Drupal 6.25 released

Drupal 6.25, a maintenance release fixing issues reported through the bug tracking system, is now available for download. There are no security fixes in this release. Upgrading your existing Drupal 6 sites is recommended, especially if you skipped Drupal 6.24 due to update issues.
Drupal 6.25 builds on top of Drupal 6.24 and includes all the previous bugfixes and security improvements. Changes in this release only fix issues introduced with the previous bugfix release (Drupal 6.24). The list of all fixes included is:Click Here!

Rollback for issue #12274 given that it does not consider email domain names with hyphens valid after the first component of the domain name.#1425868 by ELC, lort, greg.harvey, David_Rothstein: Fixed duplicate entry of theme primary key in system table on Drupal 6.24 when updating using drush.#1425260 by mgifford: Fixed 'Call to undefined function locale_inc_callback()' during 6.22 -> 6.24 upgrade if locale module was previously enabled but is not currently enabled. A complete list of all bug fixes in the stable 6.x branch can be found in the git commit log. There are no new features in this release. More information on the 6.x releases can be found in the Drupal 6.0 release announcement. Drupal 5 is no longer maintained, upgrading to Drupal 6 is recommended.
Given enough bug fixes (not just bug reports) more maintenance releases will be made available, according to our monthly release cycle
There are no database schema changes in this update and the robots.txt, .htaccess and (default.)settings.php files were not changed either, so you can keep local modifications easily.

None at this time.

Click Here!

Drupal 6.25 released

Drupal 6.25, a maintenance release fixing issues reported through the bug tracking system, is now available for download. There are no security fixes in this release. Upgrading your existing Drupal 6 sites is recommended, especially if you skipped Drupal 6.24 due to update issues.
Drupal 6.25 builds on top of Drupal 6.24 and includes all the previous bugfixes and security improvements. Changes in this release only fix issues introduced with the previous bugfix release (Drupal 6.24). The list of all fixes included is:Click Here!

Rollback for issue #12274 given that it does not consider email domain names with hyphens valid after the first component of the domain name.#1425868 by ELC, lort, greg.harvey, David_Rothstein: Fixed duplicate entry of theme primary key in system table on Drupal 6.24 when updating using drush.#1425260 by mgifford: Fixed 'Call to undefined function locale_inc_callback()' during 6.22 -> 6.24 upgrade if locale module was previously enabled but is not currently enabled. A complete list of all bug fixes in the stable 6.x branch can be found in the git commit log. There are no new features in this release. More information on the 6.x releases can be found in the Drupal 6.0 release announcement. Drupal 5 is no longer maintained, upgrading to Drupal 6 is recommended.
Given enough bug fixes (not just bug reports) more maintenance releases will be made available, according to our monthly release cycle
There are no database schema changes in this update and the robots.txt, .htaccess and (default.)settings.php files were not changed either, so you can keep local modifications easily.

None at this time.

Click Here!

Drupal 7.14 and Drupal 6.26 released

Drupal 7.14 is now available, which contains bug fixes as well as fixes for security vulnerabilities from Drupal 7.13.
Drupal 6.26, which fixes known bugs (no security issues) is also available for download.
Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement, more information on the 6.x releases can be found in the Drupal 6.0 release announcement. Drupal 5 is no longer maintained, upgrading to Drupal 7 is recommended.
Drupal 7.13 only includes fixes for security issues. Drupal 7.14 also includes bugfixes. The full list of changes between the 7.12 and 7.14 releases can be found by reading the 7.14 release notes. A complete list of all bug fixes in the stable 7.x branch can be found in the git commit log.
Drupal 6.26 only includes bugfixes.
Drupal 7.13 were released in response to the discovery of security vulnerabilities. Details can be found in the official security advisory:
To fix the security problems, please upgrade to Drupal 7.1

