Earl Miles and Young Hahn join Dave Burns, Jeff Eaton, and Jeff Robbins to discuss the similarities and differences between Drupal's Panels and Context modules. Earl is the creator of Panels. Young is the co-creator of Context as well as Features, Spaces, and several other great modules. We open up the cage, toss everyone in, and see what happens!

Also be sure to check out David Burns' article "Assembling Pages with Drupal," which also compares and contrasts Panels and Context.

 Are you new to Drupal or interested in considering Drupal as a content management system or social publishing platform?

You are invited to join Jeff Veit and Anthony Albertyn for a low-key special event in Cambridge. We will be available to answer your questions about Drupal, give mini demonstrations and guidance on how to get started with Drupal. Spaces are very limited so please RSVP asap.

We are a friendly group and new members are most welcome.

This event replaces our Drupal Presentation evening for August as a one-off.

To any of our more experienced members who are getting withdrawal symptoms, we can recommend attending the Drupal Focus on Publishers event in London on the 13th August 2010. 

Please RSVP for our special event at this link:  http://www.meetup.com/drupalcambs/calendar/14261864/

• East of England

Hey there, UK friends! :) Lullabot loves you. As proof of that love, we're doing our first ever public workshops in the UK in September. That's right, Lullabot is coming to Europe, so don't miss it! We'll be holding back-to-back workshops on Drupal module development at Dexter House in London, Monday through Friday, September 20-24!

And because Lullabot loves you, we're posting a special discount code for you to save an extra 5% at registration. Register before August 20th and save even more while the early bird special is available!

Discount Code: DRUPALUK5

Find out more at http://lbt.me/london-deepdive

Hope to see you there! :D

• Drupal London

Nathaniel Catchpole (aka catch) talks about some of the performance-related patches that he has been focusing on for Drupal 7. When Dries gave his State of Drupal keynote address in DrupalCon San Francisco, he presented the Top 20 Drupal 7 core patch contributors and catch was at the top of the list with over 337 patches that he was involved with by that point. He notes that a lot of his patches were a series of smaller performance-related patches that he discovered by using profiling tools such as XHProf and XDebug. He talks about some of the performance changes that got into Drupal 7, as well as how he's been able to work on Drupal 7 core through his job at Examiner.com.

At the time of this recording there were over 120 critical issues for Drupal 7, and at the moment there are around 41 critical issues in the Drupal 7 issue queue.

This year in my keynote at DrupalCon San Francisco, I mentioned that the elephants are coming. Well, earlier this week Capgemini, one of the world's foremost consulting providers with 95,000 employees, announced a new service, Capgemini Immediate. I'm pleased to say that they're using Drupal as a foundational technology for their new Immediate platform.

Capgemini Immediate is an offering which helps organizations to build and run on-line services. It consists of a number of preferred technologies (i.e., Drupal, MySQL, Salesforce, Lithium, etc.), best practices, and an ecosystem of preferred partners of which Acquia is part.

Capgemini Immediate is already being well received and making news. The Royal Mail, the national postal service of the United Kingdom, has signed a large six-year IT contract with Capgemini to transform their on-line services using Capgemini Immediate. With almost 200,000 employees, Royal Mail is the second biggest employer in the UK. Signing of Royal Mail received significant press coverage, including the Wall Street Journal.

The Capgemini stamp of approval, and the fact that Royal Mail will be using Drupal, is tremendous news for all of us. If successful, it could be an important milestone in the history of Drupal -- similar to when Dell and IBM decided to ship machines with Linux pre-installed in 2007.

Incidentally, Capgemini is using Drupal to power their own 95,000 person intranet.

Mike Carper (aka mikeytown2) talks about the Boost module, which a lightweight performance enhancement for small-scale sites that don't have a lot of dynamic content. After adding some apache rules to the .htaccess file, then Boost will translate Drupal pages into static HTML files and serve those directly instead of going through PHP and MySQL. Carper talks about some of the other caching configuration options, and says that this module is perfect for sites on shared hosting that are looking for a performance boost. He says that Boost can actually make your site slower in some cases where you have a lot of content that is frequently updated. In those cases, Varnish would probably be a better solution, but the Boost module is intended to be a quick and easy solution for smaller websites looking for better performance.

