It is common to wish to remove the time of day shown in the node “submitted” line. In Drupal 5, there were no less than three ways to achieve this, and I will present these when I'm done covering date formatting for Drupal 6. Drupal 6 allows you to modify the different formats for dates in the Administration area of your site, these different formats being small, medium and large — yep, just like pizza, oh... my... god... You could do the same in Drupal 5. However, you then had to pick among a finite list of options. In Drupal 6, you can create an nth option, if you like none of the options presented to you. Read more →

This is a pretty simple task but one I seem to end up doing over and over again for whatever project I'm working on at the time. I've done it a number of ways, from simply using CSS and dealing with multiple cross-browser issues, and probably quite a few alterations of this technique.

EDIT: chx pointed out I was doing this all wrong and wouldn't work when dealing with multiple submit buttons. Looking at the views_ui.module, there's a proper way to do this. See below:

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Now that CCK and Views have release candidates for Drupal 6, it's the perfect time to start hammering down on the list of modules that haven't been ported yet. This video demonstrates how anyone with basic copy/paste/modify PHP skills can help port Drupal modules. Really! It's not nearly as bad as you think. :)

Topics covered include:

• How to tell the module portage status of your Drupal site with the Upgrade Status module.
• How to perform basic community research to determine the actual porting status of your modules.
• Overview of the amazing Coder module and how to configure it.
• Where to find more information about changes between Drupal versions.
• How to use Coder module to convert a simple module from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6, step by step.
• How to test to ensure the porting status was a success.

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I just wanted to point out that I have re-activated new user registration on most of my sites, including RealTech. If you register for an account and I know you, I'll also give you trusted user status and you'll be able to comment without the comment going into moderation. You don't have to use your real name or provide a web site to register.

If you register and I don't know you, become known (leave comments) and I'll change your status in time. In addition, for those (hi Bud) who have asked, I am looking at how to provide comments feeds, but so far all I've found with Drupal is per-user feeds.

The only reason I have comment moderation on at all is because I still have problems with spammy comments. These are not the automated type; they're from people hired to hand enter comments into sites, while linking back to a commercial site. I am not going to provide free text link ads in my space.

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I just wanted to point out that I have re-activated new user registration on most of my sites, including RealTech. If you register for an account and I know you, I'll also give you trusted user status and you'll be able to comment without the comment going into moderation. You don't have to use your real name or provide a web site to register.

If you register and I don't know you, become known (leave comments) and I'll change your status in time. In addition, for those (hi Bud) who have asked, I am looking at how to provide comments feeds, but so far all I've found with Drupal is per-user feeds.

The only reason I have comment moderation on at all is because I still have problems with spammy comments. These are not the automated type; they're from people hired to hand enter comments into sites, while linking back to a commercial site. I am not going to provide free text link ads in my space.

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This weekend I gave two talks at DrupalCamp Seattle. The first discussed some data import code I used at The Seattle Times while converting our old systems to Drupal. The second talk was a repeat of the deployment talk I gave at DrupalCamp Vancouver, with one new slide covering the just-released Database Scripts module.

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With the release candidates of CCK and Views now available for Drupal 6, the assorted 'Bots are busy updating several chapters of the upcoming Drupal Jumpstart book with the UI and subtle functionality changes in Drupal 6. I'm currently putting the finishing touches on Chapter 8 -- it will walk readers through building a product reviews web site. Along the way, we've decided to use a different contrib theme for each chapter's sample site, to provide some visual flare and help readers quickly spot which site is which when thumbing through screenshots in the book.

For the Product Reviews chapter, I stumbled across an awesome new Drupal 6 theme named Nitobe. It was designed by Shannon Lucas of Four Kitchens Studios, and it's a clean, attractive theme with a lot of potential for customization. Among other things, it offers quick-and-easy selection of custom banner images at the top of the blog. While the release of the Garland theme with Drupal 5 brought us color customization, not many themes have made it easy for users to pick custom header images without doing their own CSS tweaks. Now I want to use it on all of my random sites...

Cut the size in half

I was tired of waiting for this to happen. It's simple stuff and the effect is pretty big if your content primarily consists of text. Well, it's not like this affects the text - that's already compressed by Drupal if you allow it to do so - what I mean is the compression ratio. If you serve megabytes of images, sound, and video, shrinking those few percent of JS and CSS won't have much of an effect.

