Since listening to Garrett Coakley speak at the first Geek Night on the topic of Drupal, I’ve been sniffing round that open-source CMS. He kindly came to speak to us again, and very inspiring it was too. We’re now having a deeper look at it, seeing what it can do, what are its strengths and weaknesses; that sort of thing.
As I gradually emerge from my long, occasionally messy (but mostly fruitful) encounter with Drupal, I hope to neglect this blog less and less. As a couple of well-meaning friends have put Graceful Exits on their aggregator site, Oxford Geeks Planet, then I ought to acknowledge the faith they have in my ability to churn out high-quality content more than once a month. Acknowledging it is easier than living up to it, anyway.
Coming to the end of the Drupal project on which I’m currently working, I spotted someone else’s brand new site on drupal.org: TeamSugar.
Those who may have tuned into the long, slow rumblings of my work Drupal project may be pleased to hear that the site is finally live:
CRUDE: The new documentary from director Franny Armstrong (McLibel) and Oscar-winning producer John Battsek (One Day In September)
Was programming in Drupal a pleasant experience? Yes and no. Was it the perfect tool for the job? Yes and no. Will I be happy to program in Drupal again? Emphatically, yes.
Will wonders never cease? I’m helping a friend build a website for his driving school, and decided to give Drupal a try so he could have all the whistles and bells he might want. It seemed a bit like overkill, but it would also be instructive for me and would mean that he could always turn to someone else in future to do the development. The number of sites that must founder because they’re maintained by a friend that becomes an ex-friend….
Drupal, along with Plone and dotnetnuke, beat some monumentally big playas to the first awards of the OpenID bounty. This is awarded to projects which implement a number of requirements which, together, constitute agreed OpenID functionality.
Drupal has a built-in form abstraction system called Form API (or FAPI), which like the Atom protocol consists of two complementary halves. The first is an abstraction of forms to structured data, and is dealt with very well by both online documentation and the excellent Pro Drupal Development. The second is a workflow for turning this data into forms, validating form submissions, and processing valid submissions onto output streams such as the database, the browser or emails to the user.
There’s a long (and old) thread about Drupal logins not working. A lot of the problems are to do with weird PHP version changes; some of them are caused by cookie persistence; but the one we’ve had was the result of losing the login box on the front page.
The slides for my Barcamp talk are available, for those who missed it (most of you, you swine). Of interest if you want to see a Drupal site that doesn’t look like a Drupal site, and how you might go about doing that.
CCK is Drupal’s way of making rich content. It means that nodes of any content type can have any kind of data attached to them, so you can have e.g. a directory of superstore outlets, where the outlet records have their longitude and latitude (editable by a Google Map widget) whereas the contact records (e.g. Sales Manager, South-East) can have a portrait photo, selected from an image gallery in a dropdown widget. (A note on terminology: widgets are the structures which are used to edit the CCK data, typically defined in the same CCK submodule as the data types).