We made two versions of Drupal 7 available, so you can choose to only include security fixes (Drupal 7.13) or security fixes and bugfixes (Drupal 7.14). You can choose your preferred version. We are trying to make it easier and quicker to roll out security updates by making security-only releases available as well as ones with bugfixes included. We hope this helps you roll out the fixes as soon as possible. Read more details in the handbook.
- #1558548: Notice: Undefined index: default_image in image_field_prepare_view() - Upgrading from Drupal 7.x to Drupal 7.14 will yield a harmless but annoying PHP notice. Patch has been committed to 7.x-dev, and will be available in 7.15. A workaround in the meantime is visiting the field settings page and saving.
- #1541792: Enable dynamic allowed list values function with additional context - This issue introduced an more context to hook_options_list(). However, because Entity API was calling this hook directly it causes errors such as Warning: Missing argument 2 for taxonomy_options_list() in taxonomy_options_list() (line 1375 of modules/taxonomy/taxonomy.module).. Fixed in Entity API module at #1556192: Incorrect invocation of hook_options_list().
- #1171866: Change notice for: Enforced fetching of fields/columns in lowercase breaks third-party integration - This issue accidentally introduced an API change that affected both Migrate and Backup and Migrate modules. Solution for Migrate is to rename tables in scripts back to their proper names. Solution for Backup and Migrate is at #1576812: Could not complete the backup.

Drupal 7.14 and Drupal 6.26 released

Drupal 7.14 is now available, which contains bug fixes as well as fixes for security vulnerabilities from Drupal 7.13.
Drupal 6.26, which fixes known bugs (no security issues) is also available for download.
Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement, more information on the 6.x releases can be found in the Drupal 6.0 release announcement. Drupal 5 is no longer maintained, upgrading to Drupal 7 is recommended.
Drupal 7.13 only includes fixes for security issues. Drupal 7.14 also includes bugfixes. The full list of changes between the 7.12 and 7.14 releases can be found by reading the 7.14 release notes. A complete list of all bug fixes in the stable 7.x branch can be found in the git commit log.
Drupal 6.26 only includes bugfixes.
Drupal 7.13 were released in response to the discovery of security vulnerabilities. Details can be found in the official security advisory:
To fix the security problems, please upgrade to Drupal 7.1

We made two versions of Drupal 7 available, so you can choose to only include security fixes (Drupal 7.13) or security fixes and bugfixes (Drupal 7.14). You can choose your preferred version. We are trying to make it easier and quicker to roll out security updates by making security-only releases available as well as ones with bugfixes included. We hope this helps you roll out the fixes as soon as possible. Read more details in the handbook.
- #1558548: Notice: Undefined index: default_image in image_field_prepare_view() - Upgrading from Drupal 7.x to Drupal 7.14 will yield a harmless but annoying PHP notice. Patch has been committed to 7.x-dev, and will be available in 7.15. A workaround in the meantime is visiting the field settings page and saving.
- #1541792: Enable dynamic allowed list values function with additional context - This issue introduced an more context to hook_options_list(). However, because Entity API was calling this hook directly it causes errors such as Warning: Missing argument 2 for taxonomy_options_list() in taxonomy_options_list() (line 1375 of modules/taxonomy/taxonomy.module).. Fixed in Entity API module at #1556192: Incorrect invocation of hook_options_list().
- #1171866: Change notice for: Enforced fetching of fields/columns in lowercase breaks third-party integration - This issue accidentally introduced an API change that affected both Migrate and Backup and Migrate modules. Solution for Migrate is to rename tables in scripts back to their proper names. Solution for Backup and Migrate is at #1576812: Could not complete the backup.

Ebizon builds world's fastest growing Drupal site - TweenTribune

TweenTribune,TeenTribuneand TTEspañol deliver the teen and tween audience with compelling stories kids won’t ?nd anywhere else. Stories chosen for TweenTribune are selected by tweens working closely with professional journalists. Tweens can submit links to stories they'd like to share, submit their own stories and photos, and comment on the stories they read.

More than 53,000 teachers across the U.S use Tween Tribune in their classrooms.

Generates more than 5 million page views per month.

10,000 nodes are added every day

TweenTribune and its sister site, TeenTribune, work through schoolteachers across the U.S. Registered students log onto the site and post comments on selected stories of the day, and teachers review the responses for approval before making them “live” for other students to see.
During Christmas in 2008, Founder of Tweentribune, Mr. Alan Jacobson, decided to move its website from Wordpress to a more capable and flexible Content Management System Drupal. He contacted us in December 24th 2008 and worked with us to develop the application that would allow Tweens of ages 8 to 14 to read a variety of interesting content as well as comment on news for other Kids to see. Teachers can easily use Tween Tribune as a teaching tool. First, the site uses high-interest reading material to engage students with the news.
Teachers can register their classes on the site, which allows them access to special features like custom generated pages that show students comments or stories the class has commented on. Teachers can print out reports by student; these reports allow them to see which articles students have read and to access to individual student’s comments. In this way, teachers can easily grade or comment on students’ writing. There’s even a Faculty Lounge where teachers can interact with each other, sharing ideas and lesson plans.

