After three years of being happily together with my girlfriend (fiancée since almost a year ago), and while planning for a lot more, we decided to officially join our lives and proclaim that for the bigger public. We are getting married on August 9th, and will be out of the usual tech loop and away from other things in life for a few days after that.

Looks like people are finally realizing the enormous business opportunities lying in doing themes for Drupal sites. There is the http://www.topnotchthemes.com/ team building truly nice themes with support for common modules, knowing Drupals ins and outs.

At the same time http://www.templatemonster.com/ is picking up Drupal in their CMS section, selling Drupal themes for all kinds of focus areas. Although some of their demos have the "Mambo license" menu item running, which is quite frankly not a testament to their understanding of Drupal. However, starting off from a ported theme could still be nice, those buying Drupal themes might not want to fiddle as much customizing the theme further (update: and there are possibly other problems my soft blogging style did not uncover here, see: http://www.drupal4hu.com/node/146 and http://www.drupal4hu.com/node/141 for notes).

If you'd be interested in ported themes though, you might want to just start off from a theme downloaded for free. There is a new site coming up, started by a Hungarian Drupal enthusiast Ádám Boros. He is going through some of the exciting existing HTML templates and converting them to Drupal themes, providing for you to download for free. Why another theme site, you might ask? Why not just submit to Drupal.org? Well, although free to use and take, some of the HTML templates are not released under the GPL, so they are not suitable for submission on drupal.org. This requires people to either host them on their own site, or go centralize to a location. Ádám's new site, drupal6themes.com aims to not only host Ádám's work but also provide a platform for others to submit their Drupal 6 compatible themes and host them there.

I am extremely happy to see all these theming businesses and the expansion of the available themes to come together, and hope the growth is going to be even bigger going forward.

It was two weeks ago, that we announced the logo contest for the next Drupalcon, which is going to be in Szeged, Hungary at the end of August. We are glad that we managed to energize the Hungarian and a bit of the international community to come out with ideas. We are at ten logo ideas, and it is only two weeks left (until next week's Friday) to submit your logo suggestions! Keep those coming!

Critical Mass is an event which is held two times a year in Hungary (as well as sometimes more often and at varying times around the world), where bicyclists and other self-propelled commuters take to the streets en masse to demonstrate that biking is a good way to commute. Budapest's Critical Mass grows by each event in size, last fall attracting 70 thousand bikers, this past day having 80 thousand riders throughout the day.

Critical Mass 2008, Budapest (spring) photo by zsoolt

What's great about this event is that the Critical Mass Hungary community site runs all on Drupal for the past few years, and the community is happy about it. It is great to see all these activity helped by Drupal, especially that this fine system is used on many of the other local biker sites for bicycle trading, dispatch riders, bike camps and several bikers associations. Another good cause where Drupal helps build a better world!

Also special thanks for the biker community who brought in some money for our Drupal Conference Hungary 2006 and then bought a camera for the last Drupal Conference 2007 for the Drupal User Group to use. This allows us to post videotapes of the presentations we have at our user group events ever since.

This beautiful Monday morning, a few little presents arrived to the Drupalcon Szeged 2008 website. First entry to the Drupalcon Logo Contest from Ivan Raszl, who based his design on the floral patterns of traditional Hungarian embroidery, porcelain and furniture design. He even went ahead and created some renderings of the logo on several swag and even outdoor advertising. Not that we would be there already to do that for Drupalcons.

And while I was working down my email queue, mag3ee also submitted another entry based on our national colors and the Szeged paprika. Keep these coming or just watch as entries pop up in the list! Note that voting will open when submissions are closed.

In other good news, people from as far as India and Australia are planning to come. Caitlin Johnstone is looking to discuss child care in her forum topic Anyone else looking for childcare? As she explains:

Are there any other Drupal families out there going to Hungary? We thought it would be a good one to bring the kids to since it'll be a bit more intimate than usual, but we need to organise some childcare on the conference days.

Bar bringing someone, I was wondering if we could hire a nanny over there, or perhaps even organise some kid-happy programs if there were enough other families planning to bring their little ones.

Let's see who else is interested in nannies, so that we can suggest and/or help you find suitable service. Reply in the forums.

If you look at the Drupalcon Szeged 2008 website's tracker, you'll see that most announcement posts are attributed to me. This is all too misleading, because in many cases, I am merely channelling information collected and discussed by various organizers to the public website.

This is the first Drupalcon for which the organizers have set up a management website, with the sole purpose to serve the organization team as good as possible, and while it is certainly not perfect, it works well so far. The "Do Drupaltown" website uses the core profile module, the organic groups and casetracker modules, as well as some small helpers like comment upload, upload preview, markdown with smartypants, diff and of course OpenID. Nothing earth-shatteringly special, just trying to work out easy ways to collaborate.

The two basic requirements were to have work groups for specific tasks, in the name of limiting scope and handing out responsibility. An event organized with a thousand attendees expected has so many aspects it is very hard to have a good overview of each aspect. So we have an organic groups setup with some top level groups and several focus groups for tasks like producing (valuable) materials for the registration packages, discussing and solving venue tasks, and so on. Because in numerous cases, we need responsibles to hand out tasks to, organic groups nicely fits with its concept of group ownership and memberships. It also supports mailing updates when new content is published, which is good to drive idle volunteers to the site when things are happening.

