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Top Notch Themes: Drupal 6 themes now available from TopNotchThemes!
Hot off the press, many of our themes are now available as Drupal 6 themes. Just in time for the stable releases that everyone’s been waiting for—CCK 2 and Views 2 for Drupal 6—you can now get an advanced theme for your Drupal 6 site from TopNotchThemes. Ubercart and Panels for D6 are also around the corner!
Not a coder? No problem.
Our Drupal 6 themes have had a complete overhaul. With the new theme settings available in Drupal 6, you’ll have more of Drupal’s power in your hands. On one page you can easily personalize your theme for better SEO, configure the wording of common site text, choose how the author, date, taxonomy terms, and search results are shown, and more!
Matthew Saunders: What Am I Reading? Selling Online with Drupal eCommerce
I'm about a third of the way through Michael Peacock's Selling Online with Drupal eCommerce. PACKT Publishing sent me a review copy about six weeks ago which I have now gotten down to reading. So far it seems an easy read with simple instructions on setting up an online shop. Too bad it isn't available for D6 yet!
Dmitri Gaskin: Angela Byron named core maintainer for Drupal 7
I had four reactions to this, that went in this order:
- CONGRATS
- Does she have time for this with the book and everything?
- Oh wait. She said the book would be DONE by Drupalcon.
- CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!
I expect to see patches flying in (almost literally, except for the fact that it would take a while to fly from Montreal, her home base, to OSUOSL in Oregon, where the Drupal repositories are), especially testing patches.
I'm surprised there hasn't been more noise about this on the planet, but CONGRATS!
Wolfgang Ziegler: Drupalcon and the Rules BETA1!
I'm happy to announce the rules 6.x 1.0 BETA 1 release. Check out the rules project page and try it. Now the API is frozen and modules developers are encouraged to write module integration and to port their workflow-ng integration to rules. You can find the documentation here.
To get token support everywhere in your actions you just have to install the latest development snapshot of it.
Now basically everything is there, including support for
- firing core actions
- grouping rules in rule sets
- scheduling arbitrary rule sets
- a module input evaluation system
- and much more!
If you want to know more details about the improvements done for rules 6.x check out the development status page or the slides from the drupalcon session.
Lullabot: Drupalcon Szeged, Day 1
Whew. So day 1 of Drupalcon Szeged was a whirlwind of fun. Szeged is a very cool town. Lots of things going on, easy to get around and the weather is awesome! I'm not a good note-taker at all but here are the highlights for my day:
During Dries' State of Drupal presentation, he announced that webchick is the new maintainer for Drupal 7. Of course, Angie rocks and is taking the year by storm. It has been so cool to see her recognized so much for all the amazing things she has done and continues to do. I'm so proud to be not only her co-worker, but also her friend. Inspiring to say to the least.
Right after that I headed off to give my Gentle introduction to Drupal coding presentation (a PDF of the slides is on that page too). This was the first time I'd done this presentation and I got lots of really good feedback from folks who attended. It was quite a bit of fun and I look forward to expanding on intro coding types of presentations in the future.
CiviCRM Blog: Keep CiviCRM for Drupal 5?
My self-appointed job is to hangout around here and complain about how CiviCRM could be more like Drupal or better implemented with Drupal. Instead of banning me from the forums and IRC for being annoying, Lobo gave me blogging access. So I'm writing to share about my latest campaign to Druplify CiviCRM.
Playing the Protagonist Part, Partly
In some games -- typically non-first person games -- the player is asked to play the role of a particular character. In Dreamfall, the player starts out playing the role of Zoe; in Tomb Raider, Lara Croft; in Deus Ex, J.C. Denton. In many interactive fiction games, the same applies, such as the Abbot in Vespers. In many instances, the protagonist has a history, and in some cases a personality, but inserting the player into that role can produce a frustrating conflict when player behavior does not necessarily match what might be expected from the established character.
