When I first built Gpanels I ran into the usual layout problems when using percentages—IE rounding up, Operas inane percentage rounding behavior and a bunch of other pita issues.

I decided there must be a better way of achieving the layout I was looking for, and not using grids, because my base theme is not grids based.

Five is a Drupal base theme written using HTML 5.

With this module you can quickly and easily set a new randomly generated password for a user and dispatch a notification about the change.

This module was developed by Tobias Sjösten of NodeOne and sponsored by NodeOne and SF Bio.

As promised today we roll out the all new Gpanels - nine in total, five more than the original four released in Genesis. These will be released in AdaptiveTheme RC4 shortly and will be included in the next version of Genesis as well.

I am just reaching out to the Drupal community to let those who knew me by mcneelycorp, that I am now elvis2. I wish there were a more formal way of announcing this, like through sticky signatures. Why the name change?

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Around 30 pages are there but it’s ok if you just convert just 2 pages completely as it’s one design in all pages. 7-8 graphics buttons should replace to css buttons. There may need some graphics adjustment for drupal, The design must be 100% same as now… (Budget: $30-250, Jobs: CSS, Drupal, Graphic Design, Photoshop, [...]

This is a module for Drupal and Ubercart. It converts regular drupal image node-types into Ubercart products. This module handles the conversion(s) in a batch. You can attach a Taxonomy to the image(s). You may also use your own defined product class.

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Ubercart has a fairly straightforward API for processing and logging payments that is quite similar in both the 1.x and 2.x branches. As a developer, you may run into a situation where you need to make manual note of external payments or trigger the automatic processing of payments based on your business rules. In Ubercart, there is a difference between processing a payment with the function uc_payment_process() and just recording a payment with the function uc_payment_enter(). To explain the difference, you should first understand a few concepts related to the payment system in Ubercart and how payment data is displayed to customers and administrators. After covering the terms and concepts, a full description of both functions mentioned above will be given followed by a section on using the API to process credit card transactions in your own code.

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Recently I created a patch for the migrate module so you can export content sets, paste them into your module and have them automatically imported. This works in much the same way as Views handles default views in code, with the version in the database overriding the version in code. Using the Chaos Tools (ctools) module it was, relatively, easy to add this functionality. Here are the steps involved if you want to add it to your own module.

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DraggableViews gives you the ability to create a table view and order the rows by dragging them to your desired order. The module is in heavy development and we’ll be using the dev branch because it has the most bug fixes.

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I generally get called on to projects to do custom module development and internal architecture/engineering, so I have increasingly less frequent contact with the front end tools and site building type modules. But I've been playing with Panels again lately for a project and ran into an issue with block visibility. While Panels will generally give you an option to respect a block's configured visibility settings, for blocks generated via Views, it does not (even if you have specified visibility rules for that block via admin/build/block). I suspect this is because Panels invokes Views generated blocks directly thereby bypassing that extra 'layer'.

Read on for one solution to this problem.

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I posted a story over on Open Source Catholic today concerning page caching and its importance for saving a server under a heavy load (read: the slashdot effect). You can save a lot of resources on your server by not only using built-in page caching on your favorite CMS, but also exploring further options (for Drupal, there's Boost (read our case study on Boost); for WordPress, there's WP Super Cache). From OSC:

A couple months ago, the Archdiocese of Saint Louis announced that a new Archbishop had been chosen (then-Archbishop-elect Robert J. Carlson). For the announcement, the Archdiocese streamed the press conference online, then posted pictures on the St. Louis Review website of the day's events (updated every hour or two).

During this period of time, the Archdiocesan website had over 2,000 visitors per hour, and almost all the visitors were hitting the home page. The website (run on Joomla 1.0.x) didn't have many caching mechanisms in place, and for almost a complete hour, the website was returning server errors as the processor was pegged at 100% utilization. Something had to be done!

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Flat World Knowledge, an open source online college textbook publishing company, released version 2.0 this week. Zivtech has worked on the site steadily for over a year, progressing from a Drupal 5 site, to a Drupal 6 1.0 version, to the current version.

