Drupal

There are a couple of apps which can post to Drupal as well as the majority of other popular blogging platforms straight from your iPhone: iBlogger and BlogPress. I'm writing this from BlogPress on my iPhone, but the app also supports the iPad for all you lucky folks out there. With BlogPress you can view previous posts, save drafts, upload images to Flickr or Picasa and upload movies to YouTube, all of which can then be embedded straight into the post. Drafts can be saved to the app and are stored on the iPhone or can be stored on your Drupal site. No more excuses for not having enough time to blog!

If you know of any other apps for blogging from the iPhone, especially to Drupal, please add them in the comments below. Happy remote blogging :)

There are a few great out of the box performance tweaks which Drupal offers to speed up page loading times and minimise server load. First of all, these tweaks wouldn't suit every site. You need to first think about how much traffic you currently get and how often our content changes. You don't necessarily have to add or amend a page for content to change; people can post comments and interact with your site in ways which change the content displayed. This will make a difference to how you chose to optimise your Drupal site performance.

I've decided to give the web service, Mollom, a try since my CAPTCHA, which I kept tweaking to the point where I nearly couldn't read it, was letting me down. The problem with CAPTCHA is it logs how many form submissions it blocks, which is great, but this doesn't necessarily mean SPAM submissions; it could be frustrated people not being able to post a comment on your blog. Mollom works by analysing the form submission for SPAM patterns, then determining whether it is suitable or not. It's quite strange to see my forms without a CAPTCHA underneath, but I should know soon enough how well the service works as I have many form submissions blocked by CAPTCHA each day.

Mollom is available for Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla! and many more CMSs. It also has developer libraries for PHP, Java, Ruby, Python and many more.

I've just installed the Drupal Editor app for Android and this is my first 'test post' if you will. It's quite a simple app that connects to your Drupal site through the core blog api module. It then shows a list of all Drupal blogs and allows you to view, edit or delete the posts. You can also post new entries and assign taxonomy terms to them. It's simple and gets the job done!
To install this app search for 'Drupal Editor' on the Android Market. Enjoy!

The Drupal Zen sub-theme, Zen Classic, is to no longer be included with the Zen theme download. The Zen theme will now purely be a theme framework and starter kit. If the Zen Classic theme is to be continued it may be done so as a separate project. Although many people said it was bland I quite liked the simplicity of it, but since it's been removed and I've been thinking of redesigning my site anyway maybe this was the kick up the butt I needed to put pencil to paper!

In terms of Zen sub-themes there are a few available to download from the Drupal website: http://drupal.org/node/340837

There's also a list of sites implementing Zen over at: http://groups.drupal.org/taxonomy/term/5171

What is hotlinking?

Hotlinking, sometimes called image leeching or hot linking, is where another website embeds an image which is stored on your web host. So, for example, if you want to add an image to your website, you can upload the file to your web host then embed the image into your HTML referencing the source for the image as the location of the file on your web host. When someone accesses the HTML page where the image is embedded the file will be downloaded from your web host. If you don't protect against hotlinking, someone could embed that same image on their web page, which means that every time someone accesses their page, the image will be downloaded from your web host and drain your bandwidth. Don't do this, it's not cool and some sites see it as stealing.

Drupal 6 was released today! After having a play with the beta and release candidates...well, I don't have to say; this really is a phenomenal release! Here are some of my favourite new features which I'm looking forward to using:

• Extended logging - You can set Drupal for OS level logging
• Batch API - A progress bar can track tasks running in the background through multiple HTTP requests
• Scripting from the command line - This is really cool! You can now run Drupal code through the command line
• Forum improvements - Granular permissions can allow more control over forum moderation
• Sticky table headers - Does what it says on the tin
• Drag and drop features - Again, the tin...
• CSS only theming - Define regions etc. in .info files without writing any php code, then set styles in CSS

Well done to everyone who has been clearly working hard on this!

It's incredible how rapid the development of Drupal has become. Drupal 6 is only just around the corner and we're already talking about what improvements and features we'd like to see in Drupal 7! Drupal 5 has been absolutely fantastic. I've found it not only a great content management system, but also an excellent framework for building applications.

Anyone who wishes to officially request a new feature for Drupal 7 may do so on the Drupal website by submitting a new issue. Some things I'd like to see would be:

• Some kind of media management system - not just for images, video and audio but maybe also PDFs and other attachable or embedded content
• More core forum features
• Built in WYSIWYG editor as I almost always use TinyMCE, which is great, but it would be nice not to have to install and upgrade it separately from the core
• Improved node access control system
• Automatic upgrade of core system and modules
• Site backup for both files and database

As of Drupal 5.6 you will no longer be able to install the CMS onto a server with register_globals enabled. The notice on the Drupal website says:

"We no longer support servers with the PHP directive register_globals set to on. Attempts to install Drupal 5.6 when register_globals is enabled will fail. Current installations will continue to function, but will display an error on administration pages and the status report."

This check was introduced as a fix for the Cross site scripting vulnerability (DRUPAL-SA-2008-007) which occurs when register_globals is enabled. I was upgrading my Drupal installation from 5.5 when I found out so I only suffered the error on the status report, but people running a fresh install will find they can’t go any further until they disable register_globals.