For community shared business, development, and training tools, Agaric throws a little sponsorship at http://modulecraft.com

Khalid Baheyeldin (aka kbahey) has been involved with Drupal since 2003, and focuses on the performance & scalability in Drupal. He talks about his strategies for diagnosing the performance bottlenecks in a Drupal site, and mentions some of the various tools that he prescribes as a solution.

For more information, be sure to check out Baheyeldin's DrupalCon presentation slides and talk titled 2.8 million page views per day, 60 M per month, one server!

We now write Drush Make files for even our smallest one-off builds. This discipline saves us time and makes us more efficient as a team by knowing what code actually powers a site. It also helps us transition projects to our partners or to the shops that will be supporting the sites we build, helping us more quickly cut the long tail of a build. To give a sense of just how much this can help internal processes, I'll explain how I was robbed of three days this week by jumping onto a project we worked on before we formalized using Drush Make in our build process.

This week we started sprinting on a custom Open Atrium build for Teachers Without Borders, an organization with a somewhat obvious multinational reach that wanted us to extend Open Atrium in a few interesting ways. They needed Open Atrium to be an identity hub, be localized into multiple languages, and have more social features like following. We'd already done some work for Teachers Without Borders deploying a set of Managing News sites, including one localized into Chinese, and an Open Atrium hub site with the OpenId Simple Sign On stack.

When we originally deployed these sites, we didn't have a good way of tracking what had been added or changed from the standard Open Atrium and Managing News platforms. Each of these platforms had a number of extra modules deployed, mostly to power the authentication infrastructure, and a patch or two to some modules. As someone who didn't work at all on either of those projects, it made getting into these two sites, as well as fixing bugs on them, a very confusing experience.

This video introduces you to the Vi (and Vim) editor. Vi is the most common text editor that you will have available to you on *nix systems so it pays to at least learn the basics in case you end up somewhere where that is all you have to use. Vim is also actually a very serviceable editor which many people (mostly hardcore geeks) use as their day to day editor. We'll talk briefly about Vi versus Vim, then open a file, move around, and close the the file. Our next video will dive more into editing files with Vi.

Note: There are a lot of editors out there on various systems, notably emacs, nano, and pico. Vi is considered the lowest common denominator (i.e. it is the most commonly available one), which is why it is the one being covered in the command line basics series. It is also the editor that I use personally, so is the one I am most familiar with. Please limit editor war discussions to other threads on the internet that are meant for them.

The last few weeks have seen an intense flurry of work on the Panels suite of modules. Today I've rolled releases of the Panels 3.7, CTools 1.7, Panels Everywhere 1.1 and a tiny bugfix release for Tinsel 1.1. This has created a massive chunk of new features that we're hoping will push Panels even more into the mainstream by seriously extending the power available to site builders, particularly in terms of giving site administrators better options for doing their jobs without having to worry about details they've taken care of.

After several days of off the chart temperatures, it's feeling a little more reasonable outside with temperatures only in the 90s. Take advantage of the break in the heat to get out of the house and check out a technology event. While there's not a whole lot on the calendar this week, there are still some interesting events. Have a great week!

Dusk

Screen on the Green: With much cooler temperatures and a forecast for clear skies, it's shaping up to be a great night to catch a movie on the Mall. Tonight 12 Angry Men will be playing as part of the Screen on the Green festival, starting at dusk.

6:00 - 8:00 pm

CopyNight: If you're interested in copyright issues around technology, you'll want to check out this meetup. This month there will be a discussion on the implications of the recent ruling finding LimeWire liable for inducing copyright infringement.

Narayan Newton (aka nnewton) talks about the future of MySQL and it's various forks and different patch sets that are emerging. He's the lead sysadmin for drupal.org, a database optimization expert with Tag1 Consulting, and the co-maintainer of Pressflow, which is the high-performance Drupal distribution.

