Planet Drupal

Drupal 5.0 was released yesterday on Drupal's 6th birthday. Yeah!

My first Drupal 5 guinea pig was Digital Doodles, my "non tech" website. I'm very pleased with the results. The Double D wasn't using a large array of modules but does have a highly customized theme and many PHP snippets using the likes of db_rewrite_sql, db_query_range, and node_view. I was expecting a little bit of post-upgrade work but it was all good! Both the theme and my snippets continued to work.

In those immortal words: I love it when a plan comes together!

An aside: The PHP snippets were used before I realized the full potential of the CCK/Views dynamic duo, and to work around a little problem with the Excerpt module. I wouldn't do it this way again.

Based on a sample of one for a basic Drupal site I'd say a 4.7.x to 5.0 upgrade is no more difficult than a 4.7.x to 4.7.x+1 upgrade.

Bèr Kessels gives an example of using a .htaccess to limit file access to update.php:

Disallow anyone but you, to reach the update files

Always nice having an explicit example handy, so I've added it to the Drupal Compendium.

I've been playing around a Drupal reference page for a while. Someplace to capture those interesting interweb articles, blog posts, and search engine results that never seem findable 48 hours after reading them. The page seems to be at a point where others might find it useful so I'm releasing it into the wild.

For your consideration: http://www.group42.ca/drupal

February 2007 is a busy month. There are three Vancouver conferences, each focused on a different aspect of web technology. Two of them are very affordable, one is non-technical.

Web Directions North

February 7 - 9, 2007
http://north.webdirections.org/
Before Dec 31: Conference: $895, Optional Feb 8 Workshop: $395 ($495 without conference)

Vancouver PHP Association Conference 2007

February 12 - 13, 2007
http://vancouver.php.net/confschedule
$100 before Dec 31st./ $150 regular

Northern Voice 2007

February 23 - 24, 2007
http://2007.northernvoice.ca/
$30 for 1 day/$50 for both days

Saw a pointer to this video: How We Do It Video: Blogging As We Travel, on Richard's blog:

For your consideration, the newly made over North Shore Writers' Association website: www.nswriters.bc.ca

The website is now running on the Drupal content management framework and makes extensive use of the Views and CCK (Content Construction Kit) modules. Views is incredible. What I was doing with SQL queries I can do faster and easier in the Views user interface. More over, Views is theme friendly and likes to give a helping hand. The code snippets it provided turned a potentially hair pulling theming experience into a straight forward process. Combined with CCK for creating custom nodes, laying down the bones was easy. Kudos to Earl Miles, Jonathan Chaffer, Karen Stevenson and the other developers for such awesome modules.

The Drupal 5 beta release is now available for testing: http://drupal.org/drupal-5.0-beta1

A message from Dries this morning said only 3 critical bugs at this time and the chances are good that 5.0 will require fewer betas/RCs than 4.7.

Upgrades are always such mixed blessings. Great new features but the thought of site upgrades isn't appealing. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

One thing about the Vancouver Drupalier meetings, I'm never quite sure what to expect. Last night's meeting was the least technical so far and a lot of fun. Here are some notes with stuff left out to protect both the innocent and the guilty . . . . .

The last Drupal Vancouver meet up proved an interesting buffet of different things. I didn't take notes, but here is a list of things still lingering in my brain:

• DrupalCon Brussels Review, including:
  - discussions of new Drupal 5 features
  - the Drupal Association
  - Walkah's presentation explaining the infamous Pants module
• Massoud presented an overview of his Asterix billing module
• New Drupal sites released into the wild
• “Stump the Drupal Ninjas” - A Q&A session of “how would I implement function/feature x”
  Joking aside, these are incredibly useful. Drupal is so feature rich and new modules are coming on the scene regularly enough I always walk away with some useful tidbits of information, whether I'm looking for them or not. Some of the topics:
  - A discussion of online payment options
  - Mapping options
  - Forum options

This meeting was one of our longer ones, with discussion taking us late enough there wasn't time to adjourn to other environs.

Richard Erikson posted a great set of notes from the August Drupal meetup: Notes from August 24th Vancouver Drupal User's Group.