Another round of Drupal quickies for those who don't have the time to keep on top of all the recent happenings in Drupal land.

  • Exactly two weeks from now, many of us will be at the Drupal Conference 2005 at FOSDEM'05. At the time of this writing more than 60 people subscribed so you better be there too, don't you think? Stefan, Drupal's professional photographer and long-time contributor, will be taking pictures for those who can't attend. Check the conference page for more information.
  • Talking about conferences, Goba and the other members of the Hungarian Drupal team are organizing two Drupal related sessions at the Third Hungarian PHP Conference, held in Budapest on the 12th of March. One session will be about building an online shop with Drupal, and in the other session they'll compare Xaraya's and Drupal's APIs. The conference is free but they'll be selling Drupal t-shirts and mugs to help cover the conference costs.
  • Ever since the last round of quickies in December, I implemented a Paypal donations tracker. If you haven't seen it already, you can check it out at http://drupal.org/donate/. People who donated money to Drupal are now listed publically. The next step is to show one's financial donations on his or her profile page, and to track expenses.
  • Roland put on his superhero marketing outfit to make sure Rasmus Lerdorf, founder of PHP, knows about Drupal: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roland/3436941.
  • Drupal had a brief mention in the January issue of Redhat Magazine. Take a look at http://www.redhat.com/magazine/003jan05/features/lamp/.
  • Olen contributed an LDAP address book module which lets you manage your LDAP address book through Drupal. It strikes me as an interesting approach for those looking for basic contact management functionality. Especially because other tools (like your e-mail client) can automatically pick up your contacts. I wonder how this stacks with the contact directory module.
  • Thanks to James, Drupal 4.6 will support the new rel="nofollow"-tag introduced by Google, MSN Search and Yahoo! to combat comment spam.
  • Make sure to check John's workflow module. In essence, the workflow module enables you to setup a publishing process. An example workflow with different workflow states would be: drafttext complete and spell checkedmarkup and illustrations added by designerapproved by editorapproved and published by boss. Thus, the workflow module allows the creation and assignment of arbitrary workflow states to content, and enables Drupal to perform certain actions (like sending an e-mail) when a post moves from one workflow state to another.
  • Thanks to chx's SQL query rewrite work some Drupal pages are now up to 50% faster in absence of post-level permissions.
  • On the usability front, we finally did away with the confusing forum configuration. Thanks to ccourtne and James, setting up a forum is now done using a dedicated user interface. It has never been easier to setup a forum with Drupal. Drupal 4.6 only.
  • After the Finnish translation Drupal continues to conquer Scandinavia: Wulff contributed a Danish Drupal translation and steffen contributed a Norwegian Drupal translation. That makes for 26 translations in total.
  • Chrisada added the Obsidian flavour for the Manji theme to Drupal's Manji port. See the theme in action at http://sandbox.ichris.ws/obsidian/ or download it here.
  • Lo and behold: there is a Drupal 4.5.2 ebuild in Portage. It is still masked but Gentoo Linux users will love it nonetheless.

Comments

stevew’s picture

Stevew added three flavors for Chrisada's port of the Persian theme. See the themes in action at http://theme.etmeli.us/ or download them along with Persian.

axel’s picture

On the usability front, we finally did away with the confusing forum configuration. Thanks to ccourtne and James, setting up a forum is now done using a dedicated user interface. It has never been easier to setup a forum with Drupal

In result we get two taxonomy - one for forum and another for rest of site. Strange improvement.

I think real improvement for forum usability will to allow posting of polls and another nodetypes to it. Phpbb and many other forum engines can it, but 'flexible' Drupal forum - don't.

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Axel,
JabberID: laika@jabber.org
Drupal in Russia

Dries’s picture

The forum module still uses the taxonomy system, but it is true that the forum terms can no longer be shared by other node types. However, I'd think that is easy to fix/change.

Making it possible to add polls to forums would be nice (but isn't a usability issue). Maybe file a feature request for it, and chances are it gets picked up after the code freeze.

B.X’s picture

What for? There was a beautiful idea, and now that? Than differs (or will differ Drupal) from the same Php-Nuke (or others "classical" CMS)? Different terms is a bad idea... Now it is necessary to create different terms for blogs and for image, for files. Then I can use PhpBB because there is such hacks. What for to me then Drupal?

Really it is impossible to create "display forums" as was earlier? Really we now do not have choice? Really it now for ever?

Steven’s picture

The idea behind this was to simplify the forum setup and move it out of taxonomy, as this was too confusing for most people.

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If you have a problem, please search before posting a question.

B.X’s picture

Whether it means, what Drupal from an intellectual and ideological platform turns in "popular" and "for all"? Also what was confusing in taxonomy? There all was simply, difficultly became now...

Gábor Hojtsy’s picture

With some simple modifications, you can still let the taxonomy admin interface manage the forum terms (although not all aspects will be setable, just like in 4.5). The forum just provides a feature specific interface on top of the taxonomy API, which is stil used behind the scenes. The forum taxonomy is just hidden on the taxonomy admin interface.

B.X’s picture

"is still used behind the scenes" is a good phrase, especially "still", time when I already this cannot, will soon come? To me sadly to look behind such development CMS Drupal. I hope you as developers, know that do...

Very much I hope for people who will create the alternative forum module.

robertDouglass’s picture

its not that bad. I consider it an improvement.

- Robert Douglass

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www.robshouse.net
www.webs4.com

B.X’s picture

I already tried it and I do not consider that so it became better. Than better? And for what it? Simplicity for the sake of simplicity?