Planet Drupal

Drupal has some pretty amazing features to handle aliases and aliasing. They are also commonly misunderstood. This article is an attempt to shed some light on how URLs and aliases and redirects work in Drupal which, with the help of some contributed modules, automatically turn a Drupal site into a TinyURL-like service.

It All Starts With the Menu System

Most modules in Drupal have a hook into the menu system which allows them to declare paths to which they will respond. For example, the node module's hook to the menu system allows it to respond to requests for "/node/".

Clean URLs vs. ... Dirty? URLs

Drupal responds to the "q" parameter from the URL. http://growingventuresolutions.com/?q=node/1 tells Drupal to serve up the page for "node/1". Ever since about 2003 Drupal has used features of the web server so that http://growingventuresolutions.com/?q=node/1 can be "rewritten" to http://growingventuresolutions.com/node/1. This is the so-called "Clean URL" which removes the main query parameter from every Drupal page request. Sure, there are still some page requests like for the second page in a list of nodes but they are much less common.

Ever since Drupal 6.x, if your web server supports clean urls then they will be enabled during installation. This is great.

Internal Path vs. Path Alias

We recently helped out with the development of a pretty neat multiple vendor e-commerce website. In working on it much of the code was custom but we were able to build a novel, generic per user content type quota system. Each user can purchase credits towards their quota, which allows them to submit new content.

About LolliShops - Multi Shop Marketplace

The easiest way to describe LolliShops is an upscale boutique version of Etsy, built in Drupal. Lollishops provides a turnkey solution for artistic individuals who make jewelry, clothing and art by hand. Anyone can sign up and setup a personalized online store in minutes. It focuses on the Frou Frou market (if you're not familiar with it, it's probably best described by the site). So far, LolliShops has thousands of individual stores. The theme and products shown on the home page give a great sense of the intended audience. Vendors on the site purchase the ability to sell their products on the site with 3 different selling arrangements. Two of these arrangements limit the number of products that they can create, requiring a quota system.

About the User Quota Module

Of course the first thing I did when looking to build that quota functionality was to compare all of the existing solutions. I posted a summary of my research into the Duplicate Modules Hall of Shame group for others to benefit from the research. It seemed like there was no way to do exactly what we need with the existing modules, so I set to work building a new module.

Hello, world! I'm Steve (aka garbanzito on d.o), growing my Drupal skills for over a year, and a team member at Growing Venture Solutions since mid-October. This is my first Planet Drupal post.

Part of my background is in print publishing, so I took on a particular challenge with the Druplicon: for various reasons, the standard Druplicon won't work well at tiny sizes, so I developed this variant for use as a glyph in printed text (on the order of 2 mm for a "bullet"—even smaller than the favicon).

I used solid color instead of shading to avoid losing detail such as the face among the halftone dots. I also exaggerated details for better recognition at small sizes and to adjust for the properties of printing presses. I chose to fill most of the drop with solid color to make it a darker mark on the page, more like a typical bullet. The result is not intended to be "correct" at a larger size. The glyph is a single composite curve for cleaner scaling and transparency in PostScript usage, and its color is 100% Black in the CMYK color mode.

The image shown is for display—for production use, start with the PDF file attached (editable Illustrator CS2). The design is approximately 200x230 mm (about 100 times the intended size, depending on your usage). GPL2 license embedded.

I've got presentations and Drupal socializing on the brain.

Last week I gave a presentation to the Western Region Alliance for Community Media. I provided my standard Introduction to Drupal presentation and collaborated with Brian Hiatt (of CivicPixel) and Ann Theis (of Deproduction) who provided the perspective of using Drupal as a tool to help run a Public/Educational/Governmental television station (PEG). Brian has a lot more insight into the importance of the conference to Drupal and of Drupal to PEG. One comment he had is:

There are soo many different PEG technology/open source projects being developed at the moment, but very few (if any) that are being deployed at more than a handful of stations. There is a lot of curiosity tempered with fear over these solutions as they stand now.

That sounds pretty familiar. It's the classic adoption process and I think that the Denver Open Media folks are doing a lot of great stuff to help promote a sound station philosophy based in Open Source.

Eclipse and OpenID At Denver Drupal User's Group

Tonight was the Denver Drupal User Group meeting where we had a solid presentation from Michael Graves of JanRain. Al Steffen of pingVision got us all up to speed using Eclipse to increase our productivity.

DrupalCon DC 2009 - Token, Security, BOFs, oh my!

My experience with Mollom has been highly enjoyable. I used to get lots of spam comments on various sites I run which I blocked and cleaned manually. Then I installed the CAPTCHA module which helped a bit, but was annoying to users, let past some bots, and wasn't entirely accessible. I installed Mollom when it entered Beta a few months ago. The concept of only presenting a CAPTCHA when the content is likely spam really appeals to me. It's better for users and admins alike (as long as you don't mind shipping your data off to someone else's servers...which I don't).

