There has been a lot of hand waving about the semantic web, RDF, and Drupal. This is good, and it is important for there to be excitement about the possibilities that this opens to us. Now the first concrete plans are being laid and the first patches are being written and evaluated. If you’ve ever wondered about this semantic web business, or if you thought microformats were a good idea, or if you’ve been secretly (or publicly) coding your own RDF tools for Drupal you’ll want to be a part of this conversation.
A lot of hard issues will have to be solved. XHTML document designers (ie web application builders and Drupal developers) are not accustomed to working with XML namespaces. The inclusion of RDFa is wholly dependent on the theme layer so it is important to build tools that handle this without further burdening Drupal themers. The basic data storage mechanisms in Drupal are all based on relational databases, not RDF, thus it will fall on tool builders and module authors to ascribe semantic meaning to data and to actively use the new tools to generate RDFa markup.
Furthermore, the addition of RDFa and supporting technologies like GRDDL introduce very new and somewhat complex workflows that greatly depart from the server->browser lifecycle of our current XHTML documents. Drupallers will have to learn about this in order to understand and utilize the potential benefits that RDFa can bring.
Here are some places to watch and participate in the coming months as Drupal makes this very important transition:
It's nice to see hard work, persistence, team effort, and collaboration pay off. This year three Packt Publishing awards went to Drupal. First, Earl Miles (merlinofchaos, father of Views) was honored as Most Valued Person for the Drupal project, a title he sure has earned. Then, on Wednesday, Packt announced that Drupal had won the award for Best PHP Based Open Source CMS. This comes with a $2,000 prize that the Drupal Association will be sure to put to good use. Now, today, Drupallers can smile happy because Drupal also won the Best Overall Open Source CMS category, along with $5,000 in prize money. Wow! Two years in a row for that one.
See below for the code to put a Digg widget (for the Drupal.org story) on your site:
On December 12, 2008, I'll be in New Orleans to talk about the exciting world of Drupal Search. In a first-of-its-kind event, the Lullabots have organized a "large-scale, 3-day learning event" that will bring together some of Drupal's most sought after speakers, as well as a number of other prominent internet personalities and luminaries. I'm looking forward to meeting some of the speakers who aren't necessarily known as Drupal rockstars (meaning they did something else to get famous):
- Chris Pirillo (Gnomedex, Lockergnome.com)
- Tara Hunt (Citizen Agency, HorsePigCow)
- Brian Oberkirch (Brianoberkirch.com)
- Lane Becker (GetSatisfaction.com)
- Heather Champ (Director of Community at Flickr)
My session will focus on practical solutions for common problems encountered when building Drupal sites. I'll look at core search as well as some of the other solutions available (like the ApacheSolr module), and explain why we can expect more (and get it!) from Drupal search. If you're going to be there, and have any requests or questions, I'd love to hear those as well.
Many thanks to my employer, Acquia, for being a sponsor of Do it with Drupal, and for sending me and my colleague Gábor Hojtsy as speakers.
Drupal people: get some coffee, grab a seat, log out of IRC, and find 16 minutes to watch this video. Wordpress is leading the way in terms of posting and administering content, and we'd better be taking notes. The bits that I'm particularly jonesing over are the drag and drop widgets, the content administration dashboard, and the instant installation of plugins and themes.
My favorite quote from the video:
I think that people ... downloading things to their computer and uploading them to a server is completely worthless. You're a fake bottleneck.
Drupal has been attracting some really great writers recently, and I have a couple of serious Drupal crushes going at the moment. The first is the blog of Shelley Powers, author of a whole stack of tech books published by O'Reilly. Shelley wrote the first book I ever bought on RDF and has thoroughly documented her initial Drupal experiences. The second is the fantastic site of Sacha Chua whose writing melts my tech heart and gives me the digital butterflies. These two, and many other recent newcomers, have made Planet Drupal very rewarding in the past weeks. And before anyone starts getting jealous about my new blog loves, I promise to still be faithful to my romances of the past (I'm winking flirtatiously at you, Nick Lewis!)
Great job, Dmitri!
Working with Drupal and other open source projects has introduced me to some really brilliant and wonderful people. That's the part of contributing that has been the most worthwhile.
The Wordpress 2.6 Beta 1 is now available. Hats off to the Wordpress team. Here are some features that we should have in Drupal, too:
- A new and improved image editing dialog that offers lots of control over the images in your posts: This is interesting and worth checking out. Whoever makes it easy to post images and integrate them into posts will attract massive numbers of users. Drupal lags here.
- Better SSL support for the Admin: It should be easy for the (non-technical) admin to have either all of a Drupal site or just the admin and login portions go over https.
- The ability to move wp-config.php out of your web root: This would be settings.php for Drupal and (optionally) moving it out of the webroot is probably a "Good Thing"
