Nedelchev Personal Space

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

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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Jeff Robbins talks to Bill Fitzgerald of FunnyMonkey about how Drupal is being used in universities, high schools, and other educational institutions.

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Drupal.org will undergo a scheduled maintenance period Friday, Nov. 7th, 02:00 GMT. Barring problems, the maintenance should take about 15-30 minutes.

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A year after answering Dries Buytaert's call for Drupal book authors, Aaron Winborn is pleased to announce the publication of Drupal Multimedia, which is now available! Packt Publishing, known for their support of Open Source projects, will donate a portion of the book's royalties to the Drupal Association.

The book teaches the best practices and contributed modules for integrating Images, Video, and Audio into your site. Written for Drupal 6, the book assumes you are a developer, themer, or administrator who needs to embed multimedia. It makes heavy use of Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views 2, and offers demonstrations of the various modules required for the task.

The book helps to answer common questions, such as when to use Image or ImageField, how to leverage the power of FileField, and how to override theme functions to display multimedia content the way we need it.

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The Drupal Association today announced that Drupal has won two prestigious Packt Publishing 2008 Open Source CMS Awards this week - the Overall 2008 Open Source CMS Award and the Best PHP Open Source CMS. This marks the second consecutive year that Drupal has won Packt Publishing’s Overall Open Source CMS award. In addition, on Monday, Packt Publishing recognized leading Drupal contributor Earl Miles as a 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valued Person (MVP).

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Hi,

Following on from last week's call for feedback on iteration 5 of the prototype ... we have now progressed to iteration 6, whereby we have begun to integrate the visual design into the prototype, making the prototype feel more like a website now and less like wireframes.

We encourage you to browse through the prototype and feedback your thoughts and ideas in this thread. The link to the latest iteration is below (please note the slight change in URL - this is because of a new version of Blueprint, and additions to CSS etc.):

http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/visual/iteration6

Key points on this iteration:

• If you've viewed the prototype before please dump your cache or things may look a little screwy.
• Applied visual design concepts to prototype (disclaimer: This is the 3rd iteration - things will be changed, and things will get better. Also, ignore the CSS and semantics of the HTML - this is all currently based on Blueprint.)
• Added new logotype (rationale forthcoming on a blog post on the MBD site, which you can read in Planet Drupal, but also a post here)
• Amends to several section, including moving logged in homepage to 'Dashboard' (name tbc)
• Revisions to Documentation
• Major changes to homepage to include revised copywriting

On the initial schedule, this was due to be the last week for community feedback, but due to the overwhelming and undeniably useful response, we have added 3 more dates for your feedback.

Don't forget to keep browsing the Flickr group (http://flickr.com/groups/drupalredesign/), and if you aren't doing so already, there is still plenty of time to follow the redesign on Twitter (http://twitter.com/drupalredesign)

We hope you are as excited about these developments as we are.

Thanks again.

Mark

(www.markboultondesign.com)

For the third year in a row, Drupal has been nominated for a Packt Publishing Open Source CMS award. Packt Publishing is announcing winners all week. Today they announced the 2008 best PHP open source CMS.

The Award for the best Open Source Content Management System written on a PHP/MySQL platform is today announced as Drupal. Receiving $2,000 as the judges’ and publics favourite, Drupal finishes ahead of Joomla! and CMS Made Simple, who finished on equal points as joint runners up and collect $500 each.

Drupal won this award in both the popular vote and the judges selection. The judges cited improvements to installation, updates, breadth of features in modules, and how Drupal handles errors in these processes. Of special note was Drupal's use of social features and how those features integrate with web content management. Of course the final advantage Drupal had was the "large and hugely supportive community". This award belongs to everyone in the Drupal community for helping each other and particularly new users.

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DrupalDay, Italian association for the development and promotion of the famous Open Source CMS, is pleased to announce the first DrupalDay.

The event will be held Friday 28th November 2008 from 9,30 am to 5,30 pm at Auditorium of Polytechnic of Milan located in Viale Romagna, 62 in Milan (Italy).

The program will provide a wide range of reports on technical and functional issues and offer opportunities for debates and comparison.

The event is hosted by POUL, no profit student association and is sponsored by Wellnet, web software house in Milan. Participation is free but a pre-registration is recommended.

DrupalDay, movimento italiano di promozione e sviluppo del famoso CMS Open Source a cui aderiscono numerosi sviluppatori ed aziende è lieto di annunciare il I° DrupalDay

L’evento si terrà venerdì 28 novembre 2008 dalle 09,30 alle 17,30 presso l’Auditorium del Politecnico di Milano in Viale Romagna, 62 a Milano.

