Twin Cities Drupal

I need someone to update a theme based on zenlike so that it also works on low-resolution settings. Please contact me for website and contract details.

thanks,
John

Drupal 6.8 and Drupal 5.14 are slight updates to Drupal 6.7 and 5.13, removing an incompatibility with versions of PHP before 5.2 released in the earlier versions. The 6.7 and 5.13 releases fixed problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in Drupal 5.0 release announcement.

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Drupal 6.7 and Drupal 5.13, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities, are now available for download.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in Drupal 5.0 release announcement.

Using PHP 5.1.x or earlier? We found a bug which causes a warning on login. That patch has been rolled back in CVS, and we will be doing a bugfix release on December 11th. As always, please test this release, so we can find and fix any other critical bugs, see the Bug reports section below.

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The deadline for submitting sessions proposals for DrupalCon DC is December 10. If you'd like to present but haven't yet submitted, please submit your session before midnight! So far, almost 150 session ideas have been submitted and discuss a variety of topics. It's exciting to have such a large and varied pool to select the final sessions from - and to know that we're well on our way to having a high quality conference.

In the weeks after the deadline, we'll work with a volunteer committee (please contact us if you want to help) to go through the proposals - and in conjunction with the votes each has received - select the best sessions for each track, merge ones that overlap, and ensure that each track has good depth and representation.

The final schedule will be posted to the DrupalCon website in January. If you have a last minute session idea, we have plenty of space for BoF sessions which will be scheduled on the fly.

Hey Twin Cities,

After talking with a few of you at last meeting (thanks again Dave!), I realized there are probably quite a few of us that will be heading off to Drupalcon DC in March.

As such, we all have a chance to do some voting on the T-shirt contest. Erika Stenrick of our local community (and designer here at Gorton Studios) submitted this entry. We're, of course, big fans of Erika's work, and if any of you have seen some of our websites and liked them, you're been admiring her work as well.

So - if you're planning on going and/or voting in the T-Shirt contest - we'd encourage you give her entry a look and vote for it if you happen to like it, too!

That's it - just getting out the vote!
:-)

Drew

Hi Twin Cities! I’m a new face in the local Drupal community, having just joined Gorton Studios as their new Project Manager. Gorton Studios is currently working on a bunch of interesting projects and it just so happens that these projects are landing at the same time. So, we are currently looking for both freelance Drupal Programmers and Designers, as well as folks that we can outright refer work to. We are looking for people that are experienced in their field, are great communicators, are flexible, have integrity, and of course a sense of humor. If you fit this bill or if you know of someone that would be a great fit and they want to be part of building great websites, please send references and a resume to me, Lynn Winter, at lynn@gortonstudios.com.

The Drupal Association is excited to announce that the last iteration, iteration 11, of the Drupal.org redesign is now available for review. Hundreds of Drupal community members and designers have participated in the redesign of Drupal.org.

We have had over 450 comments on 10 posts in the Drupal.org redesign group. Leisa Reichelt, our user experience research lead, has posted over 26 blog entries about the Drupal.org redesign with over 300 comments! Over on Mark Boulton Design, Mark has blogged 6 posts with over 430 comments. Who knew that open source contributors were so passionate about fonts, logos, and brands? Mark Boulton has also blogged three posts on his personal blog. It's been an exciting, educational, and insightful process for everyone who has been involved. If you haven't had a chance to review these 42 blog posts, or the numerous posts about the redesign on Planet Drupal, please take a few hours and get involved now!

We are now recruiting theme developers from the community to help create both the base theme and Drupal.org site specific themes. The base theme will implement the design style guide developed as part of the redesign deliverables. The Drupal.org specific themes will remain exclusive to Drupal.org web sites: http://association.drupal.org, http://api.drupal.org, http://security.drupal.org, http://infrastructure.drupal.org.

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Crooks and Liars is an American liberal blog, which was founded in August of 2004, during the 2004 Presidential election, by John Amato. It was the first video style blog around, starting in a pre-YouTube era. Crooks and Liars has a team of about a dozen volunteers, including administrators, contributors and moderators.   Crooks and Liars has grown immensely since its birth, now averaging  over 230,000 unique visitors per day and over 330,000 page impressions.

Crooks and Liars originally started out on Radio Userland , which served as its home for two years. After that we started exploring other blogging platforms. At that time we were averaging around 100,000 hits per day. We decided to move to Wordpress , which could handle our smaller team of only 4 at the time.

As the site continued to grow and we were approaching the 200,000 hits per day mark, we started experiencing a lot of down time from server overloads. We were utilizing the famous wp-cache plugin for Wordpress, as well as hosting the database on a single master and two slaves, using the HyperDB class for Wordpress to handle the replication.