Using Drupal 6 and a variety of excellent contributed modules, the site Tweentribune.com was launched in March, 2009. Modules used include Views, CCK (both core and imagefield), and Imagecache.
Codes were written for all the custom features of TweenTribune. This custom code was integrated into a Drupal Content Management System in the form of Drupal Modules.
Tweentribune is now a success story that has been featured in LAtimes, YPulse.com, KillerStartups, WeMedia, GoodHouseKeeping and getting
more than 5 million page views a month. more than 16 million add impressions per month.more than 3000 comments and 6000 quizzes Tweentribune.com had couple of unique challenges. The traffic used to pick during US school hours with most users logged in and hence, creating making maximum connections to the database. The webserver and database were separated on 2 different machines in the same network (LAN).
Further Following measures were taken to improve drupal performance:
Optimize database queries and modulesUse Memcache for all database cache.Sessions which are typically stored in database in Drupal were also stored in memcache.Boost module to serve html content for anonymous usersUsing Lighttpd to serve static files like css, js, images.APC as the PHP accelerator was used.Using Linux shell, Munin and Nagios for monitoring. Memcache - way better than cash
Memcache, Squid, APC, etc were used to make Drupal scale. Memcache, APC and Squid were installed and configured on the server. Memcache was monitored and configuration of Memcache was changed with time as traffic improved and RAM of the server was changed.
Lighttpd is a web server that was used to serve static files (images, javascripts, css) to reduce burden on Apache webserver as lighttpd is faster at static contents.
Apache Solr vs DSS
Drupal Search Sucks as it doesn't deal with large amount of content, it doesn't scale and gets bogged down.Drupal Search is integrated - it runs and searches on the same database thus, slowing down the system. Apache Solr's advantage for Drupal is that it indexes nodes, not pages. This means it can have access to attributes of the node that are not readily parsable from the rendered page. These attributes can be used to filter the results. Apache Solr provides faster search experience than default Drupal search.
Varnish or Squid
But either is better than getting shellacked, and both are better than Boost.
InnoDB, instead MyISAM. - Who wants to get locked under a table?
InnoDB implements row-level lock for inserting and updating while MyISAM implements table-level lock. InnoDB inherently takes care of data integrity by the help of relationship constraints and transactions. InnoDB is faster in write-intensive (inserts, updates) tables as it utilizes row-level locking and only hold up changes to the same row that’s being inserted or updated InnoDB buffer pool. How big is too big? We know. .
The larger the buffer pool, the more InnoDB acts like an in-memory database, reading data from disk once and then accessing the data from memory during subsequent reads. The buffer pool even caches data changed by insert and update operations, so that disk writes can be grouped together for better performance.
KeepAlive on or off?Contact us and we'll tell you.
Ebizon NetInfo: Ebizon builds World's fastest growing Drupal site and is the backbone of the project with the expertise in performance and scalability tuning that is essential for Drupal sites with millions of nodes and users. Ebizon supports Tweentribune's rapid growth of almost 10,000 nodes addition everyday through multiple layers of content caching in multi-server environment. Ebizon extends Drupal to meet the unique needs of the site to handle traffic of more than 1 million authenticated users during school peak hours.BrassTacksDesign: The BrassTacksDesign Team were responsible for project conceptualization and use cases. All day-to-day operations are managed and administered by them.Rackspace: The website is hosted on Rackspace.Quad Socket Quad Core Intel Xeon E7440 2.4GHz 64GB Memory Operating System: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 - 64 bit Database server has following configuration:
RAID 512 GB DELL RAM Single Socket Quad Core Intel Xeon L5520 2.26GHz Challenge: Drupal is both resource intensive and database intensive. Its strength is ease of development, extensibility through modules and faster development time. Its downside is that it requires more CPU and RAM than other CMSs.

Solution: With our experience we found that couple of Drupal contributed modules are resource intensive and their optimization is necessary in order to scale the system. We monitored SQL queries using devel module and identified the queries that consumed most resources. Then we optimized those queries and monitored their performance and load on the system for couple of days. The results and improvements were captured in a performance report that was published for client’s review.

