It really feels like Drupal is accelerating in the marketplace lately. You can help keep it keep it going by voting for / nominating Drupal in important industry awards. Here are a couple that need action from you today.

Drupal is running as a finalist in five categories for the Sourceforge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards. VOTING ENDS TOMORROW!

Drupal is also in the nomination stage for the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Awards, an award Drupal won last year. You can nominate Drupal in several categories here. Nomination is the first step to winning. Do it now.

Oleg Terenchuk (litwol) is now developing the JavaScript Theming module. The five second elevator spiel: this will move theming from the server to the client.

The longer explanation is a bit more exciting. This module plans to abstract the core of Drupal theming into a javascript layer. This will allow a JSON feed to pass raw data to a browser to be formatted on the fly for display.

The implications are astounding, and I'm still wrapping my brain around the possibilities. For one, it could mean super fast in place load times, because Drupal doesn't have to mess around with passing everything around the theming system. An AJAX request could just ask for the data, Drupal sends it, and jQuery will format your list, table, teaser, or what have you. In its second day of life, it already works with messages (and item lists, I believe).

A potential problem I see might be that slower computers would see slower rendering times. But this is already happening with some jQuery-heavy sites anyway. The benefit would be most seen with faster hardware, but this is always true with cutting-edge technology. Everyone else will catch up soon enough.

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Last Friday, the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), onde of the biggest universities in South America and responsible for 15% of all research done in Brazilian universities, released its new website in our beloved CMS.

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Steph & Chris from TopNotchThemes will be giving a session at the Berkeley Drupal Users Group meeting on Thursday, July 24th from 12-1:30pm. We’ll be covering the process of finding, reviewing, and selecting the right theme for your Drupal site.

Should you hire a design firm to create a fully custom theme? Do you have mockups already? Are you working on a low-budget project and need to know the best way to modify what’s out there? How can you tell if a theme is any good? We’ll answer this and more!

Get more info and directions here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/12774

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We do a lot of work building portals and intranets that provide collaborative online spaces for professional communities. Some of these projects are completely private sites, and some are open to larger user groups. In each case we need to provide a toolset that could be configured differently for each site and frequently tweaked in particular groups. To do this we've built Spaces. It's a module that leverages Organic Groups to relate users and content to groups, and it extends context_ui to define 'features' that can be control individually in each group.  Spaces also makes assumptions about how you want groups to work and so is able to reduce the options available when creating groups and posts in groups, making the group creation and content posting processes more intuitive.

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So the past couple months have been completely nuts trying to get Drupal Jumpstart out the door (one month left! eek!), I haven't had the chance to write about this.

Tomorrow, I'm headed to San Francisco, California for BlogHer '08, and will be co-presenting with Marianne Masculino from WordPress on Saturday about how to participate in an open source community; I of course will be talking about the Drupal community. :)

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Yesterday, Jody and I had the privilege of presenting at the first Higher Education Web Symposium, held at the University of Pennsylvania. Below you can find the slides from the first part of the session, which was part of our intro to Drupal and a showcase of some of the educational institutions that run Drupal sites. For the second part Jody did a live demonstration of some of the basics of setting up and running a Drupal site, which we were not able to record.

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I like to develop against local virtual hosts when I work with Drupal. Here is the apache httpd.conf configuration that has served me the best so far. The first VirtualHost is the default .. .simply replicate the second VirtualHost entry and edit accordingly. A simple edit of /etc/hosts to enter the virtual host name that matches the virtual host entries in the httpd.conf and a quick reload by apache and you are good to go. I particularly enjoy the independent logging for each site.

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Quick Note: the Administration Menu module in Drupal seems to have some weird bug in ver. 5.2.5 which causes menu items listing to disappear on admin/build/menu configuration page.

Solution: disable and remove Administration Menu module, download 5.2.6 or later version, install that one. If the problem persists run “menu_rebuild();” from hook_init() of any module or even from page.tpl.php. The problem should be gone.

Enjoy.

