Drupal.geek.nz Bevan on drupal, usability, web, open source, tech...

Config to Code module for Drupal 5 makes it easy to deploy new views and panels and to version-control changes to existing ones with a source code repository like subversion. It makes it quick and easy to move configured views and panels in the database to code, then safely delete the configured views from the database and finally, expose the views and panels in code back to their respective modules. It is extensible for other types of configurations that can be stored both in database and code.

Config to Code module solves some of the deployment issues that Features module also solves. Though Features solves an awful lot more problems than Config to Code does, and is more comprehensive. Since Features is only for Drupal 6, Config to Code is still a useful tool for Drupal 5 websites.

Here is a short screencast demonstrating Config to Code module.

We are excited to announce the DrupalCon Asia-Pacific Organisers group. DCAPO intends to lay foundations that will facilitate international Drupal Conferences (DrupalCons) in the Asia-Pacific region.

DCAPO welcomes and needs input and assistance from Drupal users and communities throughout the Asia-Pacific region. DrupalCons are a lot of work, and are only possible through the community's effort. Please join the DCAPO group to share your opinions and experience, volunteer your time, or nominate yourself or others for roles on the selection team.

DCAPO will later announce a call to the community to suggest and research locations for the first Asia-Pacific DrupalCon. Note that a lot of work goes into researching locations. The DCAPO selection team will only be able to seriously consider locations with suitable venues, dates and event management companies, financial estimates, potential audience and motivated local teams.

But first, as much of the Asia-Pacific Drupal community as possible needs to get involved. You can help by translating and reposting this announcement on other websites where Asia-Pacific Drupal users and communities are likely to find it. Don't forget to note any translations and reposts in the DCAPO group so that we can track progress and share translations with each other.

DCAPO is a result of the Drupal Association's new Events Plan (announced on Drupal.org) to have an Asia-Pacific DrupalCon every two years.

Thank you!
From the DrupalCon Asia-Pacific Organisers group

This hook_world_alter() T-shirt idea was something Trevor Twining came up with way back at DrupalCon DC.  I got a single T-shirt made for DrupalCon Paris.  A number of people said they wanted one – though since I'm not interested in the business of making T-shirts, I thought I'd make the vector file available for anyone and everyone's use.

Enjoy!

This design is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

Following in the success of DrupalSouth Christchurch November 2008, DrupalSouth Wellington January 2010 is in it's planning stages. It will be close to LCA Wellington 2010 both in time and location, and will feature excellent overseas and home-grown speakers & attendees, such as;

• Angela Byron (webchick); Drupal 7 core committer, Drupal community nurturer, and co-author of Using Drupal
• Addison Berry (add1sun); Documentation lead, recipient of $100,000 Knight Foundation grant for Drupal documentation, co-author of Using Drupal
• Emma Jane Hogbin (emmajane); co-author of Front End Drupal, uber-documenter, Drupal evangelist/speaker and community all-rounder
• Dan (dman); Numerous drupal modules and high-profile NZ websites including The Vintage Aviator and Sorted.org.nz
• Others, yet to be determined.

Please take this one-minute survey to help us better determine suitable dates and other logistics. To get updates, subscribe to the NZ Drupal group, follow @DrupalSouth on twitter and get involved!

I was extremely pleased with my DrupalCon Paris session on jQuery for Designers and Themers. It was a great success – my best session yet.

You can see the slides at tinyurl.com/jQuery-Designers and download the sample theme code from drupal.org/project/jq4dat.

I made a couple of references to blog posts and work I've done with jQuery during the session:

• I wrote a jQuery dashboard plugin that uses jQuery UI's Sortable library to make an iGoogle-like dashboard with an example server-side implementation.
• Calling drupal_get_js() and drupal_get_css() from page preprocess functions creates an unnecessary performance hit. This blog post discusses a technique that allows javascript and CSS to be added in the page preprocess function without needing to call drupal_get_js() and drupal_get_css().

I forgot to demonstrate jQuery UI effects. You can see demos of these on jQueryUI.com and I added an implementation of the explode and bounce effects to the sample theme when you roll over the "Hey nice username!" message and click on it.

