Nedelchev Personal Space

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

Earl Miles joins Lullabot's Nate Haug, Jeff Eaton, Kent Bye, John VanDyk, and Jeff Robbins for a discussion about the relevance of the node and node-based solutions for user profiles and comments given the advances in Views 2 and future versions of Drupal.

Links mentioned in the podcast:
http://drupal.org/project/acquia_marina
http://mollom.com/download
Parents Click bought by Lifetime
http://www.markboultondesign.com/news/detail/cap_d_or_not_splash_or_not/
http://www.doitwithdrupal.com
http://drupal.org/project/jqp
http://drupal.org/project/simpleviews
http://drupal.org/project/views_bulk_operations
http://www.lullabot.com/videocast/building-views-fivestar-and-votingapi

This videocast covers three modules, wrapped together to provide a flexible solution for displaying information about content ratings in a list.

VotingAPI: Central storage of votes and rating information.
Fivestar: A flexible widget for registering votes on a 1-10 star basis.
Views: The ultimate Drupal query builder, capable of pulling out lists of information from the database.

In Drupal 6, the options in configuring views has become drastically more complex. This videocast helps understand how to setup views that display information about the current average rating for piece of content and also how to pull in an individual users results, each displayed as Fivestar widgets.

Angie Byron, Addi Berry, Kent Bye, Nate Haug, and Jeff Robbins discuss Drupal news and recap the DrupalCon event in Szeged, Hungary.

http://www.usingdrupal.com
http://www.drupalbook.com
http://www.lullabot.com/blog/angela-byron-wins-best-contributor-award-os...
http://doitwithdrupal.com

Drupal Redesign Survey
http://acquia.com/blog/kieran/drupalcon-szeged-code-docs-usability-sprin...
http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team
http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/program/sessions (http://tinyurl.com/drupalcon)
http://buytaert.net/state-of-drupal-presentation-august-2008 (presentation here: http://buytaert.net/files/state-of-drupal-august-2008.pdf )

Dries' presentation">Dries' Wish List for Drupal 7:
1. Usability improvements
2. Better media handling (images, videos)
3. Custom content types and fields in core
4. Views in core
5. A WYSIWYG editor in core
6. Easier upgrade functionality
7. Performance improvements
8. Better document management
9. Better search
10. Better import/export functionality
11. A test framework and lots of tests
12. Better document management
13. Improve node access system Are we on track with Drupal 7?

Top 10 Desired Features for Novices and Expert Users (from Dries' presentation)

Jeff Robbins talks with Merlin Mann (43 Folders and You Look Nice Today), Jon Armstrong (Dooce®), and Ben Durbin about running their successful blogs on Drupal.

Jeff Eaton, John VanDyk, James Walker, and Jeff Robbins discuss the web APIs, mashups, and (to a small extent) how all of this relates to Drupal.