Drupal

There are a number of different authentication methods available for integrating with Google Apps. These include OpenID, OAuth and SAML amongst others. At a first glance, it's not always entirely clear on the differences between them and when you may wish to use one over another. Here's a brief overview which hopefully makes this a bit clearer.

OpenID

Time is flying by. There is now only 7 weeks to go to DrupalCon San Francisco! I'm really looking forward to it I have to admit. Although I've visited the US a fair bit, I've never been to the west coast, not to mind say San Francisco. Dermot is coming over with me this time, and we're planning on taking an extra week to travel around and do some sightseeing. We're also going to visit a good friend of mine, Aimee, in LA, and then travel back up to Sacremento to visit other friends.

CivicActions is really excited to be a Silver Sponsor of DrupalCon San Francisco this year, and beyond our sponsorship, we're hoping to enrich everyone's experience with a variety of sessions proposed by our team members.  Take a few minutes to check out out this awesome lineup of session proposals.

Our friends at Chapter 3 recently launched a training program and just announced a new round of trainings in San Francisco in February.  As Dries Buytaert has pointed out, with the growth of Drupal, and the increasing demand for Drupal development and site building services it is essential that more people learn to build websites with Drupal.

I was recently asked to take some civicrm demographic data from various groups and graph the data so that a visual comparison could be made between groups. In the course of looking for some graphing/charting technique that would integrate well with drupal & civicrm I discovered the google chart api module.

The Image FUpload module is an add-on to the Image and CCK's Imagefield modules, and allows you to upload multiple images at once with just a few simple clicks. You can use it with both single-value and multi-value imagefields, and it will automatically create the nodes for you.

For a project I've been working on recently, I needed the ability to have a two column table layout in Views. The idea was to place the field label in the first column, and the field data in the second. I had tried achieving the same layout using the unformatted default layout with some CSS, but was unable to get the label and field data to line up correctly, and so eventually wrote a views plugin to achieve the effect using tables.

The screenshot below shows what the final result looks like.

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.

I don't get asked to review books often, so I was delighted when I got asked to review Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization by Ben Finklea, it being top of my list of Drupal books to buy. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is all about improving your site's position in search results. It's part science, part art, and involves a lot of small, but simple, improvements to your website.

Kent Bye interviewed me (Bevan Rudge) in early September at DrupalCon Paris about Drupal in New Zealand, CivicActions and some recent projects. Yesterday Lullabot released the podcast as Lullabot Drupal Voices 75.