I have released the second alpha of the Usability Testing Suite. The API is fully functional and there are two plug-ins implementing the API. The reason the module is still marked as alpha is due to the user flow issues and clean-up items.

For more detailed information on the status of the project please read the alpha 2 release notes.

I would like to get feedback on what people think of the module, as it is intended to be used to enhance Drupal's usability.

Make sure you read the INSTALL.txt file before installing.

Neil Drumm and I just launched a new widget with Advomatic, over at MapLight.

This widget is fully customizable, and returns a dynamic image with data created on the fly. I did the image part of things.

I'll do a write up someday soon. I promise! Busy with book editing and work this week...

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After recently reading about how great VIM is for the three hundredth and fifty second time (I kept count), I decided to take a look.

It really is quite cool! I've also decided to try to log any cool tips I learn about it. Here is the first which I found after running the coder module on one of my modules (Page Title 2) and it threw hundreds of errors about too many trailing spaces on empty lines.

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You may remember that back in February, Drupal announced that Peter Cawley (Corsix) was chosen as the Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) winner for the Drupal project. It turns out that finding a time when the 10 grand prize winners, their parents, and a mentor from each of the 10 participating open source projects were all free was not easy, but we finally got together this week for the official awards ceremony.

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With apologies to Gloria Jones and a variety of others...

Recently I've been experimenting with automated methods for detecting security vulnerabilities in Drupal and contributed modules. The time has come to report on my progress. If you want to learn more about this and are going to DrupalCon Hungary 2008, vote for my session proposal.

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Last week was crazy. Six airplanes, three time zones, four different hotels, two rental cars, an Acquia Board meeting, two nights in a tent and ultimately, my mind blown at FooCamp.

Off to a meeting in a tiny little airplane. In line behind the big guys. Taken with my iPhone.

FooCamp is the annual invitation-only conference organized by Tim O'Reilly. It is the mother of BarCamp, if you will. The people you get to meet at FooCamp are impressive, and the format (including the nightly campfires) really sets people up to talk, brainstorm and geek out. The result? A fire hose of new ideas and a lot of new friends. Thanks Tim!

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The .htaccess file included with Drupal tells Apache to send all 404 requests to Drupal to handle. While this is great in some cases, the performance degradation can have a huge impact on a site that has millions of users.

When Drupal processes a 404, it has to bootstrap Drupal, which includes Apache loading up the PHP process, gathering all of the Drupal PHP files, connecting to the database, and running some queries. This is quite expensive when Apache can be told to simply say "Page not found" without having to incur any of that overhead.

Now you might say your site doesn't have any broken URLs as you haven't changed any. Well that's great, but as your site grows, it is going to be a target for spammers and hackers. They are going to start requesting all sorts of file to see if they can find an exploit. Instead of bootstrapping Drupal each time to tell them that DLL file doesn't exist, it would be much better if Apache could just say that, to save resources for your real users.

So, what can you do? How can you stop Drupal from handling 404s but not break modules like imagecache?

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Acquia has signed up as a platinum sponsor for Drupal Szeged 2008 coming up August 27-30. We're sending a large contingent of Acquians as attendees, presenters, and general community participants. We'll be recruiting and enabling partners, looking for new employees, and sharing the latest Acquia news. We really look forward to seeing everyone there.

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Acquia has signed up as a platinum sponsor for Drupal Szeged 2008 coming up August 27-30. We're sending a large contingent of Acquians as attendees, presenters, and general community participants. We'll be recruiting and enabling partners, looking for new employees, and sharing the latest Acquia news. We really look forward to seeing everyone there.

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Mail clients can receive both HTML and text-only emails. Emails formatted in HTML are much more attractive and generally sought after by most clients. However, many users do not accept HTML emails, believing these emails to be more vulnerable to attack.

The solution is to send a multi-part email, which includes both text and HTML versions of the message. In such case, people who do accept HTML e-mails will see a pretty version and the rest will see a text-based version.

Let's look at a quick example:

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