Since Sun bought MySQL and then Oracle bought Sun, a lot of the MySQL developers have left to Monty Program Ab and there are more decisions that need to be made by database administrators.

There is an active issue on Drupal.org that discusses the various forks, and whether Drupal should recommend a particular flavor of MySQL, and Newton summarizes the current MySQL landscape as having the following different options:

• MySQL/ORACLE
• MySQL/MariaDB (Monty + a lot of the original mysql devs are here)
• MySQL/Percona (Are partners of MariaDB and say they are going to switch to distributing it)
• MySQL/Ourdelta (Are already just redistributing MariaDB)
• MySQL/Drizzle (Not production ready)

Since the recording of this interview, it appears as though Percona and others are converging around MariaDB as a drop-in replacement for MySQL. Newton also mentions Oracle's MySQL 5.5, a set of patches from Percona, Percona's XtraDB, the Open Database Alliance (which includes Monty Program and Percona), the InnoDB Plugin as well as Google patch set for MySQL and Facebook patch set for MySQL. Other notable MySQL fork products include Drizzle and OurDelta.

Here's a couple of useful graphics to help visualize the MySQL landscape:

• Graphic of MySQL forks as of March 2010
• Graphic of MySQL forks as of August 2009

Newton also talks about benchmarking, the grinder load test framework, and the limitations of using micro-benchmarks apart from testing on actual web sites. He also talks about how Drupal 7 gives the ability to run multiple backends including a combination of MySQL and memcache and MongoDB and even scaling writes with Cassandra.

For more information, be sure to check out Newton's DrupalCon talk entitled The Future Of MySQL: Forks, Patches And Decisions

Today we start closed beta testing of Maps on a Stick v.2, an application for making interactive maps and visualizations offline. This version is thoroughly rethought to make the application more flexible and efficient. For example,

• No more complex deployment process. Users can easily copy single-file SQLite tilesets to Maps on a Stick for viewing.
• Adding online KML is as simple as inputting the address of the KML file and clicking 'Add.'
• Uploading KML consists of clicking 'Upload KML' and uploading it.

With this release, the simplicity and flexibility of Maps on a Stick have increased tremendously, as a result of improvements to the underlying infrastructure.

The first version of Maps on a Stick revealed a few important principles of portable, cross-platform applications:

• Distributing tilesets as massive collections of files is disadvantageous due to the inefficiency of filesystems, especially those that serve as the lowest common denominator for USB sticks, like FAT32.
• Distributing pure HTML and Javascript revealed the serious and hard limitations of that approach. Cross-domain KML was not supported, and even loading files from the local disk is not supported in Google Chrome because of security restrictions.

The Drupal trademark policy was launched officially about 11 months ago. As explained in my blog post on the Drupal trademark policy, the purpose of the policy is to create a level playing field for all. It allows everyone to use the trademark without administrative hassle, while at the same time keeping some control and oversight to avoid dilution and misuse. For example, we all know the scarcity of cool domain names, and how frustrating it can be for a local Drupal user group to find that their domain name has already been taken by a commercial entity. The trademark policy seeks to resolve this problem.

Now one year later, there have been some interesting results from the trademark policy. So far, I have received 89 serious trademark queries. Twenty-three of these resulted in a license being granted because the requested use was intended completely to foster Drupal software. For example, there was a request for the name Drupal to be used in the title of a Drupal camp. There were other requests for the name to be include in non-commercial modules. These are all acceptable and good uses of the trademark.

In 32 other trademark usage requests, a formal license contract was required. Among the formal licenses, so far only four contracts have actually resulted in the payment of the administrative license fee. Although the fee is quite reasonable (i.e., 600 euros for clearly commercial use; 300 euros for mixed use), many correspondents ultimately changed their plan in order to avoid the administrative fee. In quite a few other cases where a formal contract was imposed but the intended use was clearly not commercial, no administrative fee was requested. These were typically requests from local Drupal groups.

