Drupal

There is a lot happening in the technology scene this week in Washington, DC, with events on openness in government, R, and mobiles in international development. Add to the mix two storytelling events and some happy hours, and it’s a great week. Below is our roundup of events, and you can find a full calendar over at DC Tech Events.

7:00 - 9:00 pm

The Anecdote: Stories about Not Love: In preparation of Valentine’s Day - or in spite of it - come out for a night of storytelling about failed love, dating troubles, and overall bad romance. Danny Harris from the People’s District - whose stories we helped map - is one of the presenters.

9:00 - 10:00 am

Open Innovation: Tools to Solve Problems and Grow the Economy: At this event held by the Center for American Progress, exiting U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra will talk about his work pushing for open policies around innovation and how the government can stay on track - and open - moving forward.

3:30 - 5:30 pm

Mobile Disconnect: Can Mobile Solutions Really Combat Global Poverty?: This panel discussion hosted by the New America Foundation will look at the potential of mobile phones aiding international development and political activism, and also the limitations in their use.

6:00 - 10:00 pm

ICT4Drinks in DC: After the Mobile Disconnect event, attendees and others in the international development and technology sectors will meet to continue the discussion over drinks. If you want to talk mobiles in development and pick the brains of presenters and attendees, check this out.

6:30 pm

R Lightning Talks: Want to dip your toe into a bunch of different topics around R? This month’s R user group will feature seven lightning talks on topics like R’s spatial tools, version control in Git, and webscraping with R.

6:30 - 9:30 pm

Nerd Nite: Nerds in Love: Want to start your Saturday night by learning about the science of love, sexual attraction to objects, and frogs mixed with some drinks and live music? Then Nerd Nite at DC9 is your ticket.

This module allows you to update the status of ubercart orders in batch/bulk by selecting them, and selecting the status you want to change them to. There is an option for calling the mail hooks or not (informing your clients of the status change).

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Voting is now open for the 2012 election of at large directors of the Drupal Association. Two directors will be elected from among the ten candidates.

When we designed a new governance structure for the Drupal Association last year, we decided that most of the board is selected through a nominating committee with the goal to carefully balance many factors like needed skills and geographical and sector representation. However, it was also deemed important that we have directors chosen directly by the Drupal community to make sure that the community is always well-represented.

We're holding our first open community elections! Two community "at large" directors will be elected to the Drupal Association Board of Directors, and YOU can get to say who they are!

• Review their nomination profiles.
• Read the notes from the two all candidates' meetings at http://groups.drupal.org/node/207398.

Voting is open to all individuals who registered an account on drupal.org prior to January 18, 2012 and who have logged into that account at least once in the one-year period prior to February 3, 2012.

There is no need to register to vote. The voting system has been set up and prepopulated with the list of eligible voters.

• Log in to this site.
• Visit the https://association.drupal.org/2012-vote page. After clicking through, you will be asked to rank each of the eligible voters, from 1st (top choice) to 10th (last choice). You also need to check a box confirming you're an eligible voter. Make your selections and save the form. That's it!

The voting is done using the "Instant Runoff" voting method, powered by Decisions module. For more about this method of voting, please see this helpful YouTube video which explains it with post-it notes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA3_t-08Vr0

Yes! Before the close of voting, you can return to the voting form, cancel your previous vote, and submit a new vote.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012 is the last day of voting. Voting will close at 00:00 UTC on Wednesday, February 8, 2012.

When voting closes, a four-member elections team will review the results and post them to this site (association.drupal.org). Results will then be forwarded to the Drupal Association board for ratification.

The election team includes Angela Byron, DA board member; Cary Gordon, DA board member; Nedjo Rogers, DA advisory board member; and Thomas Svenson, Drupal community member who participated in the community process of planning the elections.

We had focused a bit too much on organizing the elections and left finalizing the actual voting system till the last minute. After several community members and Drupal Association staff pitched in, we got the elections system up about 3 hours after the planned opening of voting.

Despite the fact that the voting form lists far fewer, there are actually 270K Drupal.org accounts that fit the voter eligibility criteria. Valid accounts are added to the electorate list when they visit the Association website. These shenanigans are due to the Bakery module, our single-sign on solution, and the requirement to reconcile peoples' Association.drupal.org user IDs and their Drupal.org user IDs.

If you believe you are eligible to vote and try to vote and cannot or encounter some error, please post an issue to the Drupal Association issue queue, selecting "elections" as the component.

• The nominations announcement.
• The elections plan.
• All elections posts.

This module adds an edit-button to all products in the cart. Clicking the button brings users back to the product form, where they can change the cart-item's selected attributes and/or quantity.

Installation
Just enable the module. It will work out of the box.
Support's boost and core caching by using POST-requests.

Modules with similar functionality

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The day has come! Ubercart 3.0 is now LIVE!

Huge shout-outs to our project maintainer Lyle Mantooth (Island Usurper), 

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Drupal 7.11 and 6.23, maintenance releases which fix security vulnerabilities are now available for download.

