Wim Mostrey's blog

When upgrading your CiviCRM site from 1.x to 2.x you might have to upgrade some custom modules. If you're upgrading to CiviCRM 2.1 or higher, this also requires that you're running Drupal 6. Upgrading your custom Drupal 5 modules for Drupal 6 is pretty easy: you simply download the coder module which will point out almost all required changes to your module with direct links to the documentation page about converting 5.x modules to 6.x. Upgrading your custom CiviCRM modules to be compatible with 2.x however won't be as easy since a bunch of functions have been replaced or removed. The idea is to motivate developers to use the internal API's directly and not use these helper functions anymore. There is a developer discussion about the API Migration from 1.x to 2.x and while it offers some indication as to what functions were replaced, it doesn't provide a valid alternative for all removed functions.

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In Drupal Multimedia Aaron Winborn covers media handling in Drupal and provides information on how to embed and manipulate images, audio and video. Packt Publishing provides a dedicated page which lists the complete table of contents and where you can download all example code used in the book as well as a sample chapter. The first chapter provides an in-depth introduction to Drupal, covering nodes, regions, blocks, themes and modules in general and cck and views specifically. The advanced theming section contains information about custom regions, hooking into template.php and creating template files. Each topic comes with clean example code, plenty of comprehensive screenshots of the different configuration forms and of what the end result looks like and notes with extra clarifications, tips and tricks. The author does a great job in describing the basic Drupal concepts, making this chapter really useful for new Drupal users.

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More and more web publishing platforms are starting to integrate video comments. YouTube and TechCrunch use them and embedded commenting systems like Disqus make it really easy to enable them on your site. Drupal has its own ways to provide integrated video comments, although most solutions are currently only available for Drupal 5. The most popular video comment provider appears to be Seesmic. TechCrunch enabled video commenting in April 2008 using Seesmic and Disqus makes use of the Seesmic API to embed video comments. To use Seesmic on Drupal, you need two modules: Seesmic API and Seesmic Comment. The set-up is very straightforward: enable both modules, configure the permissions and you're good to go. I do consider it a big downside that each user needs a Seesmic account before they can post a video comment. There is no way to configure one account to use for all comments in the way that Disqus implements this. Also, as a small nitpick: the Views module is required by Seesmic Comments while I feel that code should go into a separate module, or a check could be implemented if the views module is enabled. An even faster way to enable video comments on your Drupal site is to install the Riffly module. Enable the module, set the permissions and you're done. Users are given the option to leave either a video or an audio-only comment and they don't need to register, which is a huge plus. Do note that both modules are only available for Drupal 5 and that they don't have the option to enable video comments per content type. With files in general and media in particular getting a lot of attention lately, it might be worth exploring what we can do with recorded media.

The ApacheSolr module allows the integration of the core search module with the power of the Apache Solr search platform. Aside from better performance the most prominent feature is the addition of faceted search. In essence it's a user-friendly manner to search for content by filtering on author, content type, taxonomy,... You can try a demonstration on the search pages of Robert Douglass, author of the ApacheSolr module. Now, not everyone has the resources to set up a server with Apache Solr, be it an actual dedicated server to run the software on or the funds to rent one. Luckily, there's also the Faceted Search module that provides similar functionality without this extra requirement. You can check out the demonstration by David Lesieur and see how it compares to Robert's. Faceted Search also has a couple of extra features that make it a worthy competitor.

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