In this post, we describe some of the issues facing large or complex software projects using Drupal's CCK content type extension facilities. We then propose a remedy in the form of CoCKTaiL, a high-level language for CCK types and associated UI elements and relations. Tools and potential applications will be described in future work.

Drupal's Content Construction Kit (CCK) is a powerful feature, much loved by Drupal developers, who use it to rapidly define data types and relations for applications. Using a UI, developers can easily create new content types by specifying fields, UI widgets, relations, and more.

The ability to interactively create new types and supporting UI's is a great timesaver in the early stages of many Drupal development projects.

For larger projects, however, the nature of the design and implementation process for CCK types leads to difficulties in evolving and maintaining projects which include CCK components, and these difficulties contribute to the lifecycle cost of large Drupal applications.

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Last year, Acquia opened for business, offering commercial support for a defined software distribution called Acquia Drupal. One could purchase commercial support for all the modules in Acquia Drupal. As I mentioned last week in my 2009 predictions for Drupal, one of the things we learned relatively fast is that people wanted more than just Acquia Drupal. They wanted support for all modules, themes and custom code.

No surprise, but when we set out to build Acquia little more than a year ago, we weren't quite sure how we'd go about supporting everything with the limited resource we had available. We have since learned and grew a lot, and we decided that we're finally ready to start providing technical support for all of Drupal 6.x -- not just Acquia Drupal but all modules and themes available on drupal.org, as well as custom code.

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saur87 posted a photo:

We’re looking for a Project Manager for working with our development team. Our development process internally is more ‘agile’ - however, an adaptation to our own ways of working. Each Project Manager would typically need to manage 2-4 projects of varying sizes, across 1-2 project teams (4 people per team).

The responsibilities of a (technical) Project Manager at Srijan are detailed out below.

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Business Analysis
Work with the customer in getting requirements in place. Make use of ‘wireframes’ and ‘user stories‘ as an estimation process. Skills in ‘use case diagrams‘ would be a real benefit

Maintain Product Backlog
Work with the customer in creating and maintaining the Product Backlog

Manage Work Plans
Prioritize the Product Backlog, and create ‘work plans‘ or week-long Sprints with the Project Owner (which is essential a Tech Project Leader role at Srijan); Monitor the output, refactor, manage challenges

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Drupal for Education and E-learning is a must-have for any teacher, school or education institution considering a new school website, or technology-centric project in the classroom. Whether the reader has heard of Drupal or not, the book provides valuable insights, empowering ideas and simple instructions to help get any teacher or school on their way to having a powerful, useful and valuable learning resource.

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add1sun posted a photo:

This is my first siting of the book I co-authored on the shelves of a bookstore; in this instance Borders. Holy very cool, batman.

We’ve just improved the activity feeds on the site. Activity feeds are a great way for members to discover other members and new features on site and have become and important part of Sparkle*Shelf.

One of the great things about Drupal is how active the community is. We installed an earlier version of the Activity Module last summer and it was a nice addition to the site. It was fairly crude to begin with, but did the job of letting people know what was going on around the site.

Recently, we noticed that the developers on the project have been quite busy adding new features and fixing bugs, and we decided to upgrade to the latest (and still in development) version of the module. Some of the features we’re most pleased with are

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We’ve just improved the activity feeds on the site. Activity feeds are a great way for members to discover other members and new features on site and have become and important part of Sparkle*Shelf.

One of the great things about Drupal is how active the community is. We installed an earlier version of the Activity Module last summer and it was a nice addition to the site. It was fairly crude to begin with, but did the job of letting people know what was going on around the site.

Recently, we noticed that the developers on the project have been quite busy adding new features and fixing bugs, and we decided to upgrade to the latest (and still in development) version of the module. Some of the features we’re most pleased with are

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bertboerland posted a photo:

Mockup /before/ the (re)design of drupal.org

During the past couple years I've had some brief but rewarding content management discussions with Deane Barker from Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive.  Dean has worked with quite a few Web content management systems over the years and appears to be most passionate to using eZ Publish.  Naturally, our discussions almost always involve Dean talking about ez Publish and me talking about Drupal.  Unfortunately, as I am more of a system administrator than a developer, the information I have been able to provide him about Drupal has always been limited.

Well, it looks as if Deane Barker has finally decided to get on the Drupal learning curve and find out more about this great CMS.

I’m working with Drupal for the first time on a hobby project I’m doing with Seth Gottlieb (about which you’ll hear much more later…). Adam Kalsey — Drupal ninja that he is — is advising us on the technical implementation, and he’s been a great help.

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