Drupal

The MediaElement module brings the MediaElement.js plugin to Drupal.

This module is in active development and not ready for use.

We're very proud to see the first fruit of several months of work and several year of building the Drupal enterprise eco-system in Israel.
The first site shipped, http://shituf.gov.il is a site which exposes the latest rules and discussions from the government to the public.
That way legislators get a very short feedback loop on the current activity and the public gets to state it's opinion and vote up or down on the stream of new rules and political activity.
This "political digg" is the first time in Israel where official governmental activity is letting the public create content in the website and the first time Drupal and it's underlaying open stack is used in official governmental hosting.
The site is seeing great engagement (for instance a rule about monitoring the state of israeli education had 544 votes, divided almost equally and hundreds of comments.
Shlomi Tsadok, Our reprasentitve in the government has led this project and we are showing day after day the flexability, ROI, lower TCO and general awesomeness which is Drupal.
YADGSCTL - Yet Another Drupal Govermental Site Comes To Life (I'm not sure about the popularity of the acronym, but Drupal is gaining popularity in Enterprise Israel and that what counts :) ).
World Domination is now.

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We're very proud to see the first fruit of several months of work and several year of building the Drupal enterprise eco-system in Israel.
The first site shipped, http://shituf.gov.il is a site which exposes the latest rules and discussions from the government to the public.
That way legislators get a very short feedback loop on the current activity and the public gets to state it's opinion and vote up or down on the stream of new rules and political activity.
This "political digg" is the first time in Israel where official governmental activity is letting the public create content in the website and the first time Drupal and it's underlaying open stack is used in official governmental hosting.
The site is seeing great engagement (for instance a rule about monitoring the state of israeli education had 544 votes, divided almost equally and hundreds of comments.
Shlomi Tsadok, Our reprasentitve in the government has led this project and we are showing day after day the flexability, ROI, lower TCO and general awesomeness which is Drupal.
YADGSCTL - Yet Another Drupal Govermental Site Comes To Life (I'm not sure about the popularity of the acronym, but Drupal is gaining popularity in Enterprise Israel and that what counts :) ).
World Domination is now.

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The Taxonomy Token module allows the user to set vocabularies for which there will be created specific tokens. It's main use is together with the Pathauto module.

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This module creates access rules automatically, when some events are verified.

I have recently added drush and drush make packages to my openSUSE repository. For more information or to report bugs on the packages please visit their respective project pages: drush and drush_make.

To install the packages you can use the one-click installers provided by the build service or manually add my repository and install the packages as shown bellow.

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There are approximately 38 critical issues that need to be resolved before Drupal 7 beta gets released. For more on these beta blocker issues check out: Drupal Core Improvements.

With this post I want to encourage you to install Drupal 7 alpha, test it out, and ultimately help to fix the critical issues and speed up the beta release.

You'll need a localhost LAMP or XAMPP environment to follow along with the examples here. If you don't have one set up I recommend using the Acquia Stack Drupal Installer.

Once your testing environment is configured, download Drupal 7.

Installing D7

Save the installer to your localhost Drupal /sites folder and extract it. Set up your MySQL database using your preferred method. Note to developers: D7's new database abstraction layer will theoretically support multiple database types including SQLite, PostgreSQL, MSSQL and Oracle. So if you are running Oracle you may be able to use D7.

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Many sites have views that are used to generate a large number of sections/pages on the site, and you may want to easily change the number of results without having to edit the view. It's easy to create a settings page that will allow you to configure the number of results.

We've launched the Drupal.org redesign theme on localize.drupal.org about six weeks ago, and the reception was great. While other subsites like api.drupal.org are also in the process to migrate to this theme, we could pioneer some fixes and get them into production. We keep tweaking the theme on this site and get fixes in based on your feedback.

Some great feature additions landed since the last update. The most requested new feature is that you can now export all outstanding suggestions with translations. In case of multiple outstanding suggestions for any one string, the suggestions will be in comments. In case of single suggestions, the export uses Gettext's fuzzy facility and just marks the string as "not ready". Look for this option on the language export screen.

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Nathaniel Catchpole (aka catch) talks about some of the performance-related patches that he has been focusing on for Drupal 7. When Dries gave his State of Drupal keynote address in DrupalCon San Francisco, he presented the Top 20 Drupal 7 core patch contributors and catch was at the top of the list with over 337 patches that he was involved with by that point. He notes that a lot of his patches were a series of smaller performance-related patches that he discovered by using profiling tools such as XHProf and XDebug. He talks about some of the performance changes that got into Drupal 7, as well as how he's been able to work on Drupal 7 core through his job at Examiner.com.

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This year in my keynote at DrupalCon San Francisco, I mentioned that the elephants are coming. Well, earlier this week Capgemini, one of the world's foremost consulting providers with 95,000 employees, announced a new service, Capgemini Immediate. I'm pleased to say that they're using Drupal as a foundational technology for their new Immediate platform.

Capgemini Immediate is an offering which helps organizations to build and run on-line services. It consists of a number of preferred technologies (i.e., Drupal, MySQL, Salesforce, Lithium, etc.), best practices, and an ecosystem of preferred partners of which Acquia is part.

Capgemini Immediate is already being well received and making news. The Royal Mail, the national postal service of the United Kingdom, has signed a large six-year IT contract with Capgemini to transform their on-line services using Capgemini Immediate. With almost 200,000 employees, Royal Mail is the second biggest employer in the UK. Signing of Royal Mail received significant press coverage, including the Wall Street Journal.