However, if your site is more like this one you might be able to cut the size of the site in half. For people with a non-primed cache, that is. That's a really big plus if you get a sudden surge of visits. Nowadays the typical resource usage pattern seems to go from one spike to the next with rather little usage in-between. Take a look a Esoteric Curio's excellent article if you're interested in some more details.

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For the Brown University Featured Events website, I needed to develop a means to use their events for other purposes around the Brown.edu websites. I ultimately created a basic way of exporting iCal, RSS and HTML of a selected span of events.

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One of our clients mailed me with an urgent problem: His site crashed!

Quoting (bolded made by myself):

The amount of testing we need to do with each update makes it almost impossible to keep updating risk free. We would have to test for so long, that by the time we're done, the next module will be ready. It's just too complex a site with too many contrib modules. Maybe if we had a full time person just on that.

Despite what the "community" says, my tendency is to only update security changes.

Looking at the error message, it took me less than a minute to tell him the writing was on the wall... Well, maybe this is a too obvious case, but let's admin it - maintaining a Drupal site and keeping it up to date, is not always that easy. We all have other things to do, and keeping the site with the latest versions of module X, is not always a top priority.

How should one do, to keep his site safe, and his soul sane?

There's no one good answer, but for most of site owners, who are not full time Drupal developers, here's a bunch of advices:

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Indeed, this is a great usability report.

I scribbled these notes as I read it:

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 Making a move to Drupal and figuring out the many things that we take for granted with Wordpress has been challenging finding the right information.
 

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British Columbia is a big place, 1180 km (730 miles) from North to South, with most of the population in the bottom third of the province. In the North there's one population center of around 85,000 people but most of the cities fall between 5,000 and 15,000 people. With the economy being primarily resource and tourism based it's a hard place to find fellow Drupalers, but Glen Ingram is up for the challenge. Glen (bermin@drupal.org has started the Northern British Columbia User Group.

If you're a Northern BCer, or have an interest, please become a charter member of the group! (I grew up and graduated in a place called Quesnel, so consider myself a honourary quasi-Northerner, even if Quesnel is technically the central interior)

Northern BC certainly isn't the only place with a low population density and an interest in Drupal. If you have tips on running a user group in this kind of situation please share!

Good luck, Glen!

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A new bill, The Orphan Works Act of 2008, is currently making its way through congress, and it threatens to take away copyright protection from unregistered works. This includes virtually all open source software.

Essentially, the bill (as I understand it -- and I'm not a lawyer) will modify copyright law such that if the owner of a work can not be found by "reasonable search", anyone can use the work for whatever they want, regardless of the author's intentions, or the license the work was released under.

This means companies could ignore the GPL, or any other open source license, simply by claiming they couldn't find the author. If a copyright holder decides to sue, the infringing party just has to show proof that they performed a "reasonable search".

The bill requires anyone who wants to maintain their copyright to register it (presumably for a fee) in a database with the following information:

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I recently saw a comment about Pathauto and started writing a really long reply that seemed more valuable to share here.

Basically one of the questions people have is “Why should I use Pathauto? If I don’t care about SEO is there any other reason?”

This is a valid question to me. There is some indication that users don’t look at the URL bar. During the Usability testing at UMN we never noticed people looking at the URL bar in the eye-tracking data. But some people certainly do look at the URL bar - people who like “hackable urls” do

I use it extensively to create “hackable URLs” that are valuable to a user. A “hackable url” or “index alias” is the feature on a site where you have a post and then users can remove the title down to the previous URL element and get the other posts from that month, one more layer for the year, and one more for that user since forever. See - fun! I even made a movie about it:

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Not only is there a need to get modules ported to Drupal 6, but also themes. Because someone wanted to use the plutado theme on a Drupal 6 environment, I ported this theme. Attached you'll find the patch.

On this link you can find more info when you decide to join the porting-force.

Observe:

An incredibly long standing issue, that keeps popping up, gets a handful of follow-ups, none of which actually address or even mention any of the technical problems that need to be solved.

Instead, all it gets is a bunch of "+1 Subscribe" follow-ups. Whenever I see such a comment, it tells me this:

I really want this feature, but I'm not prepared to do anything about it. I won't spend any time educating myself about it, exploring the problem space or prototyping possible solutions. I fully expect others in the community to solve it, while I reap the benefits.

Go ahead, call me cynical and misguided.

You know you are a has been if you launch a new site using a kick ass CMS and the projectlead of the CMS is not even blogging it.

Sleep tight Metallica.