A related topic is Drupal's javascript theme layer. I added an example of this in the sample code; Defining a theme function, overriding it, and calling it to get some content themed into HTML. The javascript theme layer is based on the same principles of overriding as Drupal's PHP theme layer, so it should be easy to understand if you've ever overridden a theme function in template.php.

I didn't have time to properly explain the subtle differences between Drupal.behaviors functions with the context parameter and simply executing anonymous javascript functions on page-ready. I included examples of both in the sample code with inline comments might help to understand the difference.

Thanks to everyone who attended for your enthusiasm and excellent questions which guided the session and made it more conversational than presentational. I look forward to another opportunity to present this session at the next Drupal event. Maybe DrupalSouth Wellington January 2010?

The New Zealand Government loves Drupal:

• The Beehive's (Parliament building) website runs Drupal
• Three of the seven represented parties run their websites on Drupal; Labour, Greens and ACT
• Those three parties represent 57 of the 122 parliamentary seats – almost half!

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Today I had a long and very positive meeting about software patents and the NZ Patents Bill with Commerce Committee chairperson, Labour party's Lianne Dalziel, as well as Drupal-peers Dave Lane and Jonathan Hunt.  Dalziel, Christchurch East MP, was well-informed about the Patents Bill, the Ministry of Economic Development's Patent Review and the insufficient attention paid to software patents (thanks to our emails and exchange of documents beforehand).  She was not so well-informed about software patents and the harm that they cause – as would be expected given the complexity and obscurity of these issues for those who do not work in the software development.

Lianne was quick to point out an oversight in my research of the MED's review;  A section from 2004, early in stage 3 of the review, that comprehensively summarises the issues of software patents.  Nevertheless she agreed that the attention given to software patents in the review is out-dated and/or insufficient.

She listened to and understood our arguments against software patents and noted that the following are strong arguments for an oral submission to the commerce committee;

1. Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft Corp (and CEO at the time), wrote against software patents, but Microsoft owns one of the largest software patent portfolios.  Microsoft (and other software corporations) do not use the patents to make innovation possible (which is the purpose of a patent), but to create fear about open source software and the GNU/Linux operating system, prohibit competitors from entering a market Microsoft monopolizes or wants to monopolize, create licensing deals with other companies, and many other "bullying" and anti-competitive tactics.
2. Moore's law shows that the processing-power per dollar increases 4-fold every 1.5 years, and software from 20 years ago (or even 10 or 5 years ago) holds no usefulness (or even relevance in many cases) today.  Thus granting a monopoly right to a software manufacturer for 20 years is ridiculous.
3. Given the rapid rate of change of the software industry the submissions and review work done 5 to 8 years ago is no longer very relevant or even accurate.
4. Websites of the Beehive, Labour, Act and Green parties, and many other government agencies and other organisations are powered by Drupal, GNU/Linux and other software that almost certainly infringes multiple patents in NZ and overseas.  However it is not possible to know what patents, nor even challenge those patents if it were known, due to the overwhelming legal costs and community approach to development of free and open source software.  Further, a patent-holder could charge the users of such patent-infringing software an arbitrary licence fee for software the patent-holder has not invested effort in manufacturing, thus adding a price to software that otherwise has no licencing cost.

Dalziel strongly suggested we (and/or encourage others to) meet and discuss software patents with Simon Power (National MP, Rangitikei, Minister of Commerce) and deputy chairperson of the Commerce Committee Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga (National Party MP, Maungakiekie), who will also be similarly unaware of the harm of software patents and the neglect in the MED's Patent Review.

Our conversation also ventured into discussions of section 92a copyright amendments, the Internet Blackout, Lawrence Lessig, his TED talk and Creative Commons (a client of CivicActions), possible FTA agreement between NZ and the USA, Richard Stallman, the Free Software movement, the GNU General Public License, it's 4 freedoms, Drupal, blogging and Facebook.  She was also keen to keep in touch about technology and software issues and was very sorry to have missed Lessig's recent visit to NZ.