The Capgemini stamp of approval, and the fact that Royal Mail will be using Drupal, is tremendous news for all of us. If successful, it could be an important milestone in the history of Drupal -- similar to when Dell and IBM decided to ship machines with Linux pre-installed in 2007.

Incidentally, Capgemini is using Drupal to power their own 95,000 person intranet.

This year in my keynote at DrupalCon San Francisco, I mentioned that the elephants are coming. Well, earlier this week Capgemini, one of the world's foremost consulting providers with 95,000 employees, announced a new service, Capgemini Immediate. I'm pleased to say that they're using Drupal as a foundational technology for their new Immediate platform.

Capgemini Immediate is an offering which helps organizations to build and run on-line services. It consists of a number of preferred technologies (i.e., Drupal, MySQL, Salesforce, Lithium, etc.), best practices, and an ecosystem of preferred partners of which Acquia is part.

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Translate your website into 52 languages

The TranslateThis Button is a lightweight Javascript translation widget that translates any page quickly using Ajax and the Google Language API. This module is a Drupal integration of the TranslateThis Button code.

What does it do?

This module adds a small button to your site to select a language. Once a user translates a page on your site, any of the other pages they visit on your site will be automatically translated. This allows the script to translate your entire site, and won't effect other visitors. At any time the user can stop the automatic translation either by clicking the "cancel" link during the translation or the "undo" link after the translation completes.

Additionally if the page is translated back into the original language, the automatic translation will stop.
If you would prefer not to use the automatic translation functionality at all, you can disable it.

Usage this cool translation module is simple: just download and enable the module, and place the block in the preferred region.

Technical info

The TranslateThis Button has a number of technical advantages for developers.

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This module provides a themed function called "get_exposed_filter_output()" which print out the values of the exposed filter used in a view.
This can be useful in the view header, in case the exposed filter is in a block, but there is a need to show the user according to what filter he got the results.

The idea is based on the discussion - #658566: Use data from exposed filter in title or header.

To use this module you should:

Enable the module

Add in the relevant view's header the php
<?php
print get_exposed_filter_output();
?>

Theme the content in any way you like by creating your own exposed_filter_data.tpl.php

All of the exposed filters are available in the $exposed_filters variable inside the template file.

The basic template is not very useful since it does not have the proper labels of the filters.

With entities Drupal took a huge step forward in providing conceptual clarity in how it deals with things like users, comments, taxonomy terms and nodes.

I believe there is one more step to take to bring even more clarity that will hopefully be possible in Drupal 8. This is the content of my Core Developer Summit lightning talk- hopefully it is not completely off the mark.

With entities Drupal took a huge step forward in providing conceptual clarity in how it deals with things like users, comments, taxonomy terms and nodes.

I believe there is one more step to take to bring even more clarity that will hopefully be possible in Drupal 8 (or 9!). This is the content of my Core Developer Summit lightning talk- hopefully it is not completely off the mark.

It goes something like this:

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Compared to Tattler, one of the weaknesses of Managing News is the lack of topic monitoring - where a user inputs a keyword phrase representing a topic and the system takes care of tracking this topic across pre-selected RSS sources.

Soon after we started using Managing News, this requirement came up.

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This module allows to embed primary menu in the theme as a tree instead of the first level only.

It keeps classes and other stuffs applied by other modules (Menu Class for instance).

To use it, replace :
<?php print theme('links', $primary_links, array('id' => 'main-menu', 'class' => 'links clearfix'));?>
by
<?php print multi_lev_menu('primary-links',array('id' => 'main-menu', 'class' => 'links clearfix'));?>
You can also use this code to find the name of your primary links menu :
            <?php if ($primary_links){
                if ($primary_links_name) $menu_name = $primary_links_name;
                else $menu_name = variable_get('menu_primary_links_source', 'primary-links');
                print multi_lev_menu($menu_name,array('id' => 'main-menu', 'class' => 'links clearfix'));
            }
            ?>

The Drag & Drop Gallery create a gallery node type that allows you add images to the gallery by dragging and dropping images from your local file system. (Requires Firefox 3.6 or later for administration).

Mike Carper (aka mikeytown2) talks about the Boost module, which a lightweight performance enhancement for small-scale sites that don't have a lot of dynamic content. After adding some apache rules to the .htaccess file, then Boost will translate Drupal pages into static HTML files and serve those directly instead of going through PHP and MySQL. Carper talks about some of the other caching configuration options, and says that this module is perfect for sites on shared hosting that are looking for a performance boost. He says that Boost can actually make your site slower in some cases where you have a lot of content that is frequently updated. In those cases, Varnish would probably be a better solution, but the Boost module is intended to be a quick and easy solution for smaller websites looking for better performance.

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This tutorial is sponsored by the Save Joseph campaign, a grassroots effort to find a good friend, stellar artist and all around amazing person a satisfying, creative job in the next 8 days. I know the Drupal community could use this kind of talent. Learn more about the effort at savejoseph.org. If you have any ideas on how I can get the word out about this, let me know!

My use case was that I wanted to be able to use social media icons for menu items so that we could re-arrage, add or remove items directly from the menu management interface:. The result is what you see below:

To use images for menu items in Drupal, the first step is to create an override theme function for theme_menu_item_link() in your theme's template.php file. The idea is to first run your image handling bit to switch out text for images, and then hand it over to the parent theme to do the rest. In my case, I'm using the Zen theme.

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