Challenge: Busted Page issue which was causing page to break. The busted page was a much trickier issue solely due to its intermittent nature.

Solution: The Busted Page Issue was THE MOST important issue since the site had scaled to 2 million page views a month and we couldn’t risk this problem to survive any longer. Initial attempt was to disable BOOST module but to our surprise disabling Boost did not solve the problem. After 24 hours of rigours effort and monitoring it looked like menu paths were restructuring during CRON that was running every hour. The best of teams in the world were thinking on it but no one could get to the root. Finally, one of our best technical leads made the cron to run instead of every hour only at night at 12 am. This resolved the Busted page problem and was a GREAT success for us and Alan.

Challenge: Location based advertisement and headers implementation in Drupal 6.

Solution: Drupal ad geoip module were customized to implement the feature whereby advertisements and headers can be displayed based on users location.

Challenge: Only teachers of a classroom should be able to moderate the comments and comment should be published only after they have been approved.

Solution: Drupal moderate module was customized and an interface was designed where teaches could see all the comments in a classroom and can approve or disapprove them.

Challenge: Blocking inappropriate words that student puts in their comments.

Solution: Initially Watchlist module was recommended which automatically flags a node or comment if it contains any questionable content (these can be set in the Watchlist settings by adding regular expressions of words that are considered bad). But it flags the word and notifies admin AFTER the comment is posted, which is TOO LATE. Therefore Spam module was utilized to resolve this problem.

Challenge: Alan needed a way for the teacher to send every student’s comments to the printer with one click, instead of sending them one at a time with one click per student.

Solution: It was not feasible to put restriction on users to have an email to sign up on Tweentribune.com therefore team found a way for not letting users create their email and instead having system create their email automatically from their Full name. The contrib module that was modified for this purpose was “Localemail” and was made to create email ids automatically for each user and let them register directly on Tweentribune.

Challenge: A new workflow for teachers registration was required where teachers could register themselves without requiring Alan to personally verify each registration as in the previous workflow.

Solution: Team worked on a new workflow where:
Teacher can submit information on webform, which is almost identical to existing webform with very minor change. This new form replaced the existing form.Drupal generates 9 classrooms for teacher, but does NOT use classroom taxonomy. Instead, user profile contains username and classrooms only. Classroom names use teacher's school email address + taxonomy ID. Example: mary.jones@collierschools.com-151365Drupal generates new usename = teacher's school email address. Role = teacher_private. This role is a clone of existing role = teacher.Drupal sends 2 welcome emails with username and password generated by Drupal to 2 email addresses: home email address and school email address. Email includes link to "dashboard" page where teacher can register students. See screenshot, attached. The dashboard is 600px wide, so it fits in the main content area of the current pages.Teacher logs in and is redirected to /teacher_landing_page or uses link provided in welcome email.Teacher can do the following on the dashboard: register studentssee usernames and passwords of students previously registereddelete studentsprint out student usernames and passwordschange classroom name

Tweentribune.com is a news site for Tweens and following are the cores around which it was built:
CCKViews Webform Taxonomy Imagecache Custom AJAX-based drop down select developed as a replacement of hierarchical select module (http://drupal.org/project/hierarchical_select) when selecting classroom during registration or posting of stories. Custom module was used to allow non-email based registration on the site, since; Tweens usually do not have email addresses.Also, custom functionalities like allowing administrator to register teacher’s requests easily from an interface that are received from webforms were also developed. Comment moderation by teachers was also integrated into the site using Modr8 module. Stories: This is the main content type around which whole Tweentribune.com stories are built. Profile: This content type carries the student and teacher profile information like classroom.Your-stories: Using this content type, teachers can post their own news into their classrooms. Quiz: With this content type, teachers can post quiz on the website for their classroom. Your Entry: This content type allows student to submit short stories and essays

Ebizon builds world's fastest growing Drupal site - TweenTribune

TweenTribune,TeenTribuneand TTEspañol deliver the teen and tween audience with compelling stories kids won’t ?nd anywhere else. Stories chosen for TweenTribune are selected by tweens working closely with professional journalists. Tweens can submit links to stories they'd like to share, submit their own stories and photos, and comment on the stories they read.

More than 53,000 teachers across the U.S use Tween Tribune in their classrooms.