To a certain extent, authors expect players to perform at least a minimal amount of role-playing with the game's protagonist. In some cases, more than the minimum is expected. As Jimmy Maher once said in a comment on this blog, "I don't think it's too much to ask my player to accept the premise and situation of the story she is in, and to behave in a reasonable manner." Which means that it's generally okay to discourage unreasonable play that extends beyond the border of acceptable behavior--acceptable in general (no, you can't eat your sword), or for the context of the story (no, you can't start punching your friends just for fun).
The problem is that gamers enjoy pushing limits. As Corvus said, "I too often enjoy subverting a game's intended design." It's fun to do, I'll admit it. I've often played games and at times tested the system to see how it would respond to unexpected or inappropriate behavior. It's something of a reward to see a game respond to a particular action that is otherwise inappropriate.
What's funny is that game designers invite that sort of behavior by implementing responses to it. For instance, how many interactive fiction games implement a witty response to the XYZZY command, even though there is naturally no place or reason for using it? If no game other than Colossal Cave had a response to that command, nobody would be tempted to give it a try. And if there is a response implemented for that command, how many other interesting goodies like that might there be to discover? How many of us who played the original Warcraft sat there clicking repeatedly on their individual units to see how many different annoyed responses it would elicit? It's a form of exploration, I suppose.
Granted, this is a bit different than the topic of role-playing, but I think the same principle applies. Still, in the situation of role-playing, accounting for different types of behavior, even bizarre behavior, can actually work to the game's advantage. Take Façade, for instance. Wasn't it at least as interesting to play the game while trying inappropriate or unacceptable actions, just to see how the characters would respond? And in many cases, they did respond -- by being shocked and surprised. That type of behavior was anticipated, even though it did not fit at all with the protagonist's character, and it altered the relationship between the protagonist and the other characters in ways that might be expected, providing a sort of internal validity to the game.
This would seem to support what Corvus said in his blog comments the other day:
"The problem, as I see it, is that the story itself is still widely considered to be a separate layer of the game from the game mechanics. The end result is a severe disconnect between what NPCs are saying to you and your behavior. Until such time as player actions, all player actions, are directly interpreted as components of the story...it’s not going to be solved, either."
In other words, all player actions, not just critical ones, need to be interpreted by the game within the context of the character performing the action (his or her personality and relationships) and the situation within the narrative. So it's okay if a player, who is playing the part of a character not known for violence, really does want to perform a violent act on another character, as long as the game and its story account for it. As Corvus says:
"How much more exciting will that become when your actions have immediate and direct consequences? When the targets of your inanity say, 'Well if you're going to hit me with a bicycle, I'm not going to tell you where the meeting is being held!'"
The difficulty with this approach, at least for the game designer, is that it's a ridiculous amount of work to try and account for every possible action in every situation of the game, and the effect of those actions on all of the different characters in the game. And it's also somewhat different for turn-based games with discrete actions, such as interactive fiction, and real-time 3D games that allow players to run around, jump up and down, pick up and throw objects, and so on, all while an NPC is trying to talk to you about something; the options for inane behavior are exponential. The complexity of a system designed to handle and interpret these actions in all different game situations would be staggering.
I'm mostly rambling here, and I'm not entirely certain what the point of all of this is or where it's going. I guess I'm just interested in hearing what others think about the relationships between designer, player, and protagonist, and the expectations that each brings to the table.
Acquia: Come join the private beta
As you may have heard over on TechCrunch, the Acquia private beta program is in full swing. Beta testers are able to download and test our commercially supported Drupal distribution (aka "Carbon") and utilize our new web-based network services and support delivery platform (aka "Spokes").
Arthur Foelsche: SSH Key Manger Module?
OpenSourcery: Drupalcon: Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP performance, and a Drupal performance correction
Today, on the first day of Drupalcon, Rasmus Lerdorf gave a fantastic presentation about PHP, performance, scalability and security. In this talk (the slides are available here), he discussed the writing of frameworks, and how they tend to trade off performance for what might be deemed as cleaner code. After walking through some very cool benchmarking methods (see slides 8, 14 and 16), he proceeded to benchmark some of the more popular PHP frameworks out there (slides 24 through 32). Unfortunately, when it came to Drupal, it was benchmarked without caching enabled. I have duplicated his Hello World module, and enabled it on a clean Drupal 6 install.