Il programma prevede relazioni di esperti su diverse tematiche sia tecniche che funzionali e offrirà ampi spazi per dibattiti e confronti.

L’evento è promosso dal POUL, associazione studentesca no profit ed è sponsorizzato da Wellnet, web software house di Milano. La partecipazione è gratuita ma si consiglia la pre-registrazione.

One of the hardest things to do after getting your Drupal installation up and running is deciding which Drupal modules that you're going to use. There are literally thousands of modules to choose from, and so this can be quite a daunting task. It's even more overwhelming if you don't have a clear strategy for searching through, filtering down, evaluating and testing the viable module candidates in the vast Drupal contrib repository.

You may have already come across valuable resources such as Lullabot's Top 40 modules podcast, the user ratings and feedback provided at DrupalModules.com, as well as the recently published module usage statistics on Drupal.org that allows you gauge how many people are actively using any particular module.

These are all great resources to be sure, but there is also a lot of really useful information on the health of a module that you can gather directly from the links on the module's project page if you know where to look.

This 8-minute video is an outtake from the "Understanding Drupal" DVD / digital download that features the Lullabot team sharing their module evaluation tricks of the trade. They'll walk you through some of their favorite strategies for quickly filtering down the number of viable module options down to a reasonable number.

If you enjoy these types of insights, then be sure to consider coming down to the "Do It With Drupal" Conference in New Orleans from December 10-12 where team Lullabot and a host of Drupal and outside community experts will be giving out a lot of practical Drupal site building advice like this. This is the last week of the last early bird discounts, and so save yourself a couple of hundred dollars and register today.

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This morning Earl Miles, also known as merlinofchaos, was named one of the 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valued People. Earl won specifically for his contributions to the Drupal project.

What is particularly exciting about this award is that Earl is the third Drupal community member to win an award for their contributions to the Drupal project this year. Bryan Ruby said it best.

What I found interesting is that most of the MVPs for projects were the projects' lead/founder. Perhaps that says something about Drupal truly being community driven.

Please congratulate Earl on a well deserved award for his contributions and leadership to the Drupal project. You can read Earl's response on his blog Angry Donuts.

Hi All,

The redesign has made great progress over recent weeks and we would really like to share this with you!

Below is a link to the latest iteration of the redesign prototype. Please take the time to look through the pages and feedback your thoughts and ideas in this thread.

http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration5

We also welcome comments on the initial design and visuals, and as with previous weeks, all posts here will be read and fed back into the redesign process

Don't forget to keep browsing the Flickr group (http://flickr.com/groups/drupalredesign/), and if you aren't doing so already, there is still plenty of time to follow the redesign on Twitter (http://twitter.com/drupalredesign)

Thanks for your continued support and interest in the project!

Mark

(www.markboultondesign.com)

[EDIT - 24 October 2008]

Following some comments on this thread, I've had a quick look at amending the design visuals for this initial direction:

They're at the foot of the latest prototype iteration index: http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration5/

• The masthead now has a background of gradiated blue. A nod to the history of Drupal, showing a clear evolution. As wmostrey hinted to, the blues are what makes Drupal.org look like Drupal.org. Maybe we should be taking that on board.
• I've included tabs in the logged in homepage - of course, this would need further refinement

Some small changes. Question is: blue background, or not?

Personally I think it works, but only with the iconless wordmark. It certainly looks a little more Drupal than before.

Drupal 6.6 and Drupal 5.12, 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.

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Registration for DrupalCon DC is now open and the DrupalCon DC website live. In the two hours after the first announcement went out via Twitter, 200 people registered to come to DrupalCon! Discount tickets are still available at $175 a ticket - about 200 are left now so move quickly to make sure you get the lowest rate available. Also, there are already 18 sessions submitted and voting has begun - create a profile to vote on sessions and submit your own.

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http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bsc/peps/2008/00000061/00000003/ar...

I saw this article referenced in the economist. Groups.drupal.org has done wonders for the community by empowering local and working groups and giving them control over their groups. What we seem to be missing is training. Does it make sense to provide training for group organizers and event managers?

Discuss.

Three and a half months ago, Views, along with CCK and OG were made available as a release candidates. Today, I've finally come to the conclusion that the remaining bugs are minor enough to go ahead with an official, formal release of Views 2, and we can finally say that this module is now out and available. Yes, it actually beat Panels 2 to final release!

If you've never tried Views 2, or are hesitating about Drupal 6, this new release of Views is a very good reason to consider making the transition, especially in your new sites.

