drupal planet

Put this in one of your theme's stylesheets - it'll change a clunky, large, and unweildy comment form into a more compact and user-friendly form:

I have been hitting my head against a wall for a few weeks now, trying to get a few different Views-created pages to appear as if they were normal pages inside an Organic Group (meaning they would appear inside og-menu-enabled menus for that particular group, and group blocks would also appear on the pages.

After reading up on the thread "Organic Groups and Views 2", I found that I could use an argument to help solve my dilemma. Here's how I set up an argument for a particular view:

On the page display (I could've also done this as a default), I added an argument ("Organic groups: Groups") with the following properties:

As explained on Drupal.org today, Drupal 7.0 Alpha 1 has been released, and it incorporates (among other things) a revamped user interface, custom fields (CCK) in core, image handling in core, an update manager, and a ton of 'under the hood' improvements.

This is going to be the best Drupal release to date, for two reasons:

Catholic News Live is a new site I've been working on - it is kinda-sorta out of the 'official public beta' status, although most of my sites are in perpetual beta as of late (most notably, Open Source Catholic!), but you can now check the About section of CNL for badges, follow @cathnewslive on Twitter, and subscribe to the many feeds.

As of today (October 5, 2009), I have moved all the content off the old Lifeisaprayer.com into a new Drupal-based site, in order that I might not have to do so much manual labor in maintaining and updating the site.

This has been a long time coming, as I had the idea to move to a CMS (it was a heat between Drupal (for extensibility) vs. WordPress (for it's ease of use for blogging). But as I didn't know exactly what I wanted this site to become (is it about articles? the blog? photo galleries? what???), I figured Drupal would be the best choice, as I can have a lot more freedom in building out new functionality now. Wordpress is a little limiting if you want to really stretch your site into different directions.

I'm working on the site's theme right now, and probably will be tweaking it over the next few weeks. Please let me know if you have any problems or have suggestions for improvement!

In one word: Awesome.

This Drupal distribution truly displays the beauty and power of Drupal—a dedicated team over at Development Seed spent a lot of time making a great Intranet-in-a-box solution built on top of Drupal, and even though it's a simple set of modules and an installation profile, you'd have to do a little digging to tell if an Open Atrium site even runs on Drupal!

I've just been tinkering with it for a local nonprofit I help with, and I see a lot of potential. In less than 20 minutes (from the download of the tgz file), I had two groups, eight users, and a calendar/wiki/blog system running for everyone. It's drop-dead simple! If you're tasked with building an internal communications site, or a full-fledged Intranet, this is probably one of the easiest/best (and most free) solutions out there. Check it out!

This weekend I am going to attend the Catholic New Media Celebration. I'll be on two plane flights, I'll be sitting at an airport for a few hours before each flight, and I'll be at a convention all day Saturday. I'm hoping to build out a new site idea I've had lurking in the back of my head for some time: Open Source Catholic.

In the past 45 minutes, I've been jumping around Drupal.org downloading all the different modules and tutorials I think I'll need. I've also saved some of my previous work on other Drupal sites in case I need to refer to a code snippet along the way while I don't have Internet access. I'm going to call it a night for now (I need to pack!), but tomorrow, beginning at the airport, I'm going to start working on the site.

To the uninitiated, Boost is a module for Drupal which has the potential to make your Drupal-based website run many times faster than it's currently running. Boost basically converts pages on a Drupal site into static html files, and allows your website to direct anonymous (non-logged-in) users to the cached html pages.

Doing so speeds your site up quite a bit, because instead of your web server having to run some PHP scripts and connect to your website's database, the server can simply send the complete html file, which requires no extra processor cycles or memory to compile. If your website has a lot of anonymous traffic, the potential speedup is very large. Instead of serving hundreds of users per minute, you could serve thousands.