Tag: Drupal

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The 2015 Open Source Yearbook from Opensource.com

The 2015 Open Source Yearbook is a community-contributed collection of the year’s top open source projects, people, tools, and stories. New articles are added as they are published here.

— 2015 Open Source Yearbook https://opensource.com/yearbook/2015

The yearbook highlights the best of open source in 2015 including hardware, software, and resources that made 2015 a great year for open source. There are 22 entries covering everything from the raspberry pi to Drupal to free ebooks.

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IBM is reportedly going to buy Weather Company’s digital assets

International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N) is nearing an agreement to buy the Weather Company’s digital assets in a deal that could be announced as soon as this week, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Source: IBM nears deal to buy Weather Company’s digital assets: source :: Reuters

The Weather Company’s digital assets include weather.com, the Weather Underground, and a bunch of platform apps. The weather.com website is generally considered one of the largest Drupal powered sites in the world.

This seems lit a bit of an odd move for IBM since it looks like a content play. Big Blue is more likely after the data that drives the digital properties and the talent pool it brings.

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Notes from #DCATL Day 1, part 1

Day 1 of DrupalCamp Altanta was a short day, just Friday afternoon, but there were plenty of excellent sessions on the agenda. I actually took a fair number of notes and picked up several ideas for making the Drupal sites I run, run better.

I started the afternoon with Building a Better Resource: Improving a Drupal Scholarly Journal Platform. This was a solid presentation by Dan Hansen and Jesse Karlsberg that covered a range of topics from migrating a legacy Drupal 6 site to Drupal 7 to capturing a scholarly journal workflow with the Maestro module. Of particular interest is some of the custom module work being done for the Southern Spaces site. These include a text section module that allows content creators to add section level navigation points into lengthy journal articles and juicebox inline that adds a WP-style shortcode for creating Juicebox Galleries easily. Finally work is being done to create a distribution for scholarly journals that would be useful for law reviews. Finally it’s worth noting that author’s submit articles to the journal via word processor files, not through the WYSIWYG editor.

Next up was Growth Hacking with Content, Marketing Automation & Drupal presented by Shellie Hutchens, the Director of Marketing at Mediacurrent. The focus here was on marketing automation and integrating Drupal sites with marketing platforms. The idea is to shape visitor experience on your site to engage the viewer and slowly gather information that can be used for highly targeted marketing whether it be sales, brand visibility, or higher levels of engagement. Mediacurrent supports the development of a number of marketing automation modules that tie Drupal to many popular marketing platforms.

to be continued…

 

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Slack | Drupal.org

Slack brings all your communication together in one place. It’s real-time messaging, archiving and search for modern teams, and it has cool system integrations features. This module allows you to send messages from Drupal website to Slack. It has Rules module integration. Also you can use our module API in your modules.

Source: Slack | Drupal.org

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Flaw in PHP XML Processing Hits Drupal, WordPress. Time To Patch ’em Up.

For the first time, the open-source Drupal and WordPress content management teams have coordinated joint security releases to fix a new vulnerability.

The flaw, first reported by security researcher Nir Goldshlager, is a potential denial-of-service (DoS) issue with PHP’s XML processing module. Drupal and WordPress use the same PHP module, which is why both content management systems are at risk from the same flaw. Drupal is particularly prominent because it is used on U.S. government sites, including WhiteHouse.gov, and WordPress is deployed on more than 60 million sites.

“This bug can be utilized without the aid of any plug-ins, and it functions smoothly on the default installation of WordPress and Drupal,” Goldshlager explained in an advisory (which is running on a WordPress site itself). “Only one machine needed to exploit this vulnerability.”

In an advisory on the drupal.org site, the vulnerability is rated as moderately critical. The Drupal advisory explains that the bug that Goldshlager found is within the PHP XML parser and could trigger CPU and memory exhaustion, in turn causing a DoS condition on the affected site.

via New Flaw Puts Millions of WordPress, Drupal Sites at Risk.

Patches are provided by Drupal 7.31, 6.33 and WordPress 3.9.2.

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Setting Up Apache Solr 4.2 and Drupal 7 For Better Search

Solr is an open source search server based on Apache Lucene. Lucene provides Java-based indexing and a search library, and Solr extends it to provide a variety of APIs and search functionality, including faceted search and hit highlighting, and handles Word and PDF document searching. It also provides caching and replication, making it scalable, robust, and very fast.
Happily, Solr also plays nicely with Drupal, the popular CMS platform. If you want fast and effective search on your Drupal site, installing Solr is a straightforward way of getting it quickly. Until this month, the Apachesolr Drupal module didnt support the current Solr 4.x schemas, but as of the very latest version of the Apachesolr module, 7.x-1.2, you can now set up Solr 4.x on your Drupal 7 site. This tutorial assumes that youre running Drupal 7.22 the most up-to-date version under Apache on a Linux box.

via How to set up Solr 4.2 on Drupal 7 with Apache.

If you running Drupal and have a lot of nodes to index and you’re not using Solr you’re missing out on a lot. Though it takes a bit of config to set up, using Solr to index and search your Drupal site is much better than the stock Drupal search.

 

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Some Quick Drupal Troubleshooting Tips

You don’t have to use Drupal (or any other user configurable software package for that matter) for very long before you do something that causes it to do something unpleasant. While answering one of those “why is it doing that ” type of questions this afternoon it occurred to me that there are a number of rules/tips I follow when working with Drupal.

Following these little tips makes life easier will help you maintain some sanity while getting some work done.

  •  Always use the admin or user 1 account (the first one you created when you installed the site) when turning modules on and off. Sometimes modules have odd permissions settings that require the super user to do the install but they don’t bother to tell you that or give any useful error when it goes wrong.
  • Always clear the cache when you install modules, change/add content types, create/edit views or panels, make any theme changes or do any sort of updates. Drupal caches lots of stuff and it’s easier to clear to the cache manually then it is to try and guess if what you just did is cached or not. I usually don’t worry about the warnings about clearing the cache affecting performance because most sites are small and lightly used enough for it to not make that much of a difference.
  • Install and test modules one at a time. Don’t install a bunch of stuff and then go back and start testing because if things go wrong troubleshooting is easier if you’ve only just changed one thing. Of course some modules require others, so you’ll have to install groups of modules at some point, but remember to turn them all off if something goes amiss.
  • Don’t monkey with the Drupal database unless you REALLY know what you’re doing. Something as simple as saving a blog post in Drupal can touch a lot of tables. Even if you are seeing database errors, it’s usually a better idea to try everything you can to clear them up from the Drupal admin pages first.
  • Keep a second  (or third) browser handy so that you can have an anonymous view of your Drupal site while you’re developing. This is really handy when those pesky caching problems pop up. Also helps avoid those “I can see it, why can’t you” problems that crop up when someone actually tries to visit your site.

I’m sure there are more so feel free to add them in the comments.