drupal

My session at next week's Drupal conference has been confirmed. I will be presenting a few case studies from recent Drupal developments, and talking about Drupal APIs and Drupal as a Web Development Framework. Here's the abstract:

Drupal is often compared with other CMS products, but the true power of the platform is in it's flexibility and extensibility. Drupal, as a set of APIs, is a viable choice as a framework for developing powerful web apps. This session will demonstrate the use of Drupal APIs and Modules for web application development by means of a couple of case studies. Along the way we'll touch on comparisons with other frameworks from a developer perspective, and requirements for enterprise from a business perspective.

See you in Szeged!

Most of my work to date has been Drupal 5, but a new project I am involved in has required the switch to Drupal 6. On the whole I couldn't be happier - D6 is really nice in so many areas, and the switch has been pretty painless. Except - I'm now looking at Drupal installation profiles.

A couple of gotchas that I wasn't expecting...

Last night's event at Sun Microsystems office in London was a big success. Congrats to the Drupal UK team for organising. The live hook up with Robert Douglass worked well, and it was good to hear more about recent search developments in Drupal. I presented my little case study on Interoperability with Drupal, in particular producing sales reports in Drupal using External User Authentication and report building. I'll post my Drupal module code for those that asked when I've sufficiently GPL'ed it.

See you at the next Drupal UK event?

I will be presenting at the forthcoming Drupal for Enterprise event being organised by Drupal UK. The event is on 13th Aug and is being held at Sun Microsystems. You can register for this event here.

Details are still being confirmed but I will be presenting something on integration of Drupal with other systems. This could include external user authentication, and the work I have done in the past integrating Drupal with accounting systems, and webbots to process sales information feeds.

The Drupal for Developers event was great fun this week. I did a 15 min presentation on Programmatically Creating Drupal Nodes. The slides from this presentation will be going up on the Drupal UK site in the near future, but you can get a preview of the presentation below.

Here's a nice easy way of running backups for your Drupal sites. To successfully backup a Drupal website you need to:

1. backup all the files, themes, modules, etc, and,
2. backup the database content

I'll not go into the reasons why backups are essential part of support for Drupal, or any websites, because if you've ever had a server crash and die on you then you will understand. If you haven't then I suggest it's only a matter of time, and you start a rigorous backup routine now.

Read on for one backup method that produces nice incremental backups of your Drupal site without taking up too much diskspace, and dumps SQL content of your Drupal database at the same time.

I will be speaking at the next Drupal UK event, which is being held at The Economist offices in London next Wednesday, 30th July.

My presentation is going to be about programmatically creating content (nodes) including CCK fields, attachments, and images. I will be presenting a case study from recent development that automatically creates content from iTunes Producer packages.

Places are limited but you can find more information and signup here:
http://drupal.org.uk/event/drupal-developers/04-jul-2008

Also, check out the other upcoming Drupal UK events, I will also be presenting at the Enterprise event.

Here's a few bits of code from today's Drupal wranglings that solves a tricky UX problem with Drupal and CCK Node Reference fields.

Ever wanted to deal with the case that a user might want to reference a node that doesn't exist yet? Well I've played around with a couple of modules (Add n Reference and Add Node), but they didn't offer the clean user experience I needed. Here's an example use-case:

Plane all booked for Drupalcon Szeged - the next Drupal conference, this time held in Hungary. More details: http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/

You can use any database table to validate users for your Drupal site. In this case I'm validating users against a database of clients. This client database is maintained outside of Drupal. It's a simple two step process, and just needs a couple of PHP functions in a custom module: