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It may have taken me a whole day to wrap my head around the features API and how it applied to the workflow module but I finally got there. Today I wrote features support to the workflow module. At DrupalSouth I gave a talk about features in Drupal and about exporting your configuration into code so that you can maintain it with version control and make configuration deployable.

The past week here in Wellington New Zealand has been quite an exciting one with LCA (Linux Conf AU) and DrupalSouth (Drupal conference for New Zealand) both taking place. We had a lot of speakers from around the world come to Wellington to present what they've been up to and talk about there passions in Open Source. In particular, I was able to meet up with Angie Byron (webchick) again who is the Drupal 7 branch maintainer and Selena Deckelmann and Josh Berkus from the PostgreSQL community. We all sat down and had lunch together and talked databases and PostgreSQL support for Drupal.

In short, Drupal 6 Site Blueprints is a Drupal book for beginners and not a bad one at that. It uses application, excersises and repetition to teach the reader how to use Drupal in several different contexts. Anything from a personal blog to a multimedia events based site with multiple accounts.

Okay, so I don't normally review books. I was approached and asked to review this Drupal book and I couldn't turn it down. Without a doubt, search engine optimization is a big factor to the fail or success of a website these days and some companies pay big money to get that no.1 ranking in Google. As a developer, it couldn't hurt to learn a little more about the subject and have it in mind when developing for clients.

For the first, in Paris, all the database maintainers of Drupal were in the same place at the same time. From the left is David Strauss (MySQL Driver), Larry Garfield (Database and MySQL Driver), Károly Négyesi (SQLite Driver), Damien Tournoud (SQLite and PostgreSQL Drivers) and myself (PostgreSQL Driver). Though there are only 5 of us. Each database in Drupal 7 has 2 maintainers for its Driver. At the time of this post there are no other CMS's around that have dedicated maintainers to there CMS pushing Drupal further as the best CMS and framework around.

Sick of repeating the same steps every time I wrote a custom module for a project, I decided to write a simple script that generated the base structure for creating a Drupal module.

Being a developer who likes to make stuff take less time by spending ages on the tools that make it take less time, I extended the simple script and turned it into a debian package.

So! I give to you! a debian package to easily download and install on your Ubuntu or Debian machine and start using this great tool.

Firstly you need to some stuff that makes the tool work: php5-cli and libreadline:

As all well and done providing PostgreSQL support for Drupal Core - it an important job that provides future proofing for thousands of projects around the world. But it doesn't, well that is to say it shouldn't, stop at just core.

If you've altered your stock standard postgresql.conf configuration file of your Ubuntu server and upgraded to the lastest release, there is a good chance you'll get an error like:

The first code sprint was a huge success! We had a lot of people from from Catalyst IT show up to the level 3 training room and together we looked at the issues from the PostgreSQL Code Sprint and started to create a better knowledge base around Drupal. I didn't realise how much information I had in my head surrounding PostgreSQL issues untill I started explaining the history and problems faced surrounding the issues we looked at.

So this Friday is the first of many PostgreSQL Code Sprints for Drupal with our main focus on Drupal 7 bug fixing and optimization in both D6 and D7. I've started going through the issue cue on Drupal.org and tagged issues with 'PostgreSQL Code Sprint' as issues we want to focus on first.