même pas mal ...

JVIS USA LLC is an international supplier for automotive components and tooling with facilities in 6 countries and customers all over the world. Their website helps them introduce their products to auto makers.

When JVIS commissioned their website, they requested just a few static pages. It was built as a simple static HTML site (no CMS) and in English. Very soon after launching their new site JVIS decided to localize to Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian and Spanish. These are the languages spoken by their larger clients.

At that point Jason Marshall contacted us about translating JVIS' website. It was already built (as a collection of 23 HTML files), ready to be translated. Our translation service would have produced another 92 static HTML files which JVIS would have uploaded to their server. It was clear that JVIS was going to be adding new content on a regular basis and maintaining it all in several languages without using a content management system would have been a very unwelcome task.

The likely possibility of turning a client from being happy to frustrated, due to this manual content management, concerned us very much.

We suggested to Jason Marshall, the web designer who built JVIS website, to first migrate it all to a CMS and only then begin the translation process. The first choice was Drupal, given its powerful multilingual capabilities. Maintaining a multilingual Drupal site would be much simpler, not just for us, but mostly for the client. From the client's point of view, only English texts would need to be managed. Drupal would automatically handle everything else.

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Drupal 6.13 and 5.19, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities, are now available for download. Both releases fix some other smaller issues as well.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in Drupal 5.0 release announcement.

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Mediacurrent collaborated with InterMedia Outdoors, Inc. to redesign their family of interactive websites using the Drupal content management system as a foundation. This required the migration and restructuring of content from several websites hosted by a legacy content management system (CMS.) The result was a fresh, modern web design and a social network that allowed Intermedia’s users to access a vast repository of content quickly and easily. This case study focuses on www.in-fisherman.com, the first website Mediacurrent developed for InterMedia Outdoors, Inc.

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I'm looking at a fresh new copy of Drupal 5 Views Recipes. I wrote it, and I'm thrilled to see it in print.

I have a mix of Drupal 5 and Drupal 6 sites out there. If you've got any Drupal 5 sites, consider this book.

I'll start by mentioning the appendices, since I think that's one of the most information-rich sections of the book. (The rest of the book consists of 94 step-by-step recipes.)

Appendix A – List of all default views available for Drupal 5
Appendix B – Comprehensive list of Drupal 5 field formatters, by module
Appendix C – Comprehensive list of Drupal 5 style plugins, by module
Appendix D – Views 1 hooks
Appendix E – Modules included in recipe ingredients
Appendix F – Additional resources and modules
Appendix G – Selected noteworthy patches to Views, sorted by topic

Appendix E can serve as an index to the recipes, and also includes a column indicating which modules are available for Drupal 6. Appendix G unlocks a whole host of functionality not available in Views 1 by default.

Recipes

Interesting content includes:
- How to overcome the case of the missing term in taxonomy views
- Views arguments
- Proximity search (Find every trailhead within 6 miles of a Senior Center, for instance)

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For the last few months myself and quite a few community members have been working on a larger vision for our beloved Drupal documentation. It has taken quite a bit longer than I had hoped, but I want to put out a draft of an initial "roadmap" for documentation that outlines our bigger issues and an approach to tackling them. I've attached a document which has everything we've hammered out so far in a 10 page document along with three appendices. This post is just a short summary of what is in that document and to let people know that we are gearing up to kick things off and really make Drupal documentation rock.

For starters, we've spent a lot of time identifying problem areas, prioritizing them and setting out some target dates. When looking at the tasks we need to accomplish we recognized that there are two main areas to focus on: the documentation itself and the community of people that create and maintain it.

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At DrupalCon DC 2009, an unexpected event happened. While sessions centered on development, writing code, performance, businesses and the community were happening up front, the community of Drupal designers and themers were connecting behind the scenes like never before. It started over Twitter and in small Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions and ended with the designers and themers taking over a room for the last two days of DrupalCon.

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Packt Publishing is pleased to announce the release of a new Drupal book called Flash with Drupal, authored by Travis Tidwell. Catered for Drupal Developers, this book walks the reader through the evolution of many different Flash applications built around the power and flexibility of Drupal.

Packt Publishing is also pleased to offer a 15% discount to any Drupal.org user. To purchase this book with this discount, simply purchase Flash with Drupal through Packt Publishing, and provide the code FlashDru15. Also, keep in mind that Packt contributes a portion of every book sale right back to Drupal!

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Packt Publishing is celebrating its fifth year in existence by crowning an author of the year for 2009. All authors releasing a book through Packt in 2008 were eligible for this distinction. Voting was opened to the public and through this process the field was whittled down to six finalists.