Finally, there were several trademark usage requests that were rejected simply because they would endanger the level playing field due to their monopolizing nature. Examples of this include domain names like drupalhosting.xyz or drupalthemes.xyz.

I hope everyone can see that the trademark policy is not a money printing machine for me. In fact, it's the opposite. I have paid personally for the creation of the policy and the cost of responding to trademark usage requests. The balance between costs and income is quite skewed out of my favor, although the amount of payments seems to be increasing.

Nevertheless, I am happy with the results so far. I've learned a great deal in the process, and, despite a few unsupportive comments from some, the reactions I have received overall have been positive. In fact, the most common reaction is that, although they understand why they need to pay the administrative fee and why they cannot use a monopolizing domain name, they cannot understand why numerous websites seem to get away with trademark infringements.

This reaction is understandable, of course. Remember, though, that the trademark policy is still quite new. I trust that most members of the Drupal community will comply voluntarily with the policy. So far there hasn't been a need to be a lot more vigorous in ensuring compliance with the trademark policy. There have only been a few difficult people or organizations that have attempted to infringe on the policy, requiring me to become more stern at times.

As expected when we first announced this policy, there were some comments on the actual content of the policy. My lawyers are now in the process of preparing a slightly updated version of the policy. So if you have any suggestions on improvements, please share them with us. For now, though, I'm quite pleased at the results of our first 11 months of having a trademark policy.

Deadline: 10 a.m. 5th August 2010

Sharpen your pencils, we need a strong concept for DrupalCon London that we can use as a starting point for logos, banners, t-shirts, slogans and all other promotional material.

Your concept should be an idea in the form of a written proposal and/or graphic.

One entry will be selected by the DrupalCon London team to be used across all marketing material for the event. All other entries will be showcased here and on Flickr.

The concept must include Drupal and something internationally recognisable about London. It should also communicate both the professionalism and community behind Drupal.

An example concept might be a black cab London taxi, with the slogan “Get The Drupal Knowledge”, and a version of Druplicon. This concept would gain points for strong imagery, but would be marked down because The Knowledge isn’t instantly internationally recognisable.

• Must be understandable to an international audience
• The concept and all submitted wording and graphics must be your own original work, and licensed using Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence
• Don't include anything which might possibly cause offense
• The organiser’s decision is final
• The DrupalCon London team reserve the right to reject all entries if no concept stands out
• Make us look good!

Add a comment to this page with your idea, if you have a graphic post it to the Flickr group DrupalCon London Concepts, then add the Flicker embed code to your comment here, e.g. [ flickr-photo:id=230452326,size=s ]

You are encouraged to adapt and improve other entries, in the best traditions of the Drupal community this challenge should be tackled collaboratively!

• DrupalCon London 2011

Tomorrow I am headed to DrupalCamp Perú Invierno where roughly fifty Drupalers will get together to talk about topics ranging from installing Drupal to writing your first module to using Drush for simplified site building.

I will present on how to use Open Atrium effectively. Open Atrium is a flexible platform that does a lot out of the box and can also be customized and extended to meet specific needs. This means that Open Atrium can be used well for different use cases. Here at Development Seed we use it internally as a project management tool for our team and for our clients. Meanwhile, the Open Atrium Community site is a public-facing site used to manage public support, development, and documentation around Open Atrium. I'll discuss the strategies we use in both cases to effectively harness the power of Open Atrium, with out of the box Open Atrium. There are quite a few Peruvian developers and shops using Open Atrium, so I am particularly looking forward to this talk.

There will also be a code sprint room open where developers will be testing and rolling core patches for Drupal 7, as part of the Drupal Peru community's current support of the larger Drupal project.

The 2011 European DrupalCon will be held in London (tbc).

read more

This weekend is DrupalCamp NYC at the Dibner Building at NYU Polytech in Brooklyn. Lullabot co-founder Jeff Robbins will be giving a talk entitled "Beyond Web 2.0: Designing for the Undesignable" on Saturday (the 24th) at 4:50pm in rm JAB474. You can find the full schedule here. Lullabot is sponsoring the event, so look for our table, come on by, and say "hello".