The 2.0 version has a new theme, an ajax book reader with paragraph-level annotating, and massive improvements to performance, usability, and automated integration into the company's printed book technologies.

During the 2.0 sprints we wrote over a thousand lines of update scripts to automate an extreme transition that approached a complete rebuild. We added 8 new custom modules and the new theme to the site. The final 4AM deployment at the finish line was a success.

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Last week Ariane was in on #drupal on irc.freenode.net and heard some of the core developers talking about how badly backlogged the patch review queue is. Apparently there are many good patches that haven't been reviewed and therefore haven't made it into the current release. Each of these little patches helps to make Drupal more robust and with the Drupal 7 code freeze creeping up, this is an area that needs extra help. At Affinity Bridge we have been talking about how to contribute more to Drupal core and this seemed like a good opportunity to get involved. We decided to put some of our time into helping out and realized we could use a little mentoring to get started. Ariane put the word out on Twitter and soon we had a volunteer to help us.

Yesterday we were lucky enough to have Karoly Negyesi (aka chx on Drupal.org) come by and teach us about core patch reviews and the Drupal issue queue.

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Allows you to add a field to a node that does not have a defined label.

The content creator then can choose the label and value of their choice.

The list of labels is presented to the user in an auto-complete as they type.

Easy way to allow contributors to add arbitrary meta-data without knowing beforehand what that data might be.

At Palantir, we try to be "sustainable" in everything we do. Our office is made from mostly recycled materials and we strive for being carbon-netural. Our approach to employees is to avoid the "long hours and weekends" trap, because we don't want people to get burned out before their time. Our approach to Drupal theming is built around site sustainability, and allowing the theme to grow with the site as it evolves.

It also means building code that is sustainable. That isn't really a new concept; generally it's called "reusable code". But with how straightforward it is to bend Drupal in various ways with form alters and theme overrides, it's easy to miss a rather important little revolution in Drupal development that Palantir has embraced wholeheartedly: Sub-module building blocks.

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Recently I created a patch for the migrate module so you can export content sets, paste them into your module and have them automatically imported. This works in much the same way as Views handles default views in code, with the version in the database overriding the version in code. Using the Chaos Tools (ctools) module it was, relatively, easy to add this functionality. Here are the steps involved if you want to add it to your own module.

First, for each type of exportable object you want to handle, you need to create a table in the database to store the data in. Using Drupal's schema API you can easily define you table structure. As normal you have the 'fields', 'primary key' and other properties. However you need to define one additional property called export. In our example below, we will refer to our object as 'myobj'.

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What is a "Link Resolver"?

A link resolver is software that accepts and parses properly formed OpenURL data (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenURL) and uses this data to direct users to holdings at their respective institution. In other words, it checks to see if the institution owns a copy of or license for the resource and directs the user to it, generally through a link.

What The Link Resolver Module Does

The Link Resolver Module provides Drupal with a local mechanism to add and maintain institutional link resolver data (institution name, resolver url, etc). Data can be added manually but is also "automagically" captured via the WorldCat OpenURL Gateway IP lookup service as users visit your site, imported en masse via CSV (a default list is included in the module) or added via a WorldCat Registry Institutional ID lookup.

What The Link Resolver Module Does Not Do

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Jeff Robbins talks with Angie Byron, Jeff Eaton, Karen Stevenson, and Eric Gundersen (of Development Seed) about the state of Drupal distributions including Open Atrium. The team also talks about the Features module and catch up with some Drupal news.

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Your Site from Start to Finish

You asked and we delivered! Come join us for Lullabot's latest training offering: online workshops. We'll combine live webcasts with self-directed learning to deliver the essential training required to successfully build and deploy sites using Drupal. The course includes several opportunities for Q&A with the experts and chances to test your new knowledge - all online, from the comfort of your home or office. You don't even need to get dressed up! Learn in your pajamas, if you'd like! Over the course of six weeks, you will learn what it takes to build a Drupal site from installation to launch. Ta da!

» Online - Every Wednesday from Sept 9th to Oct 14th, 2009