This forum is for news and announcements to the Drupal community at large.

Announcing Migraine, a script for migrating between development and a live production site

Performing ongoing development is tricky when you also need to maintain a stable site for content authors or the general public. I wrote a small script that makes it easier by copying configuration changes from your test/development database to your production site, without overwriting content, comments, and user accounts.

The effect is that you can continuously improve your development site, and when you're ready, run the migration script. Production downtime might be only a minute or so, depending on the size of your database, and all content on the production server will be preserved.

As a side effect, it also makes database backups more efficient by backing up just the important tables (no bulky cache tables or logs) and saving them in a diff-friendly format that works well with a revision-control system.

Thanks to Noosphere Networks, I'm releasing it as open source. Please heed the alpha-software warning, and see the web page at:

http://shearersoftware.com/software/server-administration/migraine/

studenten voor conversie www.kifkif.be naar Drupal

Kif Kif is op zoek naar een (groep) student(en) voor de omvorming van de website www.kifkif.be in de drupal-software, in het kader van een eindwerk. We hebben een voorstel dat ons ook voor de student interessant lijkt, en in een win-win-situatie kan uitmonden.

www.kifkif.be is een website die zich in het bijzonder concentreert op de maatschappelijk discussie inzake interculturaliteit in Vlaanderen/Nederland. De website is vrij populair: dagelijks gemiddeld 1.500 unieke bezoekers en 6 à 7.000 hits. De organisatie Kif Kif is hoe langer, hoe meer ook een gekende en gerespecteerde speler op het veld. De optredens in de media zijn veelvuldig. Doorheen de jaren zijn er verschillende onderdelen aan de website toegevoegd, die niet altijd perfect op elkaar zijn ingespeeld. In de komende weken plannen we onder andere een eigen ‘you tube’-systeem dat min of meer lanceerklaar is en reeds in drupal is opgebouwd.

De website van Kif Kif zou daarom geactualiseerd moeten worden. Meer bepaald zouden we willen overschakelen naar een meer gesofistikeerd CMS dat ons meer mogelijkheden biedt, en ook de verschillende onderdelen beter op elkaar afstemt. Hierbij denken we eraan om over te schakelen op de software van www.drupal.org.

DRUPAL DESIGNER WANTED

Hello Everyone,

I am looking for some Droupal Designers.

http://whiteorchid.wordpress.com/about/

On this link you will see I do a lot of humanitarian work, if somone would like to design the White Orchid, RGS or Political change sites, I look forward to speaking with you.

What I am here looking for specificaly, is someone to designs a heavy content management system called Consciencious Travel, which is talked a little about on the site.

Email me at

Vær webmaster på en hjemmeside der henvender sig til etnisk unge.

Har du appetit efter til at lave noget andet ved siden af studiet som stadig er relevant for netop dit uddannelsesforløb? Og har du lyst til at pynte dit CV? Så er tamilgirls.dk muligvis lige noget for dig.

Kort om tamilgirls.dk
Tamilgirls.dk er en hjemmeside der debuterede med kun at henvende sig til tamilske piger, men senere er siden blevet en ungdomsportal for begge køn. Siden, som er en af de få af arten, er med til at tilvejebringe en demokratisk og vestligorienteret diskussion omkring tabubelagte temaer i det tamilske samfund i Danmark såsom arrangeret ægteskab, kastesystemet, den frigjorte kvinde, homoseksualitet osv. På siden prøver vi at frembringe en atmosfære hvor alle emner bydes velkomne. Dog diskuteres den politiske tilstand i Sri Lanka ikke, da dette har givet en række kontroverser på andre dansk-tamilske hjemmesider. Vi vil hellere beskæftige os med emner der vedkommer vores fremtid og hvordan vi som tamilere lever i Danmark.

Webmasternes opgave
Som I sikkert allerede har bemærket, trænger tamilgirls.dk til en kærlig hånd hvad angår layoutet. Portalen har siden begyndelsen haft mere eller mindre den samme overflade og det er her vi har brug for din netop din hjælp. Har du lyst og mod til at

o Udarbejde et nyt layout
o Foretage løbende ændringer

Documentation - challenges and the future

Drupal has a substantial amount of good documentation; the documented code as seen on api.drupal.org, the developers handbook and even the installation and configuration guide has lots of good stuff in it. It also has older stuff that doesn't get updated in a timely manner and can be confusing. The last major handbook re-organization was Jan 2006 and that was a substantial improvement. Currently, just the three main books would be over 1,400 pages printed out.

One of Drupal's strengths also leads to it's frustrations. Drupal is flexible, it is content centric, so you can accomplish a given task in multiple ways. This is something that can be very hard to have people find the time to document. For those who haven't spent time writing HowTo documentation, it takes a lot longer than one would first think.

So, the problem, long term sustainable documentation with Drupal is difficult. Drupal core moves and changes with each version. For many versions, most of these changes resulted in only minor cosmetic differences in the user interface and menu placement.

With the release of Drupal 5, these user interface differences becomes rather substantial. JQuery's addition to Drupal in version 5 actually expands the UI possibilities in even more ways. With Drupal 6 we will see more interface and additions to core capabilities.

So what to do? At the Yahoo OSCMS I discussed this with a lot of people and came up with a new plan for the direction of some of the documentation and have been working on it since. For an identified base documentation we will use DocBook v5, commit it to CVS and version per Drupal release and generate PDF's in addition to having it live online in the handbook.

Video Screencast On Input Formats

Input formats are a very important part of using Drupal as a web publishing system. This is especially true if you plan to incorporate embedded media players and javascript widgets from external sites.

I have produced a 21 minute tutorial showing how I have set up my input formats on a production site built using Drupal version 5.2.

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