Yesterday Neal, Tom and I wandered to London, where Rob Purdie was hosting the first ever Drupal for NGOs meeting at Amnesty International’s UK headquarters. It was a hot, dry evening, and Neal’s attempts to Brompton it over from Marylebone left him dry-mouthed enough to avoid the copious snacks that Rob and others had laid on for us.
Django continues to gather momentum towards its imminent 1.0 release. The 1.0 beta 1 is out; the developer documentation has been refactored; it already places nicely with Python's powerful debugging and logging tools; indeed, all is proceeding according to the roadmap, more or less.
In Django, when you have a queryset---a set of objects returned by an object manager, as yet not evaluated to actual objects---and you want them ordered randomly, set your order_by parameter to be a string of a single question mark:
>>> from mysite.models import Country
>>> Country.objects.order_by('?')
>>> Country.objects.filter(continent='Europe').order_by('?')
The objects should then be iterable in a random order.
Astonishingly, the existing documentation has very little Goo
As discussed previously, at Torchbox we recently built TimeToLead.eu, an advocacy site set up by the four major environmental NGOs to prompt MEPs into passing the sort of legislation the world's climate desperately needs. The project itself needed a fast turnaround time, and its pan-European audience demanded strong i18n and l10n.
The past couple of evenings I've been away from a computer and so not free to consolidate my copious notes all the interesting stuff that happened at Google Developer Day on Tuesday. I should start by saying that all the organizers, especially Liz Ericson, should be proud for planning and running such a fun event, and so smoothly.
The considerably more hirsute than previously Rob Purdie put together yet another great Drupal for NGOs meet-up yesterday in London.
If you want someone to build you a website, don't let them build you a bespoke CMS to help you manage it. I've fallen prey to this very temptation, although in my defence it was as much an investigation into technology and the structure of my own content as a solution to the problem of managing said content.
Embedding JSON in XML. Hah, that's ridiculous, right? Almost as ridiculous as running a successful blog in .NET/ASP. Well, RSS can combine with JSON to quickly get a Drupal site to consume complex data structures over a webservice.
Drupal's core Aggregator module understands RSS2.0 with no tweaking, putting the text in the <description/> element into the content of quasi-node objects, so you can aggregate all sorts of syndicated content.
Drupal's Form API handles so much work for you that you'd be a fool not to use it as much as possible.
A New Year's present from Dries Buytaert:
It didn't take long for us to realize that people wanted more than Acquia Drupal: they wanted support for everything Drupal 6.x -- all modules, themes and custom code. The good news is that Acquia is a nimble company so the last weeks we worked on changing our support model to address customer demands. Starting tomorrow, we will support everything Drupal 6.x -- not just Acquia Drupal but all modules and themes available on drupal.org as well as custom code.