I was very proud to participate in the official DrupalCon Pre-Conference Training again this year. I decided to repeat my Intro to Drupal Theming class, especially since drupal 7 was such new territory. Our class size was limited to 20 students, which sold out in advance of the conference.

The Philanthropy & Nonprofit Leadership Center at Rollins College's Crummer Graduate School of Business is having Ryan Price from DrupalEasy as a guest speaker at their Winter Park Campus. Here are details about the event.

Leaders Series: Free Software Tools for Nonprofits

Effective technology is absolutely essential to efficient and successful
nonprofits. Technology, software, and IT support are integral to back
office functions and engaging clients, donors, volunteers and the
community. Take advantage of technology that can reduce your operating
cost and increase engagement and outreach with clients and donors.

Take advantage of and learn tips about:

• Google and Google Docs
• Facebook, Twitter, YouTube
• RSS Feeds, Podcast Feeds, Blogs
• Drupal Content Management
• Popular Open Source Projects

Date: Friday, January 14, 2011

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

In the most recent DrupalEasy Podcast we talked about a few sessions we're looking forward to at DrupalCon DC. Here are my picks and a few reasons why I'm interested.

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!