Drupal 7.12 and 6.24 also fix other issues reported through the bug tracking system.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement, more information on the 6.x releases can be found in the Drupal 6.0 release announcement. Drupal 5 is no longer maintained, upgrading to Drupal 6 is recommended.

We have a security announcement mailing list, a history of all security advisories, and an RSS feed with the most recent security advisories. We strongly advise Drupal administrators to sign up for the list.

Drupal 7 and 6 include the built-in Update status module, which informs you about important updates to your modules and themes.

Both Drupal 7.x and 6.x branches are being maintained, so given enough bug fixes (not just bug reports) more maintenance releases will be made available, according to our monthly release cycle.

Drupal 7.11 only includes fixes for security issues. Drupal 7.12 also includes bugfixes. The full list of changes between the 7.10 and 7.12 releases can be found by reading the 7.12 release notes. A complete list of all bug fixes in the stable 7.x branch can be found in the git commit log.

Drupal 6.23 only includes fixes for security issues. Drupal 6.24 also includes bugfixes. The full list of changes between the 6.22 and 6.24 releases can be found by reading the 6.24 release notes. A complete list of all bug fixes in the stable 6.x branch can be found at git commit log.

Drupal 7.11 and 6.23 were released in response to the discovery of security vulnerabilities. Details can be found in the official security advisory:

• SA-CORE-2012-001

To fix the security problem, please upgrade Drupal.

We made two versions of both Drupal 7 and 6 available, so you can choose to only include security fixes (Drupal 7.11 and 6.23 respectively) or security fixes and bugfixes (Drupal 7.12 and 6.24). You can choose your preferred version. We are trying to make it easier and quicker to roll out security updates by making security-only releases available as well as ones with bugfixes included. We hope this helps you roll out the fixes as soon as possible. Read more details in the handbook.

The default.settings.php file was changed in Drupal 7.12, to add documentation about PDO attribute override capabilities that were added as a result of #1309278: Make PDO connection options configurable.

The robots.txt file was changed in Drupal 6.24 to block filter tips from search engines. The .htaccess and (default.)settings.php files were not changed in Drupal 6. Additionally, indexes were added to the node_comment_statistics and comment tables, for performance.

The Drupal 7.11 release is only an incremental release off of Drupal 7.9, instead of 7.10, so it is missing bug fixes introduced in 7.10. Discussion is ongoing at #1430404: Drupal 7.11 is missing all the bug fixes from Drupal 7.10.

Drupal 7.12 is also only compatible with Menu Block 7.x-2.3 and higher, and Internationalization (i18n) 7.x-1.4 and higher.

In Drupal 6.24, if you have the contributed user_delete module enabled on your site, the update will fail with a Cannot redeclare user_delete_access() error. An update of user_delete module is being worked on.

In Drupal 6.24 if you had locale module enabled earlier, but it is not currently turned on, the update will fail with Call to undefined function locale_inc_callback(). A fix is being worked on for Drupal core.

In Drupal 6.24 if you run your updates with Drush, you might experience duplicate entry errors in your system table. See the ongoing discussion at http://drupal.org/node/1425868

Elections for at large Drupal Association elections are kicking into high gear with two all candidates meetings this week before voting opens Friday.

Election candidates will participate in all candidates meetings are scheduled over the next two days (Wed., Thurs. or Fri., depending on your location). The first meeting, intended to work for people in the Asia and the Pacific, is scheduled for 01:00 UTC on Thursday. That's 5 PM PST on Wednesday for those in the US and Canada.

The second all candidates meeting at 17:00 UTC Thursday is timed for participants in Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

Then on Friday voting will open. Details on voting will be posted to association.drupal.org.

See the elections announcement for more on how to learn about the candidates.

We're proud to present a new design for the Mollom.com website.

We first launched the Mollom.com site in 2007. For more than four years, Mollom.com was using the same design. As we grew Mollom, we wanted to address some of the issues that we've been stewing over since our original design. We have been planning to redesign the site for over a year now but work on the Mollom web service and developing new Mollom products have always had a higher priority so we haven't found the time to complete the new design until now.

The old Mollom.com design that we used from 2007 to early 2012.

The new design is the first step in our plans to reorganize the website. We still have updates to make to the content of some pages, for example. Already, we think the new design is a fresh new change that improves usability.

Take a look at the new mollom.com, we hope you like it!

The new Mollom.com website design.

Oh snap! RC4 is out the door!

Why no RC3? pfft.. Who needs a RC3 when you have a perfectly good RC4! 

Ok ok... We'll admit we forgot to post a news article about RC3's release back in December. But we're making up for the lack of news posts with bug fixes and a promise to keep ubercart.org up to speed with our insanely active Drupal.org Project page. 

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Whether you're building a Delicious-style link archive or a personal portfolio site, Drupal's Link Field is a great solution for storing user-entered URLs as part of a node. If you want to display something more visual than a URL, however, things get tricky. Third-party thumbnail generation services can create screenshots of URLs, but most rely on clunky client-side scripts to layer the thumbnails on top of your design. The Pagepeeker module offers a slick alternative: it leverages an up-and-coming thumbnail service to generate site screenshots without any Javascript code.

