An update to David Mercer’s now two year old Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites, this version has been updated for the CMS’ latest revision and guides the user through from setting up a development environment and installing drupal through to building custom themes and deploying a fully built site.

The book is designed to be read sequentially and assumes very little prior Drupal knowledge, though a little familiarity with the interface would be helpful, and a lot of willingness to explore and experiment are going to be necessary for complete newcomers. The first few chapters–focussed on explaining the benefits of using drupal and guide the user through the initial setup–are a little clunky and may deter those not comfortable with installing databases and scripting languages. The style improves as the book progresses and Mercer covers his topics well, with a considerably better structure than several Packt publications I’ve seen lately. (sadly the book retains Packt’s )

Some of those topics are fairly complex and it might have been good to have a few more directions for exploring the power of taxonomies and getting to grip with best practices in designing them. Given the range of documentation (on blogs and elsewhere) available online, more references to resources outside the book would have been a useful addition. But the fact that Mercer takes users beyond the very basics is to his credit, and it’s very good to see coverage of jquery, CCK, caching, and other topics that are key to recent versions of drupal but which could easily have been glossed over.

This is not a book for the seasoned developer coming from another platform or for those who have already have ample drupal experience (others have that covered) and it’s not really the “user manual” I’d like to find to hand on to drupal-using clients. But for those with an itch to build their own site and a sense that drupal might be the right tool, this volume is well worth a look.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher. You can find it at packt, amazon US, amazon UK and all sorts of other places.

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While my live blogging efforts focussed on the more formal sessions at ecampaigning forum, most of the event’s time and content was spent in groups following the Open Space methodology. The gatherings for people to suggest sessions were instructive in themselves as they gave considerable hints as to the key concerns of ecampaigning practitioners.

How to engage with the big social networking sites, whether to create your own, organising around big events (such as G8 summits and climate conferences) and ways of managing decentralised/coalition campaigns were some of the big themes, but the sessions covered a wide range beyond that such as engaging with young supporters, or older supporters, choosing content management systems, operating on a tight budget, pooling resources/tools and one hastily agreed discussion of twitter. What follows are a few notes on things that struck me.

The twitter session drew a mixture of existing users, aware onlookers, and newcomers. A lot of time was spent exploring existing uses of the site with examples such as teamtibet’s usage to co-ordinate protests around the olympic flame and Downing Street’s account. Most people seemed taken with its potential for short term co-ordination, but many questions arose about its potential for long term campaigning beyond informing core supporters of news updates. Being seemingly the longest-serving twitter user there, it was interesting to hear responses to a tool I’ve quickly come to take for granted

A recurring theme was the adoption of drupal by a number of the big agencies. Most seem keen to contribute code back to the community, along the lines of AI and CivicActions‘ assets module. I’ve mentioned my mixed feelings about drupal before but am hopeful that through events like this we might be able to resolve some of the issues that frustrate me.

I brought up Russell Davies’ 2008 - the year of peak advertising in conversation over breakfast on the first day and that phrase recurred a few times. There’s a general awareness that the last few years have brought lots of opportunities to attract attention by simply being quick to adopt some new “web 2.0″ tool, but that won’t last. It didn’t seem like there was a sustained discussion or much sense of where to go next, but working hard to attain attention has been the life of campaigners for a long time and so perhaps this is just another step in that journey?

There’s clearly a growing sense of how hard it is to influence big summits where the final communique is often planned months in advance. Gatherings of world leaders are a great opportunity for media coverage and to present the “actionable moments” that Ben Brandzel spoke of, but they’re now when the real chance for change occur. It’s vital to find ways to turn the energy around these summits into sustained, directed action after the final communique is published, planning the next steps before the events themselves take place.

In the session on pooling resources and tools a number of questions came up about the ethics of collaborating with big players like google (who have just been on a big outreach programme for their new Google Earth offering for NGOs). The data provided and the tools offered by the likes of Google can be a great boon to charities operating on tight budgets, but at the expense of ceding a lot of control and a lot of attention data (and with providers like facebook there are concerns about things like this). It was obvious that there is some desire to develop open source tools that provide similar tools, but it’s not clear whether the resources are there. Mention was made of open street map and I brought up the theyworkforyou api, and it definitely would have been interesting to have had people who could present on the usage of that; some concerns remain as to how ready those tools are for non-geeky end-users, which would be easy to resolve if someone were to direct the right resources.

I’m looking forward to seeing what other people bring up in their notes on the event, and what themes come out in the ongoing discussion. You can see my photos on flickr, find some content on technorati and check out the conference wiki for more. All my posts on the topic are gathered under the ecf08 tag.

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Working with a number of non-profits I frequently find myself tasked with extending or upgrading drupal. Each new version of drupal has been a significant step forward and I’m usually keen to get up to date but there’s the small matter of the suite of modules most sites use that need to catch up with changing APIs. With the release of Drupal 6 a few weeks back I found myself wanting a tool that would help me check if my chosen modules were ready for the upgrade yet.

