Dries predicted that there will be at least 10 books about Drupal published in 2008. Good news, he might've been right.

After Drupal 5 Themes (which, I know, was released in december last year) Packt Publishing just released two new books:

• Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6
• Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce

There's reviews to these books coming these days.

Also Packt will be releasing Learning Drupal 6 Module Development in June and O'Reilly a Drupal cookbook.

NexT Cultural Society from Romania decided to convert their original static website to something more dynamic and manageable. I was in charge of implementing the new version using, of course, my platform of choice. Drupal. :) You can view the result at http://www.nextproject.ro/ It's still in beta and there's a couple of small things to fix.

What it uses:

• Image and Imagecache
• Fckeditor
• CCK
• Localizer
• Sifr
• Webform
• A custom module (being contributed these days) to extend the menu (to allow specifying a CSS class or id and to decide what user roles see it)
• A custom module to archive the current festival pages and create a blank structure for a new one

After one year of development we are ready to release Drupal 6.0 to the world. Thanks to the tireless work of the Drupal community, over 1,600 issues have been resolved during the Drupal 6.0 release cycle. These changes are evident in Drupal 6's major usability improvements, security and maintainability advancements, friendlier installer, and expanded development framework. Further, from bug fix to feature request, these issues follow-through on the Drupal project's continued commitment to deliver flexibility and power to themers and developers.

Wohooo!

Scribbish is a theme by Jeffrey Allan Hardey available for Typo, Mephisto and Wordpress. Now, thanks to me, it's also available for Drupal.

Its layout standardizes on a simple xhtml structure, blog entries are formatted using the hAtom microformat specification, and styles are separated into individual files which are included in the correct order, making it easier to control the cascade and to figure out ‘what-goes-where’.

Features:

• uses the hAtom microformat specification
• minimalist style
• easy to modify!

It's available here: http://drupal.org/project/scribbish.

What is the widow problem you might ask?

in typesetting, a widow is a single word on a line by itself at the end of a paragraph and is considered bad style.

From Shaun Inman.

I'm going to present two methods of avoiding the widow problem on your website, each with it's own advantages and disadvantages.

1. The client side approach

   Using Javascript we can manipulate the headings after the page has loaded and add a non breaking space between the last two words of the content. There's a jQuery plugin which does this. I modified it to solve some bugs and created a module which uses it. It applies the transformations to elements which match one of the following rules:

   • #content h1.title
   • #content h2.node-title a

   It's available here: http://drupal.org/project/widont

   Advantages: easy to install, most of the time works out of the box.

   Disadvantages: it doesn't work when Javascript is disabled, on some themes who use different classes for the title headings it will fail.

2. The server side approach

   You'll need to know how to edit the files from the theme you're using. I'm going to assume that you're using Garland, the default Drupal theme, but the instructions can be applied to every Drupal theme out there.

The iBook has been brought from the dead thanks to some kind souls, Amedeo and Viorel. And of course there's a stack of work left from the two months hiatus I was forced to take.

Sorry for not responding to the comments and to the emails. I'll get back to the people who wrote me in a couple of days.

Here's some updates:

1. I have finally decided on a thesis subject. Details will be left for the moment, but it will be a web based application built with Drupal (of course), Python, Ruby and Solr / Lucene. Web 2.0 and all the buzzword yadda yadda.
2. I'm learning Ruby because of 1.
3. I'm investigating Solr, Twisted and EventMachine.
4. I've built a Solr php class which works with php 4 as well (the one on the Solr page is php 5 only). I might release it if the people from work allow me.
5. I've resumed work on the Simpy extension. Some first steps were taken into developing a osx dashboard widget. Right now there's latest items and a semi functional search.
6. Lazy registration for Drupal 5 is almost done.
7. I've ported memcached integration module to Drupal 4.7. I'll release it this week unless the other guy who also did this beats me to it. :)

Today I figured that the module I developed a while ago and never completely finished rotted enough on my hard drive.

The lazy registration module implements lazy registration for Drupal.

It can create accounts automatically, purge them after a period of time, allow users to make them permanent by either email confirmation or a simple edit to the account.

The account is created the first time the user tries to access an area which requires authentication. There are two ways of handling a user trying to access a members only area:
- Automatically create a temporary account
- Display a login form with the option of continuing with a temporary account.

Users can confirm the account in two ways:
- By editing their account information
- By email confirmation to make sure people don't enter bogus email addresses

Email confirmation is still buggy.

Drupal announcement is here and the project page is here.

This project was sponsored by Creditlink.

Just a brief note that this website is now served to you from a virtual Debian server running thanks to Amazon's EC2 service.

For more details check out Elastic8.com where Gremlin, friend and sysadmin, writes about using EC2 as a web server.

Now, if only I had time to modify image.module to use S3 for storage...

I took some time these days to finish the Creditlink website which was lying around in the dreadful "90% done" state for some time.

Nothing extraordinary here. It's built with Drupal (of course), uses aggregator and aggregator2 and had at some point a nice bulk edit node thingy I've built for it (which ended up not being used).

The thing that ate most of my time and nerves for the past two months is finally online, in beta form. Rez.ro offers the biggest database of residential properties around Romania plus news on the subject.

I'll come back with some info on how Drupal was used to build the website.