In an attempt to point to some of the great things that are available using Features, I tried to look for a directory of Feature Servers. Sadly, Google was not very helpful. After some digging, I was able to locate a page on the OpenAtrium Community site called Distributed Feature Servers. This points to many of the other pages I was able to find via search.

Utilmately I created a wiki page on the Packaging & Deployment group of groups.drupal.org, which seems to be one of the hottest places to discuss Features.

Directory of Public Features Servers wiki page

Currently, there is tons of info about how to create your own Features Server, but not much about where all the publicly available features servers are located. If you know of others, please go edit the wiki page on groups.drupal.org or leave them in the comments here.

This is your moment, you've decided to step up and make a job board for your local Drupal User Group. You spend some time thinking about everything you'll need, including the job listings themselves. You'll want to gather the standard info, like job title and job description, salary, experience, the works. When it comes to gathering company info, your instincts make you take a few extra moments to plan.

If you think about this from the perspective of the person posting 6 or 7 jobs, she would end up having to type (or at least copy and paste) the business' contact information each time. If you think about collecting 3 or 4 fields for each business, then that's about 20 extra form fields for the user to fill out. If she then decides to change the info, let's say she made a typo, she now must click through each edit screen 6 or 7 times. That amounts to hundreds of clicks and several hundred repeated keystrokes.

There must be a better way. A nodereference can help your users.

Once finished, you will have two nodes, one for a job and another for a company, and yet you will still display the information about the company inside the job listing.

By the end of this tutorial, you should understand what a nodereference is for, how to create and use one, and finally, how to use template files to theme the output of the nodereference and get the most out of the relationship.

Sometimes in our lives, we all have pain, we all have sorrow. And sometimes we also have to launch Drupal sites into the wild blue yonder. It's during these times that we separate the grown-ups from the n00bs, and we see how well our site performs under heavy load. Many of us didn't need to worry about speed, page size, and server load in our younger years when we were building sites for Uncle Don and Aunt Sue, but eventually you get that big client, and you need some help.

Testing your site's performance

There are several ways to test, and a few metrics to acquaint yourself with. Not all metrics are created equal, but all of them are important at one time or other. In Part I of this post, you will be reading about testing with the Apache Benchmark tool on the command line.

If you didn't get a chance to check out our live coverage of Dries' Keynote, you can also see about 100 pics I snapped during the session.

Dave A Ingram also brought the youngest Drupaller - just 3 weeks old! He is dave.ingram on drupal.org, and he comes from Gainesville, FL

Looks like some MySQL data export/import operations can fail for anonymous users. I just did a data dump from my local development server to the live site and all the comments by users who aren't logged in were not showing up. Gone. Missing. It turns out MySQL was trying to stick the autoincrement value in the `uid` field in the place of the supplied `0`.

Here at Do it with Drupal and it's snowing!

Today's challenge: your editors just handed you almost 200 taxonomy terms to add to the site, and you don't have the time or inclination to hit the taxonomy/n/add/term page for the next 2 hours or so... AWK to the rescue!

Doing a simple CSV export of the term_data and term_hierarchy tables, you've got a pretty simple structure:

term_data
tid,vid,name,description,weight

term_hierarchy
tid,parent

What you'll ultimately generate here is a file that stores everything you need to know about importing these terms via a CSV - the term names, the weights, good IDs, and the TID of the parents.

2048,#the current value of the sequences for term_data
term,34,Blogs,#a helper line
x,1,Drupal,All about Drupal,-5
x,1,Modules,Ways to extend Drupal,-4
x,1,Themes,Making your install pretty,-3
term,35,News,#a second helper line
x,1,International,,0
x,1,Local,,0
x,1,Hyperlocal,,0

In this file, we've got 3 types of data:

1. The starting value for sequences
2. The id of the parent term for the next several rows, starting with the word "term" followed by the TID and the plain English name just to help us get organized
3. The new terms, with an "x" where the new TIDs will be placed, and the VID, Description and Weight all filled out.

When developing Drupal themes, there is one bit of code you type over and over again:

sites/all/themes/blueprint/images/whatever.jpg

Where images/whatever.jpg could be a css file, or other file, but is normally an image.

However, since clean URLs in Drupal appear to make fake directories, the web browser thinks your image is located in:

node/345/sites/all/themes/blueprint/images/whatever.jpg

When it’s not. Luckily Drupal has tools to help you in this case.