Linux Conference Australasia (aka LCA, linux.conf.au) will be in Wellington 18-23 January 2010 – 6 and a half months from now. This presents opportunities for the NZ Drupal community to;

1. Promote Drupal in the wider FLOSS community (which is good for business)
2. Run a DrupalCamp/Conference; which allows attendees to combine expenses if attending LCA, and organizers to share venue, admin, financial and other resources with LCA.
3. Just hang out and drink & talk Drupal! Or perhaps (talk) and (drink drupal)!? :)

1. Promote Drupal

   With the government moving away from Microsoft products and towards Open Source, and (hopefully) a FLOSS-friendly Patents Act in NZ, it is a very critical time to be making folk aware of Drupal and how it can empower them and their organisation/s.

   This is good for the Drupal marketplace, and good for anyone providing Drupal services in NZ – probably you!? (Conferences like this are also great places to grow your own business network directly!)

   Saturday 23 January is Open Day at LCA and is probably a good opportunity to set up a Drupal stand or similar. We would be able to use the Drupal banner from DrupalSouth for this.

2. Run a DrupalCamp/Conference

   LCA is taking proposals for miniconfs during, before or after LCA. Given the prominence of Drupal in both the web and FLOSS communities it's likely a well–organised and well-written proposal would be accepted.

   Alternatively, we could organize our own DrupalCamp or mini-conference outside of LCA proper. Though LCA-miniconfs make admin easier and minimize the overhead of organizing a DrupalCamp or miniconf.

   Perhaps such an event could be DrupalSouth 2?

3. Hang out and talk Drupal!

   With or without the above (or other Drupal events), it'd be great to meetup with other Drupalers and talk Drupal in the bars. Who else is planning on or thinking about attending?

I'm very keen to be involved in any/all of the above, but won't have enough bandwidth to be a driving force behind organizing anything big while living in Thailand (from September). I'm loosely planning on being back and living in NZ (maybe Wellington) in time for LCA. This is a cross-post from groups.drupal.org/new-zealand. Please discuss it there.

NZ government is about to pass a new Patents Act.  In the 8-year review, they seemingly forgot to consider the impacts of patents on computer software!  Submissions on the bill are being accepted till 2 July, so we need to move fast.  Make a submission now! 

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UPDATE: Due to recent changes to our website the code snippet (the valuable part of this blog post) got accidentally lost. If you read this already, please come back to see the sample code. Thanks!
Often you want to add CSS files, scripts, feed icons or even set Drupal's page title from the theme layer. The most obvious place to call Drupal's functions for these tasks is probably in a page preprocess function. However calling the following Drupal API functions from a theme or module's NAME_preprocess_page() function often doesn't work;

• drupal_add_css()
• drupal_add_js()
• drupal_add_feed()
• drupal_add_link()
• drupal_set_html_head()
• drupal_set_title()
• drupal_set_message() (or devel.module's dpm()).

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I recently read a fascinating survey of 1000 blind and visually impaired internet users. It's a long article but is largely graphs and data tables – so is easily consumed. If you want the short version, check out the comments and conclusion.

The most surprising parts for me were;

• Websites that auto-play music (MySpace most notably) are extremely difficult because the sound makes it hard for the user to listen to screen readers. Further, the flash music player is usually inaccessible for screen reader users, so the music can not be stopped and the page is completely unusable.

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Screenshot of Views 2 exposed filters in a block.

This video demonstrates how to setup Views 2 exposed filters as a block.

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I have spent considerable time over the last year or so trying to get my data and systems set up to have email, contacts and calendars available both online and offline on both my main computer, my mobile device and online as a guest user on others computers. All the while keeping my inbox clean from spam and bulk mail, contacts synchronized and access my preferred user-interfaces and applications. I've recently been able to get this pretty close to perfect. In this article I will describe the technologies I use and how I've configured them to achieve this.

Hardware & Software

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The online protest against changes to copyright law in New Zealand – aka Internet Blackout NZ – was successful in that it has resulted in a 4-week delay. It is expected that this will give the new New Zealand government enough time to reconsider the consequences of such a ridiculous law change, and most probably repeal the changes entirely. The NZ Herald has more details.

This is an enormous shout out to everyone who drove the protest and participated in some way. In particularly;

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