Anello Consulting: Custom GMap Solution for Dynamically Updated Markers (Part 2)
In my previous post, I talked about how I implemented the dynamic marker system on OffRoadAtlas.com. In this post, I'll cover the functionality that the PdMarker adds to the site.
When you first hit the home page of the site, you'll see that the main content area is separated into two main sections: the narrow column to the left of the map (I call this the "info column") and the map itself.
Neil Drumm: Job queue for Drupal 6
The Job queue issue queue has been quiet and I have been testing it with the development version of the API module, so it is time for a Drupal 6 release.
Nik LePage: DrupalCon Szeged - Day One
Day one of the Drupal Con in Szeged, Hungary. Morten and I made the initial keynote speech by Dries & Co. Well, almost. We were in the door about 4 seconds, there was some clapping, and we left. Couldn’t tell you why we were so late… ;)
Sam Boyer then presented a very decent overview of the Panels module, with some information about the direction of Panels 2 and what’s upcoming in version 3. The key fact that people are most likely hanging on for is the release date for Panels 2 under Drupal 6.
Palantir: Graycor: Drupal Theming in the Works
Back in June I wrote about how to theme correctly in Drupal (Sustainable Markup: How to be a themer in Drupal). At that time I was working on a new website for Graycor, a leading provider of construction, maintenance and facilities services throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico. So much of what I wrote about in my last blog entry relates specifically to the newly launched (August 25, 2008) Graycor site.
We set 3 goals for ourselves before we started the prototype build out:
- Avoid using tpl.php files where ever possible.
- Create default CSS styling and reuse as much as possible, "Theme" don't "Skin"
- Leverage the Drupal admin everywhere we could.
And we did just that. We succeeded in reaching our 3 goals on this site.
Let me break down for you what we did...
Krimson: Drupalcon Szeged Day 0 : introduction to the community
I'll start with a slight introduction of who I am. My name is Nick Veenhof and I just graduated as a Bachelor in ICT with specialization in the webdevelopment domain at Kaho Sint-Lieven) and a big fan of open source projects and communities. Having experience in PHP domain for quite some years and having done some Drupal projects when studying made me interested in applying for a job with Krimson as Junior Drupal Developer. In a few days after I was accepted (to be exact, 2 days!) I was bombed into the Drupal community world, in Hungary. Learning time!
So enough about me, more about Drupalcon and Hungary!
Laurence Mercer: Drupal - Good For Your Health?
So I came across this today whilst wasting time doing something useful:
According to the F.A.Q. Live Search Health "is a new search engine for the web that helps you to discover, learn, and act on answers to your health questions" - err...what?
Larry Garfield: DrupalCon Szeged, Day 0
Oh, travel. I don't mind air travel, in general, but there are always road bumps.
Lullabot: Webchick Named Drupal 7 Maintainer
Each release of Drupal, Dries names one individual to share the responsibility of reviewing and committing code directly to the Drupal core.
During the opening presentation at DrupalCon Szeged (August 27, 2008), Dries named the Drupal 7 Co-maintainer: Angela "webchick" Byron! Lullabot is extremely proud to have Angie as a Lullabot, and we'll be doing everything individually and as a team to help Angie make Drupal 7 the most incredible version yet.
Raincity Studios: How Drupal Can Help Change The World
Great Net Tuesday about Drupal and Non Profits tonight (check out the comprehensive as usual Mis 604 Live Blog from the event).
I'll lead with the last presentation, the genocide (with a spotlight on Darfur) prevention site, StandNow.org from Agentic that Phillip Djwa presented
Drupalcon Szeged 2008: Slides for the opening session
In case you are wondering where are the different areas in the venue, or need some help which we talked about in the opening presentation, you'll find the PDF of the opening notes useful.
