Drupal

On a recent post on Drupal.org, a few people were asking for the devel module for 4.6. I don't understand why it is not branched with every release, and let for those who need it. Anyway, since I happen to have a copy of the 4.6 module, I am attaching it here. Enjoy ... Update: The module is already branched for 4.6, and you can get it from drupal.org.

The user points module has been updated for Drupal 4.7.Get it from the Drupal.org project page. 

The Drupal  Adsense module has been updated to allow revenue sharing.

Some technical details for the curious:

• The site admin can assign a certain percentage of ad views to be assigned to  the node author's Google AdSense client ID.
• The node  types are also configurable, so the admin can only enable it for specific node types (e.g. blogs).
• The revenue sharing only  applies to the full node view, not the teasers. These go to "the house" (i.e. the site assigned Adsense client  ID).
• The path /blog/uid also has revenue sharing enabled.
• A specifically named profile field has to be filled in by the user to get credited with the ads.
• When revenue sharing is enabled, adsense caching is disabled.
• The percentage is determined based on a random number generator. So it is basically tossing dice from 1 to 100, and seeing if this page view should be awarded to the author or the site. I did this so that I dont have to keep a running total in the database, which would slow things down.

Benefits

This is a great community building tool.

In the Drupal Predictions for 2006 thread, I predicted that both Slashdot.org and Digg.com will move to Drupal, mostly tongue in cheek. For those who do not know, both are really high volume technology news and discussion oriented sites. If/when they adopt Drupal as a platform, it would seriously demonstrate Drupal's performance under heavy loads. Alex Racine said that Digg already runs Drupal.

A few months ago, Boris Mann posted a call to arms of sorts on Drupal.org for search engine ranking for several keywords and phrases, my favorite being: Drupal, the Best Open Source PHP MySQL CMS there is.Today, it occured to me to search Google for "the best CMS", and found that the fourth result was the Drupal.org news about Sir Tim Berners Lee uses Drupal as a blog. When searching for "the best php mysql cms", the above link comes out as the fifth.

After completely forgetting about it, the Google Summer of Code T-Shirt has finally arrived. I participated as a code review  mentor for Drupal on three student project.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has a blog at MIT, and it runs on Drupal. For those who do not know him, he was the inventor of the World Wide Web back in the early 1990s.The site's theme is a modified form of the SpreadFireFox theme, by Chris Messina, which I ported from 4.4 to 4.5 and 4.6. Too bad Chris has no time to keep working on this theme. So much potential, and  lots of attention to detail...

The Drupal Click Thru Tracking module has been updated to work with the upcoming 4.7 version of Drupal.Thanks for Patrick Nelson for the patch.

It is always a challenge to make software and computing in general do Arabic (and other languages that are Right to Left and uses variable shape letters). Regarding the internet, I wrote several articles about Arabic on the Internet with a lot of background information, technical challenges, state of the market, and more. As far as Drupal is concerned, you can read my article on the various possible approaches for the Arabization of Drupal.

The custom error module for Drupal has been upgraded for the new 4.7 Form API. Thanks to Markus Petrux for provided a patch.