Owen Barton's blog

Deconstructing media on the healthcare debate

Given the highly polarised debate on healthcare reform, it is an interesting exercise to examine some of the arguments put forward.

Drush screencast tutorial 2: Using the drush dl and info commands

This screencast dives deep into the Drush "dl" and "info" commands, which can be used to look-up, download and extract the recommended version (or specific versions) of modules, themes, install profiles and translations.

Drush 2.0 released - Screencast 1: Installing Drush and getting started

After a long period of development the Drush team (myself, and the multi-talented rockstars Moshe Weitzman and Adrian Rossouw) have finally released Drush 2.0.

This is a milestone in many ways - the core of Drush has been completely rewritten (some parts of it twice over!) since the last stable release. This core can now (among other things) connect to multiple major Drupal versions, work reliably (we hope!) on a wide range of command line environments - but is also a powerful platform that allows commands to specify dependencies, to work at different levels of the Drupal bootstrap, call other commands (including on remote servers over secure SSH connections) and provide responses in both machine readable formats and nicely laid out human readable formats. There are also many improvements in the set of commands that come with Drush, both adding new functionality as well as making the existing functionality more intuitive to use.

Over the next few days, I will be uploading a series of short screencasts, covering how to get started, going through the various commands in some detail, and perhaps getting into some detail about how to write your own commands.

Here is the first in the series. Please add any questions in the comments, and I will try and address them (either in the next video, or in the issue queue).

Fun with Wordle

Inspired by Funny Monkey and their "Wordlizing" of their Knight Drupal Initiative application I decided to have a quick play myself. I thought it would be interesting to see what words CivicActions frequently uses in our blogging, so a few days ago I took a quick export of all node text from our database, cleaned it up a little and started playing - see the attachments for the results. I think number 5 and 6 are my favorites, although I am quite partial to the arrangement in 3 too!

Modules for building Drupal wikis

For many sites a standard Drupal content type with open permissions and revisions will do enough of the 'wiki-thing' for many situations.

However, there are a bunch of other wiki-like behaviors that you might (on some sites) want to add additional functionality or usability - here is a summary of modules to check out:

  • Wikitools (pretty configurable - you don't need to have all of this all the time)
    • Node Creation: Let users create new nodes when they type in a node name which does not exist.

HOWTO: Secure your SSH, SSL and OpenVPN keys generated on Debian, Ubuntu and related distributions

This is a short HOWTO guide for users (or previous-users) of Debian, Ubuntu or related distributions on how to guard themselves against the very serious vulnerability in Debian's patch to OpenSSL affecting SSH, SSL and OpenVPN that was disclosed early last week. I know that many Drupal developers are Ubuntu users (though certainly second in number to the OS X users!) so I am adding this to the planet as a PSA!

Similar content module wrapup

Here is an (incomplete) rundown of the various 'similar/related node' type modules:

Manually entered Parsed links Search/analysis of title/body Taxonomy Same content type
Related Links
Related Block
Similar by Terms
Similar Entries
Relevant Content

It should be pointed out that while related links is one of the oldest of the bunch, and has most features, it is not quite as flexible as people are looking for (which I think is the main reason for the other modules), and the UI is not always easy to understand.

Here is what I would like to see - a module that (on node creation/edition and also regularly refreshed on cron) provides a hook to allow various modules to add in some numeric factors for how that node relates to other nodes. These modules could have their own configuration (e.g. to only pull from certain vocabularies), and the central API would allow you to weight one module/factor against another (e.g. taxonomy similarity v.s. word similarity v.s. destination node votes or freshness).

It would basically then just dump this information into a table and provide it to views as a sort option (that would need to load a node from an NID passed in an argument to provide a 'relevant' sort). This would allow you to display it per content type or whatever. For bonus points there would be a way for Content Recommendation Engine or other modules with user specific input to add their influence to the final list.

Slides from "Information Architecture to Drupal Architecture"

Here are the slides from my Drupalcon session yesterday (open the PDF version if you want the LOLcats). The session went very well - there was some great feedback and lots of good questions asked.

Drupal on the OLPC XO laptop

A post about Drupal on the XO over on the Development Seed blog reminded me about a HOWTO and video demo I put together over a month ago and then got too busy to post. The Drupal on OLPC HOWTO is over on the OLPC wiki, and uses Lighttpd and MySQL for the stack.

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