Generates more than 5 million page views per month.

10,000 nodes are added every day

TweenTribune and its sister site, TeenTribune, work through schoolteachers across the U.S. Registered students log onto the site and post comments on selected stories of the day, and teachers review the responses for approval before making them “live” for other students to see.
During Christmas in 2008, Founder of Tweentribune, Mr. Alan Jacobson, decided to move its website from Wordpress to a more capable and flexible Content Management System Drupal. He contacted us in December 24th 2008 and worked with us to develop the application that would allow Tweens of ages 8 to 14 to read a variety of interesting content as well as comment on news for other Kids to see. Teachers can easily use Tween Tribune as a teaching tool. First, the site uses high-interest reading material to engage students with the news.
Teachers can register their classes on the site, which allows them access to special features like custom generated pages that show students comments or stories the class has commented on. Teachers can print out reports by student; these reports allow them to see which articles students have read and to access to individual student’s comments. In this way, teachers can easily grade or comment on students’ writing. There’s even a Faculty Lounge where teachers can interact with each other, sharing ideas and lesson plans.

Using Drupal 6 and a variety of excellent contributed modules, the site Tweentribune.com was launched in March, 2009. Modules used include Views, CCK (both core and imagefield), and Imagecache.
Codes were written for all the custom features of TweenTribune. This custom code was integrated into a Drupal Content Management System in the form of Drupal Modules.
Tweentribune is now a success story that has been featured in LAtimes, YPulse.com, KillerStartups, WeMedia, GoodHouseKeeping and getting
more than 5 million page views a month. more than 16 million add impressions per month.more than 3000 comments and 6000 quizzes Tweentribune.com had couple of unique challenges. The traffic used to pick during US school hours with most users logged in and hence, creating making maximum connections to the database. The webserver and database were separated on 2 different machines in the same network (LAN).
Further Following measures were taken to improve drupal performance:
Optimize database queries and modulesUse Memcache for all database cache.Sessions which are typically stored in database in Drupal were also stored in memcache.Boost module to serve html content for anonymous usersUsing Lighttpd to serve static files like css, js, images.APC as the PHP accelerator was used.Using Linux shell, Munin and Nagios for monitoring. Memcache - way better than cash
Memcache, Squid, APC, etc were used to make Drupal scale. Memcache, APC and Squid were installed and configured on the server. Memcache was monitored and configuration of Memcache was changed with time as traffic improved and RAM of the server was changed.
Lighttpd is a web server that was used to serve static files (images, javascripts, css) to reduce burden on Apache webserver as lighttpd is faster at static contents.
Apache Solr vs DSS
Drupal Search Sucks as it doesn't deal with large amount of content, it doesn't scale and gets bogged down.Drupal Search is integrated - it runs and searches on the same database thus, slowing down the system. Apache Solr's advantage for Drupal is that it indexes nodes, not pages. This means it can have access to attributes of the node that are not readily parsable from the rendered page. These attributes can be used to filter the results. Apache Solr provides faster search experience than default Drupal search.
Varnish or Squid
But either is better than getting shellacked, and both are better than Boost.
InnoDB, instead MyISAM. - Who wants to get locked under a table?
InnoDB implements row-level lock for inserting and updating while MyISAM implements table-level lock. InnoDB inherently takes care of data integrity by the help of relationship constraints and transactions. InnoDB is faster in write-intensive (inserts, updates) tables as it utilizes row-level locking and only hold up changes to the same row that’s being inserted or updated InnoDB buffer pool. How big is too big? We know. .
The larger the buffer pool, the more InnoDB acts like an in-memory database, reading data from disk once and then accessing the data from memory during subsequent reads. The buffer pool even caches data changed by insert and update operations, so that disk writes can be grouped together for better performance.
KeepAlive on or off?Contact us and we'll tell you.
Ebizon NetInfo: Ebizon builds World's fastest growing Drupal site and is the backbone of the project with the expertise in performance and scalability tuning that is essential for Drupal sites with millions of nodes and users. Ebizon supports Tweentribune's rapid growth of almost 10,000 nodes addition everyday through multiple layers of content caching in multi-server environment. Ebizon extends Drupal to meet the unique needs of the site to handle traffic of more than 1 million authenticated users during school peak hours.BrassTacksDesign: The BrassTacksDesign Team were responsible for project conceptualization and use cases. All day-to-day operations are managed and administered by them.Rackspace: The website is hosted on Rackspace.Quad Socket Quad Core Intel Xeon E7440 2.4GHz 64GB Memory Operating System: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 - 64 bit Database server has following configuration:
RAID 512 GB DELL RAM Single Socket Quad Core Intel Xeon L5520 2.26GHz Challenge: Drupal is both resource intensive and database intensive. Its strength is ease of development, extensibility through modules and faster development time. Its downside is that it requires more CPU and RAM than other CMSs.