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Good news! During the week of December 15, we're organizing a 5-day Fields in Drupal core code sprint at Acquia! The goal is to get CCK functionality into Drupal 7.

So far, Karen, Yves and Barry have signed up -- Karen and Yves are the main CCK maintainers, and Barry has done a lot of work on CCK as well.

To help us fund the sprint, please consider making a donation using the ChipIn widget on this page. We need money for airline tickets, hotel rooms, food and transportation. It would also be great to fly in a few additional people with extensive core and CCK experience.

I've tentatively worked out a budget of $7,000 USD, which covers flight, food and hotel costs for at least four people (Karen, Yves, and two additional people). Since Acquia is covering my travel expenses and allowing Barry to participate all week long, that gives us six people working on CCK-fields-in-core for an entire week. Any excess money will be used to add more people, or donated to the Drupal Association.

To guarantee that Yves and Karen can attend, Acquia is funding Yves' and Karen's hotel and airplane tickets if enough money can't be raised through donations. Acquia is also providing working space in our Andover office.

We'll try to allow people to participate in the sprint remotely, and provide a daily update on our progress. If you're interested and available to participate, join the Fields in Core group, enable e-mail notifications, and block time in your calendar between December 15 and December 19. We'll use the Fields in Core group to plan and to let you know how you can contribute and participate.

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Drupal for Education and E-Learning is now available from Packt Publishing. This book covers Drupal 6, and describes how to build a community site to support teaching and learning. This book is designed for people new to Drupal, with no prior development experience. The hands-on, step-by-step instructions guide you through installing Drupal, configuring contributed modules and themes, and working with some of Drupal’s most useful and powerful modules, including CCK, Views, and Organic Groups. The book also covers site maintenance, upgrades, and backups – these essential steps, while not as fun as site building, are essential for keeping your site and data secure.

This book is written with the needs of educational users in mind, but the information in this book can be useful for site administrators, or for people looking to build a community/social networking site in Drupal outside of education as well.

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Drupal Genius Wanted - we're looking for someone who can:

• provide fixes and tweaks as needed
• has strong knowledge of drupal code including blocks, views, and related components.
• strong knowledge of of php, mysql, and javascript preferred. If weak in those, then suggest how you'd address it
• is prepared to help us efficiently migrate to a new hosting site and build a new dev server that is set up for easy, transparent migration to the live server
• has a working knowledge of managing Flash, streamed media, and other graphical components within a Drupal/Apache environment

We will be updating the look and feel of several parts of our site soon, so the migration and dev server will need to be accomplished quickly, then the consultant will need to be available to help build the new page designs.

Preference will be given to applicants located in or about the Twin Cities of Minnesota

If interested, please contact Jay at jay@captionmax.com and include "Drupal" in your subject heading.

One mom's mission to create a safe online space for teens

Yoursphere.com is a safe kids-only social network (built with Drupal 5), which is complemented by an online safety blog and discussion site, internet-safety.yoursphere.com (built with Acquia Drupal).

Founder Mary Kay Hoal is a savvy mother of five. When her children started spending time on social network sites such as MySpace she did a little research and was shocked to find that social networks were magnets for sexual predators and rampant with inappropriate content targeting youth. "We wouldn't open our front door and invite 29,000 registered sex offenders into the house," Mary Kay told her kids, "so why should we accept that online?"

So she banned social networking from her home and saw her approval rating dip below that of steamed broccoli. Besides being unpopular at home, Mary Kay also knew that trying to banish MySpace would be a hopeless game of whack-a-mole. She really had no choice -- it was her duty as a mom to create a safe alternative.

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While many people say that theming is one of the better organized topics in Drupal's documentation, many have expressed frustration that relevant pages are located in a variety of different branches, and even separate handbooks. The documentation team has also decided that this has created an unsustainable path for forward maintenance. Therefore, as a first step, we are going to merge nearly all theming-related information into a single Consolidated Theming Guide on Sunday, 23 November, to be located at http://drupal.org/theme-guide (currently pointing to the Drupal 6 Theme Guide). Existing links, both to individual nodes numbers and path aliases, will be preserved as much as possible.

A theming documentation workgroup is now forming to focus on reorganizing the new book's navigation hierarchy. For further information on the project and how to join in, please visit the group's project page.

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Just over a month ago, we announced that we opened up editing rights to much of the handbooks for all users on Drupal.org. Our one month trial period is over and the Documentation team has decided that overall it has been a success. We have seen many more edits and fixes in the handbook and, while we did see some limited mess to clean up, occurrences of vandalism (or playing around) were relatively uncommon. We feel, at this time, that open editing is a significant benefit to our handbooks. We have decided to leave open editing in place, with no further defined trial periods. Keep editing away!