The Views module has undergone extensive development, refactoring, and testing. Views 2 improves the existing functionality of the Views module, and adds new features designed to simplify life for developers, site admins, themers, and end users alike.

Possibly the most important change is that Views can now create lists of anything: nodes, users, taxonomy -- you name it! Another large change you'll notice right off the bat is that the UI for Views has completely changed, and is full of JavaScripty goodness. While it may take some getting used to initially, we're confident that you'll find that the changes ultimately make creating views much easier than before.

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The redesign has been doing lots of great stuff, rethinking how we approach Drupal.org. We should take this opportunity to really think about how we present documentation on the site. There has been a lot of talk and there are lots of little nits of annoyance in addition to the larger complaint of organization with regard to the handbooks. I wanted to try to gather up at least some of the larger things for us to consider and continue the discussion so that we can focus on specific changes while we have the services of MBD available to us. MBD has put up a new prototype iteration that is now beginning to address the documentation section. This is the perfect time for us to organize our thoughts and give feedback to craft a better solution.

There is an older discussion that was started earlier this year about a Drupal Knowledge Base, which was a doc-specific spin off of ideas from an original high level redesign post. Incorporating some of the thoughts from that, as well as other discussions on the mailing list and in the issue queues, here is a (I'm sure incomplete) summary of "big" things I think we should address during this redesign. I encourage everyone to not just talk about this, but to actually make some quick wireframes to help everyone see it.

• Overall architecture of the handbooks:
  Everyone has different ways they expect to find the information they need. The documentation comprises of several different "books." What content belongs in which book is one issue, but also pulling back a bit and looking at what we are using as top-level books to compartmentalize our content needs to be looked at. Do we have too many separate books? Not enough? Should we be grouping things together differently? In particular a book like "Beyond the basics" is really more of just a catchall bin and rather vague.

• Versions
  Much of Drupal's documentation is written to the version of Drupal software (and we currently mark the version(s) with a vocabulary). Many pages apply to more than one version, some pages apply to all or no versions. It would be great to be able to look at the Drupal 5 version of the handbook and cut out the clutter and noise of other versions. It is a lot harder than it sounds. Much of this is a technical problem to solve but what would an ideal, or even achievable ;-), design for this look like? What would we even shoot for >? Something like the API version tabs? What do we do about pages that need no version at all? This is a really hard problem but if we can find a solution that even moves us in that direction, it could be a huge boost to make it easier for people to find the info they need.

• Taxonomy/Tagging
  We currently have two vocabularies for handbook pages: Drupal version and a new page status. These act as "flags" but do not really help us organize our content, nor make any easier to find what you need. How can we think about using taxonomy to improve this? People want to find info in different ways at different times. Tagging our content to give people more "meta" info could help people track down and group the information they need. Again, how does this look? How would this most help us?

• Videos
  We currently have a video section of the handbooks (under Beyond the basics) but as video becomes more and more popular, I think we need to look at how to really effectively address these informational videos. Where should they be? How best to organize them? How do we make them easy to find and view while also linking them up with the appropriate written parts of the handbook? There is a thread on video ideas that can be looked where some of these things are discussed. We should also note that the Dojo will be reviving their external site as a simple way to host videos. I think we should work with and think about this as a prototype for what we can do within the Drupal.org handbooks for videos.

Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert, joins Jeff Robbins to talk about Acquia, Mollom, and Drupal 7 and the future of Drupal.

As of today, October 16 2008, everyone with a user account on Drupal.org is able to edit most handbook pages (details are noted below). All users can already create new pages in the handbooks so this expands on that to allow editing of pages other than those you created. In the past this has been permitted only for members of the documentation team or site maintainers.

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DrupalCon is THE conference for Drupal developers, and it's coming to Washington, DC, March 4 – 7, 2009! For those new to the DrupalCons, this is a huge unconference for developers. It's a time for us to get together, learn from each other, trade ideas, make decisions, and build a stronger community.

There will be a special early bird rate of $125 per ticket for the first 100 people who register. Tickets won't go on sale until next week, but we wanted to give everyone a heads up so they can be on the lookout. We'll announce when DrupalCon DC registration goes live via Twitter, and will let followers get a two-hour head start before we get the word out elsewhere. So, follow us: http://twitter.com/drupalcon.

See you in Washington, DC in March!

The Manning Publications Company recently announced two new books about Drupal. Manning is a well known publisher of many high quality technical books and the popular "in Action" series. Their decision to release two books about Drupal highlights the growth of interest in the Drupal platform. Manning's decision to work with established members of the Drupal community and also donate a portion of sales to the Drupal Association shows their desire to be a responsible member of the Drupal world.

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