The competition has served as a reflection of the quality work being done within the Drupal community. Of the 81 titles under consideration, covering a wide range of IT disciplines, two of the final six authors wrote books on Drupal. Aaron Winborn was recognized for his book "Drupal Multimedia" and Matt Butcher for "Learning Drupal 6 Module Development". The vote will now go to a panel of experts who will determine the winner based the quality of the author's work and its contribution to the tech community.

When Zappos.com needed a content management system for its ever-growing content, it looked to Drupal after it was showcased at SXSW '08. Zappos.com built its first Drupal site, About.Zappos.com, as a way to test the features, capabilities and development effort of a Drupal site. With that project Drupal successfully showed itself to be both flexible and customizable and therefore a good fit for Zappos. Since then, Drupal has played a larger role at Zappos in a multitude of projects.

Established in 1999, Zappos.com has quickly become a leader in online apparel and footwear sales by striving to provide shoppers with the best possible service and selection. In 2008, the company’s gross merchandise sales exceeded $1 billion. Zappos.com currently stocks millions of products from over 1000 clothing and shoe brands. Zappos.com was recognized in 2009 by FORTUNE MAGAZINE as one of the “100 BEST COMPANIES TO WORK FOR”, debuting as the highest-ranking newcomer to FORTUNE’s 2009 list. More information about the company’s customer service philosophy, unique company culture, and job openings can be found at About.Zappos.com.

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Improving the usability of Drupal is very important. Yesterday, I wrote about the progress that was made on Drupal 7 usability -- the community has made a ton of incremental improvements, while Mark and Leisa have been preparing mockups and wireframes that provide significant over-arching improvements to Drupal's ease of use. Combined, I believe these efforts could make Drupal 7 a great release. A release that the Drupal project needs since our competitors are catching up in terms of functionality and flexibility. Likewise we need to catch up in terms of design and usability. It is my belief that we can develop a user experience for our project that is game changing, and that completely resets people's expectations both for Drupal and our competitors.

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Almost 3 months have passed since Bonnie and her team performed the ultimate party trick: materializing a 1400 people conference out of thin air.

In the meantime many of you have been organizing camps, launching client projects, training new developers, contributing new modules and crafting beautiful designs. You have been extending core, writing tests, attacking patch queues, reshaping D7 and madly sprinting to keep ahead of the impending code freeze.

You are awesome. Really. You are what drives the DrupalCon Paris team. You make us want to put together a DrupalCon to remember. All the hours we spend selecting the right wine, cheese and pastries and the nights away from our families hand-picking the perfect hotel rooms and apartments... it's all for you.

Because we love you.

Come check out what we have in store for you. The new paris2009.drupalcon.org is ready to take your orders. Be quick: the early bird ticket price isn't going to last forever...

For those of you who want to become a sponsor and help make this DrupalCon happen: have a look at the sponsorship opportunities and don't hesitate to contact us.

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The winners of the Horizon Interactive Awards were unveiled last week. In this eighth annual competition over 2000 sites were reviewed from 32 countries. The participants were judged on their creativity, user experience, and technical merit in media ranging from Web sites to DVDs. Several Drupal sites brought home awards, including those from Palantir.net, studio:module, and pingVision.

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Drupal is a Webware 100 winner for the third year in a row. This year Drupal was in the Social & Publishing category with well known services including MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Wordpress.com. Drupal was one of 10 winners in the category.

From CNET
The 2009 Webware 100 Awards recognize the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications on the Web today. After receiving more than 6,000 nominations for inclusion in the Webware 100, our editors selected 300 finalists. But the Web's users made the final cut, voting more than 600,000 times to select the 100 top products -- 10 each in 10 categories -- from our list of 300 finalists.

If you are a member of the Drupal community, you can add one of these badges to your Drupal site. A big thank-you goes out to all those supporters who voted for Drupal in the awards.

Drupal 6.12 and 5.18, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as a critical security vulnerability, are now available for download. Both releases fix some other smaller issues as well.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in Drupal 5.0 release announcement.

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After winning control of the New York State Senate for the first time in almost 50 years, the Democratic party turned to Advomatic to quickly deploy a new website powered by Drupal. There were many challenges to be overcome, and their requirements pushed the envelope in some areas such as permissions and work flow. In the end, this site stands as a testament to what can be accomplished by a focused and experienced development team using the power and flexibility offered by Drupal and its community.

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Packt Publishing has announced its first ever Author of the Year award. The award will be given to the author or authors of one book published by Packt in 2008.

