask themselves is, how can we keep catering to all these different devices? The good news: There is a way. It’s called responsive webdesign.

In this article, we briefly lay out what responsive webdesign is, and, more importantly, how you can use it in your Drupal projects today.

What is responsive web design?

In his 2010 article on 'A List Apart', Ethan Marcotte coined the term "responsive webdesign," referring to responsive architecture. If architects can design rooms that change according to the number of people inside them, why can't web designers build web pages that adapt to the people who view them?

As you may have guessed from the name, responsive web design is all about, yes, responding to the site user's device specifics. Does the device have a wide or narrow screen? How is the user holding the device? What OS is powering the device? All these questions determine how the user experiences your website. With responsive webdesign, you can accommodate all these possible differences.

Using a combination of CSS3 media queries (which query the device's capabilities to determine the proper stylesheets to load), a flexible grid acting as the site’s foundation, and images that change according to the screen resolution, responsive webdesign allows you to work in a so called "device agnostic" way. It doesn’t matter whether the user has the latest tablet, or an early-adapter smartphone: if your design is responsive, it can adapt to the user. Think of it as a fluid (vs fixed) webdesign on heavy steroids.

"This is our way forward. Rather than tailoring disconnected designs to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can treat them as facets of the same experience. We can design for an optimal viewing experience, but embed standards-based technologies into our designs to make them not only more flexible, but more adaptive to the media that renders them." (Ethan Marcotte)

Author Bruno De Bondt & Kristof Orts

Bruno De Bondt has been theming and developing Drupal sites since 2005. He is the technical lead at DeWereldMorgen.be, a popular independent news website in Belgium. He has also worked as a Drupal developer and themer for Krismon, one of the main Drupal shops in Europe. Working with them, he has built several media, non profit and advocacy websites. Bruno currently lives in Vancouver, Canada. You can reach him on Drupal.org or Twitter as brunodbo or on http://brunodbo.be.

Kristof Orts loves the web and specializes in user experience and usability. He's also a team player, for big projects he likes to work with partners that have the same knowledge and passion as he does. Some keywords Kristof uses every day: CSS3, HTML5, JS, flexible layouts, responsive and mobile design. He also loves to speak about these things at conferences.

A continuation of the useful administration modules list started in Part I.

Devel

Used extensively by the developers, devel module can also be very helpful to the site administrators. One of its more popular features is automatic content generation (such as users and nodes) - including media files! Another nice feature is switching between users (for example, to test access permissions). It also integrates well with the admin menu module mentioned in the first part of the article.

To use Devel on Drupal 6, go to admin/generate and choose the type of items to generate (the modules comes with taxonomy, content and users, other modules add more types of content). The module can also delete the existing items (for examples, nodes by type).

Related stories: 

If you liked it this story, you might like the following:

15 modules to improve your Drupal administration and content management experience (D6 & D7) - part IRedirect 403 to User Login (r4032login module).Custom contact form with conditional fields using webform and webform conditionalDrush Site Aliases and Interactive ShellInstall Drupal 7 site with Drush

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In this chapter we will get a calendar up and running on our demo site. We will cover the necessary modules, how to install them, as well as basic site configurations. We'll also show how simple it is to get a calendar on your site using a views template, and then give a tour of some calendar features.

Resources  Modules Needed:

• Calendar module
• Ctools module
• Views module

9m Publication date  May 16, 2012 - 9:00am Rules trigger for changing creation date on a scheduled publication.  No

In this series we focus on building calendars with Drupal. We'll be covering topics such as basic configuration for fields and views, using calendar templates, creating blocks and different ways of displaying the calendar, along with customizing the look and feel.

This video assumes that you understand the basics of content, fields, and Views in Drupal. If you need a refresher on these topics, or want to find out more about using the Date module, here are some other tutorial series to review:

2m Publication date  May 16, 2012 - 9:00am Rules trigger for changing creation date on a scheduled publication.  No

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This week I talk with Steven Jones of the Aegir Project.

Here are some of the questions I asked him

• I’ve only heard of Aegir, but never actually used it. What exactly is it?
• How did you get started with Aegir?
• What kinds of things can Aegir do other than site install?
• How does Aegir integrate with Git?
• What sort of people is Aegir appropriate for?
• How does Aegir compare to other tools like Pantheon or Acquia’s dev cloud?
• What about tools like Puppet or Capistrano?
• How can people get help?
• What’s the future of Aegir?

Questions from Twitter

• @TimeRaider: What are the plans for 7.x release and new Drush support?
• @tgroff: What should distributions do to ensure Aegir compatibility?

Submitted on Wed, 05/16/2012 - 00:00

Minor Drupal versions are usually for bug fixes, security updates, and the occasional new feature that doesn't break backwards compatibility. Compatibility changes are reserved for major Drupal releases. There are exceptions such as Drupal 6.2. It was such a big deal there is an update documentation page just for this release. When Drupal 7.14 made an API breaking change without providing documentation or notification to module developers I was quite surprised. The lack of detail made it difficult to track down the changes when I had a broken codebase. Here are the details so others can, hopefully, have an easier time if they run into this problem.

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A drush site alias file allows you to streamline advanced drush commands and make running them against both local and remote sites a breeze. With a properly configured alias file and an SSH key you can run frequently used commands that have complex options, with a concise easily remembered "alias" on any site. This will help you be far more productive and you will find yourself using drush itself far more often.

The Migrate module is the leading tool for migrating data from an external application into Drupal. Migrate has been used to bring many world class sites onto Drupal, including The Economist, Martha Stewart and thousands more. The main theme of the upcoming Migrate 2.4 release is improved file handling on Drupal 7.