The OSInet team recently attended Solutions Linux, a trade fair focused on FLOSS, and while chatting with a sales engineer from a company specialized in Typo3, got asked which CMS we used, and of course answered "Drupal".

At that point, that person flinched somehow, acknowledging that Drupal was indeed one of the "Big 3" in the CMS space, along with Typo3 and Joomla, but was plagued with security issues making it rather unfit for professional deployment, as opposed to Typo3, which took security issues seriously. Continuing the discussion, it appeared that company has indeed at least acquired some Drupal knowhow too, due to customer request, but the person doing the criticizing was not directly familiar with Drupal.

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The Drupalcon Boston site has a list of contributors who need financial assistance to attend Drupalcon, but I want to draw particular attention to two of them: Jimmy "boombatower" Berry (donate) and Adam "aclight" Light (donate).

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As you've likely noticed, the Raincity Studios squad are out n' about, presenting and representing at plenty of events around Vangroovy.

Most gigs get a recap of their own but, in the interest of convenience, here are a few other posts and blurbs popping up here and there.

Drupal Themeing

Great reviews so far for Mark and Steve's themeing spiel at Vancouver Drupal Users' Group - January 2008: Drupal Theming, From Design Draft to Theme there's even rumours of an impending follow-up.

Their Drupal themeing presentation slides are available web-licly via the Google.

Web Directions North

Boris Mann wraps up his presentation at WDN08 Web Directions North 2008: 3 stages of dynamic systems, wrap up (preview at: Speaking: Web Directions North 08 - Three Stages of Content Management)

Boris' 3 Stages of CMS Slides are Slideshared for your recapping pleasure (audio coming soon perhaps).

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While waiting for tasty Japanese Ramen near Yaletown, Raincity Studios' Dave O and Roland Tanglao talk about upcoming plans for the SxSW Music and Interactive fair in Austin, Texas during March 2008.

Topics include proposed booths activities, speaker panels, podcasting station, videocasting experiments, Bruce Sterling's yearly rant, and certainly the NxSW party hosted by Raincity Studios and Blue Flavor at the Iron Cactus.

See also: "5 minute video cast with DaveO about RCS happenings: Facebook, Shanghai Drupal Group, etc."

PS Gonna try to hook up a podcast with super-blogger docce (and possibly Utah's biggest sh!t disturber since Ed Abbey or Mark Hofman) to talk about her new, Drupal-powered site.

PPS Remember Kris Krug is heading up a panel called "Blame Canda" ~ more on this topic later.

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As of mid January I am no longer with Lullabot. Stay tuned to RobsHouse.net for news of my latest Drupal adventures.

Many Drupal developers are excited about the features in PHP 5.2.x and we can hardly wait to start using them in development. Not too recently, however, it was unclear how soon we’d be able to use these features. People worried that if we broke backwards compatibility with PHP 4 we’d lose audience due to the low penetration rate of PHP 5 among web hosts. To fix this, Larry Garfield, Marc Delisle and I launched GoPHP5. We recruited 118 software projects and 208 web hosts to commit to making their default PHP version 5.2.x as of February 5th, 2008. It worked well; shortly after we launched and released our press release, the PHP development team also announced the end of development for PHP 4. Thus the momentum behind PHP 5 has built nicely and we can safely develop Drupal 7 with all of the nice PHP 5 features like PDO, Simple XML and OOP.

My battle plan for Drupal 7 is simple: get as many performance improvements or performance-improvement-enablers from my Drupal page loading performance article into Drupal 7. From high to lower priority:

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Via Steven Peck, via 21764, the corporate site of AOL is using... Drupal! Note that their developer site has been using Drupal since nearly a year.

I think it is great to see that the big corporations use Drupal, the showcases make it easier to sell Drupal to other corporations, there is more critical mass, more good things will come to and get out of "the community".

Note that there is (or might be) also a dark side. I will blog about the downside soon, but what do you think -apart from the brand AOL- is the downside of corps like AOL using Drupal?

Drupal 6 has been in a code freeze for more than 6 months and is almost ready to be released now. We're only a few bug fixes away from the Drupal 6.0 release. Therefore, I just created the DRUPAL-6 CVS branch for Drupal core. This means that while Drupal 6 is being finalized and we prepare for the Drupal 6.0 release, we'll also start accepting new features and improvements for Drupal 7, the next major version of Drupal.

In my State of Drupal presentation in Barcelona I hinted about what would be the killer Drupal 7 release according to a survey I conducted. While that list is not exclusive and nothing but a wishlist (not a deliverable), it might be worth a look if you want to help shape the future of Drupal.

