Drupal Planet

I had the great pleasure of attending my first DrupalCon this week.  Held in downtown San Francisco at the Moscone Center, it was my opinion that this was Drupal's "homecoming".  While Drupal wasn't "born" in San Francisco, it seems to be the city that has the strongest following.  The attendance numbers didn't lie - I'm pretty sure they broke 3,000 geeks attendees.  I made this trip solo -- I only knew three people that were going, and those three were only acquaintances I'd met via email/IM a few months before.  When I left, I didn't come home with "leads" or "contacts", I came home with friends and role models, many of whom I plan on staying in touch with.  I met most of the authors of the Drupal books I've read, associated faces to the podcasts and RSS feeds I subscribe to, and I even had the opportunity to quickly say thanks to Dries and shake his hand.

For those who didn't know, archive.org has made the sessions available for download, so be sure to check those out.  Read on for my "takeaways" from DCSF2010.

While working on tweaking performance for a client, I was able to shave 7 seconds of PHP execution time time off the homepage load. The cause was eventually tracked down to calls out to TinyURL for every node being rendered. The core problem came from the service links module. We were able to fix it by disabling short URL's in the module, but the problem has been addressed in the current pre-release 2.x branch by using caching. We might have ended up discovering this by disabling module after module one at a time, but that would have taken forever.

The Views Bulk Operations module (a.k.a. VBO), is a godsend for busy Drupal site administrators. Don't just take my word for it - Lullabot wrote a chapter about it in O'Reilly's Using Drupal, it's included in the Open Atrium Drupal distribution, and it's even used on Drupal.org! Out of the box, VBO does a lot to streamline the things you do everyday, so that you spend less time doing them. A perfect example is bulk content moderation - with a few clicks of the mouse, you can mark a huge amount of comments as spam. You can even enable batch processing with a single click of a mouse so that you can literally do thousands of these without timing out.

VBO was attractive enough that we decided to offload the bulk/batch operations of Node Gallery to VBO. Integration for the most part was surprisingly easy - VBO "speaks" in Drupal Actions, so by writing actions, we were writing integration with VBO.

There's one undocumented case where VBO can be used that was critical for us. Most VBO actions you will find perform one action to a set of nodes, one at a time. Often times, that one action is to set a value of some sort on said nodes. In the case of Node Gallery, we wanted to be able to assign different weight values (used for sorting) to a bunch of nodes. The key here is that we aren't assigning a value of '2' to all selected node's weight, we want to assign a weight of 2 to node #1, 3 to node #2, 8 to node #3, and so on. While not straightforward, it's definitely achievable.

Took a fair amount of googling around to find the solution to this one. With the Node Gallery 3.x branch, we needed a way to quickly add an image to an existing gallery. We could have displayed the whole node form, but there's a lot of things on that form that we can just use the defaults for 99% of the time. We need just three fields filled in: Title, Caption, and the imagefield itself.