Since we are tracking tasks, these also need to have responsibles, an importance level, and a completion status. This allows us to have a running list of important tasks to complete, which helps us focus, know about the status of different jobs and get a distributed team to do that. Case tracker helps us there, it does integration with organic groups, so we can relate tasks to groups, email updates to tasks are mailed and severity and status flags are supported. We also have a patch pending for the views integration to be able to order by task priority, which was a trivial thing we needed to produce lists of tasks from most important down to less important.

Given how distributed our team is (only some people onsite in Szeged, lots of others are around the country elsewhere, while some volunteers from as far as Prague or Belgium), we need a way to reach any given member of the team when we are in a pressing need. We use the core profile module, which provides enough features for us to collect skype names, phone numbers, living locations, and so on, and it builds up a volunteer overview page, which gives us instant access to the contact information of anybody in our team. The only little glitch with profile module is that the number of volunteers grew above 20, so it does not fit on one page by default. Talk about sweet problems...

All-in all, our volunteers are happily working towards completing our goals, and we are marching on to come out with new exciting things for you regularly. Now that the public website of Drupalcon Szeged 2008 is building out, you will notice the volunteers themselves more there too, not just through my filtering.

Dries approached me a few months ago, whether I was satisfied with unsolicited content submission solutions I was using on my sites. Well, I was using captcha as anyone else, and the promise of an automated content analysis service which would get my site rid of captchas in most cases did sound very attractive, so I jumped on the train and installed Mollom on this blog. It was hard to not get the word out and always talk in secret-speak instead with people who I knew use or know about Mollom. Since yesterday, Mollom is in public beta, so people can try it for themselves. My spam/ham graph from the Mollom site shows how well does this service serve my site without me doing much about it (and the graph/site looks sexy too):

While Mollom started off with spam identification, it is already doing unsolicited user registration blocking and other content protection schemes are on the plan, including quality and offtopic content analysis. I am eager to see what comes out of this adventure of Dries.

As I explained in an earlier blog post, I was tasked by Acquia (specifically Dries) to identify and propose fixes to issues around integrating visual content editors (WYSIWYG = What You See Is What You Get or RTE = Rich Text Editor). Instead of rushing to select an RTE, the focus of my roadmap is to solidify input format support in Drupal so that integrating a visual editor becomes a peace of cake at the end hopefully.

Textarea and format identification

Drupal is very flexible and this makes integrating an RTE harder compared to one-purpose systems. First I tried to deliver a solution for RTEs to identify the form fields to attach to. For this to work, we need input format metadata attached to form elements, which is implemented in issue #125315 with the new #input_format Form API key. This suffers from some parenting issues still (does not support multiple format selectors in one form), which we need to solve before being able to commit. On the same angle, the RTE should know whether that format has anything to do with the format supported by the RTE, be it HTML, wiki markup or bbcode for example. Drupal uses HTML by default, and administrators need to explicitly disallow HTML. This setting however was tucked down in the "Filter HTML" filter, which made it non-intuitive to identify. So issue #24988 deals with breaking that out to its own filter for easy non-HTML format identification. This way we can easily disable HTML RTEs on such formats.

Putting permissions to place

Simplifying input format setup is quite important. Right now, there is a disconcert between setting up general permissions and input format access settings. Although the later configuration maps input formats to user roles, it is implemented in its own custom permission system. By leveraging the core permissions system for this in #110242, just like the node permissions are implemented with their dynamic names, we clean up the user interface, bring in consistency to permission setup and also simplify the API.

More fun with blocks

Finally, there are quite a few textarea based input interfaces without format support in Drupal core still. For some site settings, like the contact page help or the user registration help, I think it makes a lot of sense to just use blocks. By making the help area an official theme region, we can put the help text there as a block, and allow users to add any number of blocks to the help region to add more custom help to any page. The one-off solutions for contact page help and user registration help can be easily generalized to an admin-configurable custom help system in issue #240873. By using blocks in the help region, admins can limit and share help between different pages, provide different help for different roles and use any format for their help input. If this sounds a lot like the helpedit module or somewhat like the helptip module, that's not a coincidence, this simple change would move some of the features of these modules to core.

I have only been able to provide a short recap of FOSDEM 2008 so far, due in part to Dries' request not to publish materials from his part of our talk before DrupalCon Boston. There was video available of all the other FOSDEM Drupal presentations already, thanks to Luc Van Braekel, but he was unable to arrive in time for our presentation. Now that DrupalCon Boston is over and Dries published the video of his presentation there, I asked the Krimson guys, and Bruno De Bondt in particular, who made a recording of our presentation, to make the video available. He made the recording available on Google Video:

I also exported the slides I built into a convenient PDF form (2.2 MB). This format does not include the demo videos I made (in playable format), and is somewhat modified in title and attribution, since it does not include Dries' slides, but otherwise matches the slides I presented (even including some extra notes). For Dries' content, it is better to look at the State of Drupal video and slides.

Again, thanks to Jo, Roel and Joeri for putting resources in to organize this event!

I was browsing around in the fresh Drupal images on Flickr, when I stumbled on this composition. While in reality I had a back scratcher in my hand at the time (which became famous on its own right that day), this edition of the photo is simply hilarious.

Photoshop work by Jon Hancock, who also made some famous chx compositions. Congrats!