I was recently working on an older Drupal site that hadn't been updated in a while. It used lots of contributed modules and we were unsure whether these had any custom hacks in them. So, I needed a way to find what version of the module was in use, and then pulling down to relevant version of that module in a format suitable to use in a "diff" tool.

So, I did a couple fancy little things and wanted to share them for others to enjoy:

Finding the Id string

Many Drupal modules have an "Id" string in the top of the file. The CVS system replaces these with some information about the file when they are checked out of CVS. This gives you an automatically updated set of information about the file you are using. So, if we can find files named .module, grab the first 3 lines of those files, search for the string Id, and output the results into a file then we've tackled the question "What version of this module do I have?

It's September 1, and that means that the active development for the next release of Drupal is now moving into the bug-fixing phase. As Dries says:

Thanks to all the hard work we've done in the past three months, the next version of Drupal will have a lot of great improvements, including an installer, requirement checking for modules, a reorganization of the administration pages and file structure, a light-weight CCK, inclusion of jQuery and much more. We're also working on a new core theme (no guarantees it'll make it in time). With all that, I feel that, finally, the stars have aligned, and we're ready to call the next Drupal version, "Drupal 5.0.0". Thanks to all our contributors, Drupal 5.0.0 promises to be an amazing release!

IBM's Internet Technology Group has written a very nice series of articles on Drupal, the latest of which gives a fabulous introduction to the basics of Drupal.

This article gives you an overview of the Drupal content management system. We'll describe the common building blocks and discuss some common assumptions of the Drupal approach. It is helpful to understand core concepts and basic Drupal terminology as you go through this article and beyond.

I sat in on the so you have this crazy idea session, where community sites were the topic. The room divided up into working groups -- legal issues, maintaining and sustaining and growing a community, starting a community, and technology to use. I sat in on the first two groups. Very interesting.

At the end, reps for each group presented their findings. The tech group listed Drupal as one of the top tools to use for a robust community site (along with Plone) -- which, I suppose, is an obvious result, especially as the BlogHer site is powered by Drupal, but it was nice to hear, especially since I wasn't there to evangelize it.

The buzz on BlogHer is booming. I think we got the main BlogHer site moved to a scalable multi-server setup just in the nick of time. Kudos to our hosting partners on the BlogHer website project, Firebright, for their hard work! The new setup is humming!

Via BlogHer Contributing Editor Jeneane Sessum, I've learned that also speaking of (not at, unfortunately) BlogHer is Shelley Powers, who's back blogging on three blogs (so far). (Her old flagship, Burningbird.com, now seems to showcase some of her beautiful photography.) Shelley has noticed the incredible growing sponsor list on BlogHer's home page. The sidebar full of sponsor logos indeed has shot roots down deep 'below the fold' of the pages. (In fact, the sheer weight of the logo images was becoming a server load issue on the former hosting configuration -- a 'good problem to have,' to be sure, but still something that kept the server working harder than anticipated.)