Drupal

Not-quite-good-enough technologies evolve.

Flanking moves must be made into uncontested area

Open source disruptor Linux takes on leader, Microsoft

Product improves to serve more demanding markets

When the "not quite good enough" technology displaces the leader

ECM Players compete in a $4 Billion market

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Solar technology is being used in small, undemanding applications, competing against non-consumption

The guerrilla must not mimic the leader

Is Drupal a Disruptive Technology?

Drupal's founder, Dries Buytaert, in his keynote at the 2010 San Francisco Drupalcon, asked the rhetorical question: Is Drupal a disruptive technology?

Product improves to serve more demanding markets. Image: Sun Blogs.

Features are fully formed, preconfigured functionality that can be "plugged in" to Drupal.

Over the weekend we launched a Feature server at http://downloads.pingv.com.

Currently it has but one simple Feature: an initial release of "Photo Essay," for posting images inline in the text of an essay. We hope some people may find it useful. Or informative. Or inspiring to go make their own Features.

We see a bright future for Features. As strategists and designers, we embrace systems and practices that increase the speed and efficiency of development. Features are a great way for people to be able to mix and match components to build sites to suit their needs, without having to install and configure everything by hand, and without needing to embrace a whole website strategy inherent in a full-blown Distribution.

This is a new area of growth and rapid change in the Drupal community. It's very exciting.

Many Drupal themers will be daunted by the changes in Drupal 7. But we're excited about the new power.

With fields now in core, if you weren't CCK-prolific, you have more theme components to account for by default.

RDFa is here to stay. Robots will love it. You should just stay out of the way.

Regions contain the content area, sidebars, footer, etc.

Every major release has introduced significant changes to the core API. There's no backwards compatibility between major Drupal releases; you can't run Drupal 7 modules on a Drupal 6 site, for example. In fact, if you tried you'd likely end up with the white screen of death. This willingness to let go of past thinking and old code has allowed Drupal to be as awesome as it is today.

For theming, fortunately, the changes have usually been rather incremental — a short checklist of minor changes to themes to get them working in the newer Drupal. And none was as radical or challenging as the change from Drupal 4.5's xtemplate theming engine to the phpTemplate engine that emerged around Drupal 4.6 and became part of Drupal 4.7's core. That "upgrade" actually required total reimplementation. You simply could not just tweak an xtemplate-powered theme into a phpTemplate-powered theme. Thankfully, since then it's been a much easier road for theme upgrades.

That is, until now.

The Drupalchix gathered for lunch at DrupalCon DC 2009. An impressive bunch of people!

Kate, co-founder of PINGV and collaborator since 2003.

On this Ada Lovelace Day, I wracked my brain for someone to write about, and came up blank — not because I couldn't think of anyone, but because I can't pick out the one woman in technology or science who's exceptional in some way, because there are so many. So I'm writing about a group of women who who mostly don't know each other but are united by a project that's dear to them, and to me: Drupal.

Meet the Drupalchix

The Drupalchix gathered for lunch at DrupalCon DC 2009. An impressive bunch of people!

The wonders of working with the Skinr Module

1) The .info file for skinr blocks. The label will be the option presented; the class will be the class applied.

2) The css class that would be applied if you select "2-column plain" in the dropdown pictured below

3) By selecting NineSixty grid values, we can position blocks on the fly within a given region.

Skinr allows us to choose a template and apply classes when we create a content type.

When it comes time to theme a site you are often working within a tight time-frame. Functionality is starting to come together, representative content is here and there; generally things are in a pretty fluid state. Or perhaps you are doing rapid prototyping, and need to have some flexibility to change your layout on the fly without mucking about in template files or stylesheets. Whether you are themeing a moving target, or riding the wave of a prototype, you need tools that allow you to do your job as efficiently as possible.

Enter: Skinr

The wonders of working with the Skinr Module