Packt is aggressively promoting Drupal by publishing numerous books, and 2008 was clearly a watershed year for Drupal books. Here's a list of Drupal books and authors that are eligible for the award (in the order Packt's search engine returned them):

• Drupal Multimedia by Aaron Winborn
• Drupal for Education and E-Learning by Bill Fitzgerald
• Learning Drupal 6 Module Development by Matt Butcher
• Drupal 6 Themes by Ric Shreves
• Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions by Mark Noble
• Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6 by David Mercer

Packt is asking the community to vote for their favorite authors. The top four authors' works will be submitted to a panel of judges who will select the winner.

Go vote and show Packt that their Drupal emphasis is appreciated.

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Prentice Hall has just released Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting, authored by Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Käfer. This is a book to teach readers how to customize how Drupal looks, with a special focus on Drupal 6 and its new theme engine. Emma Jane and Konstantin cover everything you need to know to create great visual designs and interactivity with Drupal's behaviors, themes, and templates. They show how to style Drupal sites, make the most of its powerful templating system, build sophisticated community sites, streamline site management and build more portable and flexible themes. Also included are several case studies that walk thru the customization of everything from page templates to Web site forms.

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There are only a few months left before the code freeze on September 1st. Now that Fields API has settled in core, it's time to extend it with some RDF semantics. DERI Galway is hosting an RDF in Drupal code sprint from May 11th until May 14th.

This sprint builds on Dries' ideas expressed in his recent posts Drupal, the semantic web and search and RDFa and Drupal. With RDF in the core of Drupal and RDFa output by default, it's dozens of thousands of websites which will all of a sudden start publishing their data as RDF.

So far, Stéphane Corlosquet, Florian Loretan, Benjamin Melançon and Rolf Guescini have signed up. How about you?

Some others are willing to come but cannot afford the trip until some funding is secured. To help us fund the sprint and bring more Drupal rockstars on board, please consider making a donation using the ChipIn widget on this page. The money will be used to cover flight, food and hotel costs for the sprinters. All sprinters are generously donating their time to make this happen. It would also be great to fly in a few additional people with extensive testing and Fields experience. Any excess money will be used to add more people, or will be donated to the Drupal Association.

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Have you been looking for an excuse to play around a bit with Drupal 7, and have an interest in helping to directly shape it? Would you like to not only see how Drupal core contributors collaborate together, but become one yourself? Do you have an itch you'd like scratched and are willing to help scratch others' in return? Would you like to be exposed to new and interesting areas of Drupal you might not have otherwise experienced? Are you exceptionally good at finding faults and breaking things?

If so, drop by #drupal-dev on irc.freenode.net on Saturday (May 16) for a patch review sprint! (What is a patch review sprint? / How to connect to IRC?) While somewhat informal, there will be people around all weekend to help get new patch reviewers started and to help guide seasoned contributors to important patches.

Our goal is to try and knock the core patches to review queue down to zero (or as close to it as possible) by trying out patches to see how they work, and recommending ways that they can be improved. The Patch review sprints page has more information on how patch reviews work, a handy cheat-sheet of all the commands you need, and a list of prerequisites in order to participate.

Please note that "coding skills" is not on the list of prerequisites. While people with coding skills can perform certain types of reviews better than non-coders, non-coders can also perform certain types of reviews better than coders. In short: everyone is welcome!

Hope to see you there! :)

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Drupal is excited to announce that we have 18 amazing projects in this year's Google Summer of Code. This is the fifth year that Drupal has participated in the program, bringing the total investment made by Google in Drupal through the SoC to over $400,000. This investment has resulted in numerous modules and core improvements, but more importantly it has brought in many long time contributors to the drupal project and helped keep numerous other contributors engaged and active in the community.

As usual we had way more great proposals than we had slots, but for the first time we have a father-son team (Jim and Jimmy Berry) working on SoC projects! Jimmy Berry actually convinced his dad to apply. We always try and expand the Drupal family/community with each Summer of Code, but the variety in projects and students of this year takes it to a whole new level!

This year's Summer of Code projects focus on integrating Drupal with other APIs, improving and enhancing many module suites, and helping to build new functionalities that will help keep Drupal at the cutting edge of what's possible with a CMS. Most of the projects still require co-mentors, and we'll be trying to connect these students with the community in a real world setting, so if you're interested in helping out with community bonding or code review, or even if you just want to keep tabs on the SoC progress, join us over at the Summer of Code group - it's not too late for you to help out!

Please help me in thanking Google for their support of Drupal and all Free & Open Source Software projects, and please welcome our Summer of Code 2009 Students.

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