Solution: With our experience we found that couple of Drupal contributed modules are resource intensive and their optimization is necessary in order to scale the system. We monitored SQL queries using devel module and identified the queries that consumed most resources. Then we optimized those queries and monitored their performance and load on the system for couple of days. The results and improvements were captured in a performance report that was published for client’s review.

Challenge: Busted Page issue which was causing page to break. The busted page was a much trickier issue solely due to its intermittent nature.

Solution: The Busted Page Issue was THE MOST important issue since the site had scaled to 2 million page views a month and we couldn’t risk this problem to survive any longer. Initial attempt was to disable BOOST module but to our surprise disabling Boost did not solve the problem. After 24 hours of rigours effort and monitoring it looked like menu paths were restructuring during CRON that was running every hour. The best of teams in the world were thinking on it but no one could get to the root. Finally, one of our best technical leads made the cron to run instead of every hour only at night at 12 am. This resolved the Busted page problem and was a GREAT success for us and Alan.

Challenge: Location based advertisement and headers implementation in Drupal 6.

Solution: Drupal ad geoip module were customized to implement the feature whereby advertisements and headers can be displayed based on users location.

Challenge: Only teachers of a classroom should be able to moderate the comments and comment should be published only after they have been approved.

Solution: Drupal moderate module was customized and an interface was designed where teaches could see all the comments in a classroom and can approve or disapprove them.

Challenge: Blocking inappropriate words that student puts in their comments.

Solution: Initially Watchlist module was recommended which automatically flags a node or comment if it contains any questionable content (these can be set in the Watchlist settings by adding regular expressions of words that are considered bad). But it flags the word and notifies admin AFTER the comment is posted, which is TOO LATE. Therefore Spam module was utilized to resolve this problem.

Challenge: Alan needed a way for the teacher to send every student’s comments to the printer with one click, instead of sending them one at a time with one click per student.

Solution: It was not feasible to put restriction on users to have an email to sign up on Tweentribune.com therefore team found a way for not letting users create their email and instead having system create their email automatically from their Full name. The contrib module that was modified for this purpose was “Localemail” and was made to create email ids automatically for each user and let them register directly on Tweentribune.

Challenge: A new workflow for teachers registration was required where teachers could register themselves without requiring Alan to personally verify each registration as in the previous workflow.

Solution: Team worked on a new workflow where:
Teacher can submit information on webform, which is almost identical to existing webform with very minor change. This new form replaced the existing form.Drupal generates 9 classrooms for teacher, but does NOT use classroom taxonomy. Instead, user profile contains username and classrooms only. Classroom names use teacher's school email address + taxonomy ID. Example: mary.jones@collierschools.com-151365Drupal generates new usename = teacher's school email address. Role = teacher_private. This role is a clone of existing role = teacher.Drupal sends 2 welcome emails with username and password generated by Drupal to 2 email addresses: home email address and school email address. Email includes link to "dashboard" page where teacher can register students. See screenshot, attached. The dashboard is 600px wide, so it fits in the main content area of the current pages.Teacher logs in and is redirected to /teacher_landing_page or uses link provided in welcome email.Teacher can do the following on the dashboard: register studentssee usernames and passwords of students previously registereddelete studentsprint out student usernames and passwordschange classroom name

Tweentribune.com is a news site for Tweens and following are the cores around which it was built:
CCKViews Webform Taxonomy Imagecache Custom AJAX-based drop down select developed as a replacement of hierarchical select module (http://drupal.org/project/hierarchical_select) when selecting classroom during registration or posting of stories. Custom module was used to allow non-email based registration on the site, since; Tweens usually do not have email addresses.Also, custom functionalities like allowing administrator to register teacher’s requests easily from an interface that are received from webforms were also developed. Comment moderation by teachers was also integrated into the site using Modr8 module. Stories: This is the main content type around which whole Tweentribune.com stories are built. Profile: This content type carries the student and teacher profile information like classroom.Your-stories: Using this content type, teachers can post their own news into their classrooms. Quiz: With this content type, teachers can post quiz on the website for their classroom. Your Entry: This content type allows student to submit short stories and essays

