I have been readying the next version of PHPTemplate for the 4.6 release (the RC should be out very soon now). You can get this in CVS now, but it is NOT meant for 4.5. I am still undecided wether to back port it.

1. Did away with the template caching. I did some benchmarking and it appears that file_exists() is nowhere near as heavy an overhead as I thought. This means you don't have to go to admin/themes to have the cache refresh.
2. $seqid and $zebra variables are now available to all templates without needing to do the template.php hack (see: http://drupal.org/node/16383).
3. $node object available in page.tpl.php on node view pages. This allows for some very creative layouts, and styling the entire page different for different node types (by adding a node-$node->type class to the body for instance).
4. Automatic loading of node-$type.tpl.php files. You can create different templates for story / blog / etc. nodes. Practically, I still think CSS would be better for this, but it has been requested often, so here it is.
5. Automatically uses a favicon.ico if found in the theme directory.

Greetings from Brussels!

FOSDEM is beginning at Université Libre de Bruxelles. This afternoon, we'll be delivering a set of interesting Drupal presentations here in the developer room, but the truly monumental event was the developer sprint in the past two days. A lot of good discussion has taken place about usability, structured content and other initiatives we're excited about. Expect a lot of patches in the coming weeks, right after the 4.6 release. Session chairs will be updating the developer sprint pages with summaries of findings from each room; look for that to happen when people get back home and overcome jet lag.

Wish you were here. Do your best to attend Drupal Conference 2006, wherever that will be!

Read on for photos and journals of the event.

Those who have visited Spread Firefox will know that it has a very nice theme, designed by Chris Messina (a.k.a. FactoryJoe). Since SpreadFirefox (also nicknamed SFX) runs on CivicSpace, it is behind Drupal in releases, and hence is at 4.4 or so now. After some persuasion (i.e. bugging Chris), and offering to work on the theme and bring it up to 4.5, he agreed, and I have been hacking at it for some time. It now works with 4.5 and Drupal CVS (pre-4.6).

Alan Evans and I are happy to present the media.module for Drupal 4.6. Developed to address the need for better support of audio and video file handling, it has the following features:

• uses getId3 [1] to read and store the metadata from any audio or video file that is uploaded to a Drupal site via the upload.module
• presents the metadata from all audio and video files in a sortable table
• supports downloading and streaming of media
• introduces a new node type, the media-playlist

Yesterday I committed a first version of my new Drupal theme FriendsElectric. It is PHPTemplate-based and tableless, uses semantic XHTML and fully supports all theme options (slogan, logo, primary/secondary links, etc). You can check out a quick live demo on my site. The theme is designed for compatibility with the latest versions of the major browsers out there, but will not work on dinosaur browsers (most notably, IE5/Win and IE5/Mac).

This afternoon, I'll be participating in a presentation on Drupal at Purdue University's Teaching with Technology Conference. Shockwave and original OpenOffice versions are availlable on my weblog at cyberdash.com along with links to some of the Purdue Drupal teaching sites. The presentation is CC copyleft licensed, so feel free to use it.