Busy Summer for Mollom

This has been an exciting season for Mollom. They started the Summer (Northern-Hemisphere Summer anyway) by hiring Wim Leers who proceeded to build and document lots of tools which were also released to the community. Quite a nice contribution to the community both by Wim and Mollom.

Perhaps most interesting to folks, though will be a little data I've gathered about Mollom (I figured why let them have all the fun of inspecting my data - I'll look at a bit of theirs!)

Of course I'm not talking about cracking into their site to steal data, just using the data provided on their front page and a little OpenOffice.org fun to make a graph of their growth in terms of number of sites and spam blocked. It's kind of surprising to me that the two lines are shaped so similarly - then again maybe it shouldn't be.

Out of Beta - Still Accessible as "Mollom Free"

We're just under 3 weeks away from DrupalCamp Colorado 2008 which will be held July 26th and 27th. We're accepting more presentations and already have several great sessions to vote on.

I want to highlight a few notable things about this DrupalCamp.

Remote Presenters Welcome

Thanks to the work of Kevin Reynen we are welcoming remote presenters to the camp. If you can't make it to Colorado but want to share your message, this is your opportunity.

Great Sponsors and Prizes

I recently saw a comment about Pathauto and started writing a really long reply that seemed more valuable to share here.

Basically one of the questions people have is "Why should I use Pathauto? If I don't care about SEO is there any other reason?"

This is a valid question to me. There is some indication that users don't look at the URL bar. During the Usability testing at UMN we never noticed people looking at the URL bar in the eye-tracking data. But some people certainly do look at the URL bar - people who like "hackable urls" do

Hackable URLs

I use it extensively to create "hackable URLs" that are valuable to a user. A "hackable url" or "index alias" is the feature on a site where you have a post and then users can remove the title down to the previous URL element and get the other posts from that month, one more layer for the year, and one more for that user since forever. See - fun! I even made a movie about it:

Site Credibility Prior to the Click

I frequently get URLs sent to me via email and IM. Compare these two URLs:

http://drupalcampcolorado.org/node/38

vs.

http://drupalcampcolorado.org/content/our-sponsors

Which one are you more likely to click on? Which one helps you understand what content you are going to get before you even get there?

Easy to Remember URLs

Check the presentation formatted version of this page.

Greg Knaddison

Growing Venture Solutions

2008/07/27 14:00

DrupalCamp Colorado

The Pathauto module is a rather popular one for Drupal. In November Pathauto 5.x-2.0 was released which included a restructuring of several features to add new features and enhance scalability. There have been almost 50 bugfixes and features added between 5.x-2.0 and 5.x-2.1. See the release page for full details.

I wanted to blog about this for a few reasons.

Pathauto Configuration/UI Changes

First, there was a change to the UI in the way that feed aliases are handled to better support the use of Views for taxonomy feeds. I've udpated this in the upgrade guide (which, especially for folks upgrading from 5.x-1 or 4.7, should be required reading). There were also several improvements to the UI to simplify it and help people figure out which token is the right one to use. This was a major problem with the 2.0 release so I hope that the 2.1 will be easier to use. There is still room for improvements but...

Comaintainer and Maintenance Status

Second, this release is likely to be the last for a while. Now that this 5.x branch is more stable I plan to spend some time working on the 6.x branch to get a stable release of that. I'd also love a co-maintainer which mikeryan has offered to help which would take the module full circle to its author. I'm broadcasting this here to be a responsible maintainer given that I have less bandwidth in the coming months to dedicate to Pathauto because...

Prediction Market Module

Drupal Project Module History and Future

The Drupal Project Module is one of the oldest non-core modules that is still in active development and use on sites around the world. The core developers of Drupal are committed to using this module as the controller for "projects" hosted on Drupal itself. There are many people who like Drupal and want to use it to create a system for hosting projects. Two such projects that I'm aware of include the QCodo QForge and the future plans for JQuery.com as mentioned in the Lullabot podcast 21: interview with JQuery founder John Resig.

Help the Project Module Move Forward

Because the Project module is so old, it did things in ways that are not standard for Drupal. This makes it relatively unpopular for use on other sites as it lacks several important features. There are several particularly nasty bugs and Derek Wright (dww) has signed up to maintain Project module and tackle these bugs so that the Project module will get more attention and use around the world. More attention means more improvements, which means that one of the key pieces of Drupal's infrastructure can really start to shine and enable development rather than being a "I guess we have to use it" kind of feature.

So, if you use Drupal you should want to help the project module. It's important. It's a feature that lots of people want, and it has someone interested in making it better. Derek has setup a page explaining this in more detail and you are encouraged to give him more money. Read more about his plan and follow the link to donate. As of writing, Derek is at a little over $1000. That's a great start, but still pretty far from the desired end point.

Growing Venture Solutions, LLC gave funds thing to help with the process and to make sure that this module moves forward. Won't you do the same?