Groups.Drupal.org Update: New maintainers and plans for Drupal 7

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Back in 2009, Groups.Drupal.Org (GDO) went through a major transition including upgrading from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6, a redesign, and adding new maintainers. We are currently in the process of a similar transition. The site has already gone through a redesign, and as we make plans to transition to Drupal 7, we will also be moving to new maintainers for the next year.

Between the Drupal Association’s initiative to improve *.drupal.org, the community brainstorming on site improvements, and feature requests in the Groups.Drupal.Org issue queue, there is clearly a lot of interest in making improvements to GDO. However, for folks who want to roll up their sleeves and help by filing a patch, the path to replicating GDO for development purposes hasn’t always been clear. As a strategy for making it easier for anyone in the Drupal community to file a patch and streamlining maintenance efforts for the site, we have proposed that GDO will run the Commons distribution of Drupal for Drupal 7. Of course, this means that improvements made to GDO benefit sites powered by Drupal Commons and vice-versa, that generic improvements to Commons will benefit GDO.

Helping with this transition, Ezra Gildesgame (ezra-g), maintainer of Drupal Commons, is also now a maintainer of groups.drupal.org. Ezra is the technical lead for Drupal distributions at Acquia, has been contributing to Drupal for over 5 years, and also maintains the Conference Organizing Distribution (COD).

Our other new Groups.Drupal.Org maintainers are Scott Reynen (sreynen) and Justin Toupin (justin2pin) from Aten Design Group. Scott is Lead Developer at Aten and has been contributing to Drupal for over 5 years, including helping to organize the Denver group on GDO. Justin Toupin is CEO at Aten, and has been leading the organization’s involvement in Drupal since version 4.7.

This process of upgrading Groups.Drupal.Org is an especially good time to get involved by joining a few different groups and queues:

Note that Ezra, Scott, and Justin have agreed to work on the site for at least a year. If you think you might want to take over in a year, the best way to do that is to get involved working on the site in these issue queues.

This is also a great opportunity to thank Greg Knaddison (greggles) and Josh Koenig for their help maintaining Groups.Drupal.Org over the past few years. Josh and Greg found they were too busy with other projects unrelated to community site building which made it harder to find time for GDO (Josh building Pantheon and Greg working with Acquia’s Profesional Services Security Group and the Drupal Security Team). Greg and Josh hope that transitioning to people who spend more of their lives working on community sites will help GDO be an even more valuable collaboration platform for our community.

View the original article here

Greg Knaddison to lead the Drupal Security Team

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

The Drupal Security Team was originally created in 2005. Though we handled security issues before that, we didn't have a team with proper infrastructure until then. At that time, Károly Négyesi (chx) was the team leader. In July 2006 chx changed his role in the team and I promoted Heine Deelstra to be the security team lead. Heine recently stepped down as the security team lead, and I'm pleased to announce that Greg Knaddison (or greggles on drupal.org) will be filling this role.

Greg has been a consistent member of the security team and both Heine Deelstra, the security team members, and myself unanimously agreed that Greg is the logical person to head the Drupal Security Team.

For those who don't know Greg, Greg helped write our free handbooks on security and wrote a book about Drupal Security. He has also talked about security and Drupal at many DrupalCons. Greg believes in my idea to automate where possible and empower project maintainers. In the coming weeks he will write blog posts to detail some changes made in the last year toward that vision and some tasks that still remain.

As the Drupal Security Team lead, Greg will be the point person for the team. He'll be responsible for coordinating the security team's activities and for making decisions when consensus doesn't arise.

Greg and I agreed on a target of 2 years for him to be in this role. If appropriate, he may continue in this role longer or be replaced before then, but this target helps to set an expectation about the time period. Setting this expectation should help Greg maintain enthusiasm for this role and increase the likelihood that our community will have continuity when that time is up. Greg works at Acquia and will be given 20% of his time to dedicate to the security team (in addition to using his own spare time).

Please join me in thanking Heine for all the great work he did, and in welcoming Greg.

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