Setting up the module is simple: create a Link field, then select the PagePeeker display formatter. You can choose from several thumbnail sizes, or pull in the 16x16 Favicon for the linked URL. If you're working with links that aren't stored in FieldAPI fields, the module also provides a helpful theme function. Just toss a URL at it, specify the size of thumbnail you want, and it will output a linked image tag.

As you’ve seen from the amount of mapping posts on this blog, we’re ramping up our investment in MapBox - our open source mapping tools backed by a cloud platform for sharing and embedding custom maps and beautiful worldwide maps. To capture this momentum and communicate about MapBox news, we just launched the MapBox Blog over at MapBox.com. Follow us there or via RSS and Twitter.

Moving forward, all MapBox news will be posted on MapBox.com instead of here. So if you’re following us on Twitter @developmentseed, now would be a good time to follow @mapbox too. Of course we will continue posting here on DevelopmentSeed.org/blog about our data visualization and open data strategy projects, Node.js development, and local technology events.

There are several interesting events happening this week in Washington, DC, from strategically using open data to improve response to climate change to mapping traditionally undocumented areas and slums to talking real-time data at Tech@State. See our roundup below for the events we’re hoping to attend this month, and find a full calendar over at DC Tech Events.

Noon to 1:30 pm

World Bank Climate Data Briefing: On the heels of opening up of a large climate dataset, the World Bank is hosting this discussion on how open data can help respond to climate change. This meeting is specifically focused on developers working with data and data visualizations, and climate change experts. Alex and Eric will be there to talk about the benefits of open data and how to release it in usable ways.

7:00 - 9:00 pm

GeoDC Meetup: This month’s meetup will look at mapping slums and other un ddocumented areas, with speakers presenting on the techniques they’ve successfully used to map areas in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, East Jerusalem, Cite Soleil, and more. Really looking forward to this one.

7:00 - 9:00 pm

CocoaHeads Meetup: This meetup will feature two presentations from Apple developers and give you a chance to meet and talk with local developers building on the platform.

8:00 am - 5:00 pm

Tech@State: Real-Time Awareness: Access to real-time data and the ability to quickly process and analyze can tremendously help when responding to disasters and breaking events. Tech@State will look at how to deliver real-time data and use it effectively. Alex and I will be here, specifically interesting in talking about data visualizations.

8:30 am - 4:00 pm

Tech@State Unconference: Following Friday’s event, this will be a hands on dive into using technology to help collect, filter, analyze, and visualize real-time data. Check it out if you want to work with some real data and code.

The final session selections for DrupalCon Denver were announced this week. DrupalCon will take place March 19-23, 2012. Get your tickets soon so that you don't miss out on over 100 sessions across 8 tracks! This year we have added tracks specifically for Non-profit, Government & Education, in addition to Community, Commerce, Mobile, Design & User Experience, Business & Strategy, Coding & Development, Site Building, and Core Conversations.

Conference Dates:
March 19 - Pre-conference trainings -- over 16 from beginners to advanced + API Hack-a-thon

March 20 - 22 - Three complete days of 104 sessions starting with Keynotes: Dries Buytaert, Founder of Drupal and Drupal Project lead, Mitchell Baker, chairperson for the Mozilla Foundation, and Luke Wroblewski, digital product leader coming to talk about mobile.

March 22 - Drupal Means Business - included with conference registration to learn how to integrate Drupal into your business.

March 23 - All-day Contribution Sprint -- one of the largest anywhere!

Plus, parties, ski trips, networking, contests and more, all for the $350 conference fee! Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for helping this to remain one of the lowest cost open source conferences around.

Get your ticket to DrupalCon Denver today. What are you waiting for? We want to see you in Denver!

P.S. Conference registration is $350 until February 21 or when tickets are gone! Early registration helps us to plan the conference and keep our costs low by only ordering what is needed. A limited number of 1/2-priced student tickets are still available.

Follow @drupalcon on Twitter or find us on Facebook.

Like at previous DrupalCon's, I'm co-organizing a Core Conversations track at DrupalCon Denver.

The Core Conversations track is a place for people actively working on Drupal or Drupal.org to meet and plan the future of Drupal. Each session is either two 15 minute or one 30 minute presentation, followed by 30 minutes of discussion.

I know a lot of you contribute to Drupal or want to start contributing. If so, Core Conversations are a unique opportunity to present in front of key Drupal contributors, and to make the case for why we need to do more of A or B (e.g. authoring experience improvements, API overhauls, etc.). We need UX conversations, performance conversations, feature conversations, etc. Please share your ideas with the world through Drupal core.

If you have ideas for Drupal core, and you are attending DrupalCon, I suggest that you submit a proposal as soon as possible. The deadline is February 1st so don't wait too long. To get your ideas flowing, here are our conversations from Drupalcon London and Drupal Chicago.