The quick solution I came up was a screen-scraper that will take a YAML file listing the relevant modules and their URLs and check to see if a Drupal 6 version has been released as yet. I wrote it in ruby, because after all that PHP work it’s nice to slip back into a language that feels so comfortable. (and hpricot is delightful for quick scraping solutions).

In case it’s helpful for anyone I’ve popped the ruby code and a sample yaml file up as pasties. Currently it’s invoked from the command line (providing you have ruby and hpricot set up) with:

./drupal-modules.rb my-file.yaml

A couple of nice enhancements would be to either grab the list of modules from an existing drupal database, or to set this up as a little web service where people input the modules they use and can check a web page or receive an email when there’s a status update. It could even lead into some discussion of where certain older modules should be considered redundant and/or replaced with newer options. Time’s not likely to let me build that, but I’d love to hear if someone else does.

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Aimed at those with a knowledge of HTML and CSS but with no prior experience of programming, Drupal 5 Themes sets out to show you how you can quickly and easily get a drupal site up and running with a highly customised look and feel.

Drupal is highly themeable, with most aspects of the user interface being accessible purely in the theme layer without needing to dip into module development or the CMS’ core. The book takes the user through the various theme hooks and introduces the simple PHP code needed to override them, add new ‘regions’ (in which blocks can be displayed), customise existing themes and create your own (almost) from scratch. The primary focus is on the default theme engine, PHPTemplate, but others are referenced and a little time is spent on the options for building your own theme using raw PHP (without the extra layer of a theme engine).

For the most part the content is straightforward, and the reader should quickly get a feel for the naming conventions that drive the PHPTemplate approach. While not much programming knowledge is needed, it would be helpful for the reader to have a basic grasp of PHP and introductory programming constructs such as loops and conditionals. I was also surprised to find recommendations to name functions phptemplate_* within theme-specific template.php files, where they could instead be prefixed with the theme’s name rather than ‘phptemplate’. PHP’s not fond of functions that share names within the same context, and it is best to give those functions the most specific name available to you in order to avoid errors.

Given the fact that only HTML and CSS are listed as pre-requisites I was a little surprised that the PHP code wasn’t introduced in a more focussed section. Given its simplicity it’s to be hoped that anyone intending to spend much time building drupal sites would be able to figure it out, but while time is spent picking apart example code little time is spent actually giving a conceptual introduction or, for that matter, on explaining how to install drupal in the first place. Surprisingly, space was given to explaining how cascades work in CSS, which you would think is a fundamental part of a knowledge of CSS and unnecessary in this context.

This is the second book in a row that Packt has sent me for review where it has seemed that reference material is scattered too freely amongst the tutorial-style chapters. Significant chunks of space are given over to listing off functions, the locations of stylesheets, and so on, which is useful information but breaks up the flow of the book unhelpfully. It’s surprising that that content wasn’t moved to an appendix or, as with their jQuery books, a separate volume. Sitting in the middle of the book it feels like unnecessary filler (just one or two examples would do, along with a reference to an appendix, other volume, or online source) and the space could helpfully be given to more detailed tutorial material. That coupled with poor print quality and light paper stock (both also an issue with that previous book) gives the book a lightweight feel and reinforce its weaknesses.

This book should get an HTML/CSS developer who’s not afraid to dip their toes into some PHP up to speed with customising a drupal site, and its worth considering if you’ve been mostly building static sites or customising wordpress and need a content management system with a wider range of features. Unfortunately it’s still fairly weak structurally, and you may well find yourself needing to combine it with quite a bit of online documentation to properly cover the topics under discussion.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher. You can find it at packt publishing, amazon US, amazon UK and all sorts of other places.

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A couple of months ago I found myself needing to generate a “tag cloud” in drupal. The contents of the cloud would be all the children categories of a container and as is the norm with tag clouds it needed to display those children at varying sizes based on how popular they are. I looked around at the existing options but none fitted my requirements in how they integrated with the category module, or producing semantically helpful html.

So I rolled my own. It’s a quick module that just provides a few simple utilities. The cloud is initially generated as an unordered list, with the number of nodes matching each tag included in brackets, eg:

<ul>
  <li><a href="/node/1" rel="tag">tag one (5 entries)</li>
  <li><a href="/node/3" rel="tag">tag three (8 entries)</li>
  <li><a href="/node/2" rel="tag">tag two (2 entries)</li>
  <li><a href="/node/6" rel="tag">tag six (4 entries)</li>
</ul>

There’s then a jquery function, called on document load, that works through the list, hides the content in the brackets, and changes the size of the text based on the tag’s popularity.

You can include it in a page by calling:

< ?php tagcloud_include($container_id); ?>

within your theme. I’ve tested the module against drupal 4.7 but it should work fine in 5.x (and I guess 6.x).

I don’t have time or the inclination to do much more work with this module, or to provide support for it, but it seemed worth throwing out there in case anyone else wants to build on it. If you’d like to adopt it, let me know and we can collaborate.

If you’re interested, you can get the tarball here.

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