If you don't want to watch the entire video, here is the executive summary:

1. Better media handling
2. Custom content types in core
3. WYSIWYG editor
4. Better performance
5. Better tools to structure/organize content
6. Basic Views like module
7. Automatic upgrade functionality
8. Improved node access system
9. Better internal APIs
10. Better external APIs (import/export, web services)
11. Usability

Expect me to blog more about these in the next couple of months.

This one is from the description of the exhibit module on drupal.org. It made me laugh! :)

Note: This is experimental software meant for advanced users; assume nothing works, and you may be pleasantly surprised. And when it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.

If you liked the Drupal Digest, you've probably been sad the last few months wondering what happened. Well, Drupal Dashboard is finally here to fill in the hole that was left in your hearts when DrupalDigest.com was usurped.

It's a simple concept: if you try to pay attention to all the sources of information coming from Drupal you will quickly die of information overload. Instead, we will have a few people paying attention to these information feeds and then summarizing them for you. For now, there is a Important CVS Commit feed and an Important Module Releases feed. If you would like to add a filtered version of something (the development mailing list? drupal.org/planet?) please contact me. You can read more information about Drupal Dashboard like how it was built in the About Drupal Dashboard page.

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The current Drupal process of translating with Gettext PO files, trying to get them into CVS before a release file is generated and then going over hops to update it properly is far from ideal. There are lots of drawbacks, and I started working on a web interface this summer, sponsored by the Google Summer of Code program to improve this situation. Unfortunately the server is not yet ready for prime time (on drupal.org), but there are a number of beta testing servers where some translation teams already try to leverage the cool things this tool offers, so I have lots of feedback on the issue queue.

In the last two weeks, I spent a sizable amount of my free time on improving the navigation user interface, and adding team features to the localization server, which resulted in a huge changeset, and consequently an 5.x-1.0-alpha2 release of the module, which is now available for download.

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This screencast provides a 30 minutes overview of the new i18n (internationalization) and l10n (localization) features that Drupal 6 offers.

Drupal 6 contains lots of i18n and l10n improvements. Gábor Hojtsy has been focusing on i18n and translation for quite long time.

Written and recorded by Greg Knaddison. Click here to watch the screencasts:

New i18n and l10n features Part 1
New i18n and l10n features Part 2

After Matt Farnia posted about the utter lack of Drupal Wallpapers, my friend and I decided to have a Photoshop Tennis contest.

Basically, a Photoshop Tennis contest involves, after maybe setting some ground rules like a consistent theme or having to use a certain image/logo in each design, person A making a design and passing it (or 'serving' it) to person B. Person B then has to make an altered version of that image, keeping in line with the rules you agree. Person B then plays the image back to Person A. This gets repeated for a predetermined number of rounds (or the players get bored) and a winner is decided. The winner can be decided by the players or by an independent judge who scores based on the number of 'best shots' - you sometimes don't even NEED a winner as it is, after all, just a bit of fun!

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Some people have asked why my site isn't on Planet Drupal. Well, I'm not much of a blogger and my articles come out so sporadically I didn't think it was worth asking to be included. But then greggles went and filed an issue on it so I decided to clean this place up a bit and put out the welcome sign.

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This video is a graphic summary of what the Hub is;

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If there's one geeky web catch phrase that's defined 2007, it's probably the much-abused mashup. If you haven't been trend-watching, a mashup is a web site that wires together data from other well-connected web sites to provide a unique and useful (or at least amusing) service. Take the Twitter.com feeds from all your project's developers, your Unfuddle.com checkin history, and slap it on top of a Google Map projection: voila! Developer productivity by zip code. That, friends, is a mashup.

True, many examples of the trend are novelties rather than killer apps. The number of people who really, really need to watch eBay auctions appear on a 3D globe in realtime, with gasoline prices in the latest bidder's home town, is pretty small. Underneath the hood, though, the technologies that make mashups possible are a profound change in how web sites manage and expose their data. More and more sites are exposing their data using simple RESTful APIs and XML feeds, and the new tools in Drupal 6 will make integrating that data into your sites a lot easier.

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Drupal 6 introduced the concept of a theme preprocess function. In short, it allows themes, theme engines, and even modules to step into the theming process and manipulate the variables that get sent to a template. It replaces the older, clunkier _phptemplate_variables() function from Drupal 5's phptemplate templating engine, but serves much the same purpose.

While we can't backport all of that new functionality, it is possible to greatly simplify _phptemplate_variables() in Drupal 5 in a way that looks a lot like Drupal 6. Specifically, we can break up _phptemplate_variables() into separate functions that act like a theme's preprocess functions in Drupal 6.

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Spellcheck and teaser break plugins for tinymce in Drupal - Screencast.

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