In addition to helping out with fixing pages, we also need many eyes on the edits themselves. Anyone can review recent edits and check out the diffs. If you notice something awry about an edit, you can simply fix it by editing or, if you are a member of the documentation team, you can select the "revert" operation from the Revisions tab to undo the change.

This process did raise other discussions related to various improvements we could make to help track edits and thoughts about how the new page creation management, versus editing, could be improved. Feel free to join in those ongoing tasks and discussions. The next IRC meeting will be tomorrow, November 20 at 18:00 GMT (1 p.m. EST, 10 a.m. PST) and all are welcome. For more info on documentation activites and projects, check out our group.

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Presentation slides on slideshare: Auto-loading of Drupal CCK Nodes

If you need to grab lots of records from disparate sources and load them into Drupal as CCK nodes, you need to either hire a small army for data entry, or you need to automate it. If you need to do this often, you need to schedule it. In this presentation, I will show how we at UMN Libraries did both with Drupal for ethicshare.org.

This is a common problem, which the IT industry usually calls Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL). Some people, like library geeks, like to call the extracting "harvesting" and the transforming "crosswalking", but they're peculiar. Anyway, an ETL system is exactly what we built for ethicshare.org. Such systems can be incredibly complex. Though we tried to keep ours as simple as possible, there's still much I could cover, including:

• programmatically loading CCK nodes with drupal_execute
• scheduling Drupal tasks with cron
• executing Drupal tasks from the command line with drush
• executing SimpleTest tests from the command line
• putting non-Drupal-dependent code in separate modules so that it can be tested outside of Drupal
• integrating OO PHP modules, including your own, with Drupal

I could go on. I'm still working on my slides, so any feedback on what you would like me to cover would be much appreciated!

You say that all you want for the holidays is Drupal skills?

Advantage Labs to the rescue: we are conducting a concentrated 2-day Drupal training workshop where you will learn how to create, manage and extend a Drupal site, complete with functionality that will draw users in, keep them informed, and keep them coming back! Perfect for web professionals just getting into Drupal, and community managers with existing or upcoming sites.

Let us know if you have any questions.
Thanks!
Bobbi

Hi All - In our last meeting, we discovered that the November meeting was going to land the day before Thanksgiving, and that the December meeting was going to land the day before Christmas. Although our meetings are exciting, we just felt that we couldn't compete with these events.

Therefore, we decided that the next meeting will be Wednesday, December 3rd, same time (7-9 pm), same place (Advantage Labs' office: 2104 Stevens Avenue South). This meeting will replace the November and December meetings.

Stay tuned for the official announcement, complete with agenda.

Thanks!
Bobbi

Team Lullabot is really excited to unveil O'Reilly Media's first Drupal book, Using Drupal, due out next month. (BTW, that's a dormouse on the cover. :)) The book is written against Drupal 6.

Our motivation for writing this book was that most peoples' first experience with Drupal involves getting it installed successfully, but then being left with the question, "What next?" Using Drupal is all about answering this question. It shows in a practical, hands-on way how to combine over thirty of Drupal's contributed modules to build Drupal websites that can do things ranging from product reviews to event management to e-commerce, all through configuration with as little coding as possible. You can also think of it as a field guide to CCK and Views, since almost all chapters build on those base modules.

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CCK has been significantly reworked for Drupal 6, both to add new functionality and to provide stronger code and APIs. We've tried to respond to many of the things that were often requested but were difficult or impossible to do in the Drupal 5 version: streamline the process of creating fields, use drag-n-drop to reorganize fields and values, provide a user-friendly 'Add more' button for multiple values, give developers an API and more tools to customize CCK behavior, and provide more documentation.

Many of the things you see in the latest code would not have been possible without all the new Drupal 6 and Views 2 features. Drupal 6, CCK 2 and Views 2 make a great combination!

• Project page
• CCK 6.x-2.0 release notes (people upgrading from previous RCs should read this).
• Download CCK 6.x-2.0 - Fresh from the maintainers: 6.x-2.1 bugfix release

Important: This release fixes a (minor) security issue that was present in the previous RC releases.
See the Security Annoucement for more informations.

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Drupal.org will undergo a scheduled maintenance period Saturday, Nov. 8th, 02:00 GMT. Barring problems, the maintenance should take about 15-30 minutes.

NOTE: Maintenance is complete, and took about 25 minutes. Everything was accomplished without issue.

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