Grabbing Hanuman’s Long Tail - Jacob Singh online

Warning: Code is really in alpha state, however since this module is one of the most important and overlooked ones out there in terms of i18n, I thought I should mention it on the planet if others may want to pick it up and polish what is pretty much working now. Here is the issue for the drupal-5 port.

If you don’t know what Active Translation is, from the maintainer: Andrew aka drewish:

The Active Translation module is designed for internationalized sites where translated versions of content need to be displayed when available but if they’re not the original, untranslated content should be displayed. If several regional versions of a language are available these will be used as substitutions.

By default Drupal’s node listings show all content. So if you translate a node, both the original and translations are displayed. The Internationalization module, another contrib project, tried to improve on this on this. It gives you several options for rewriting queries to list nodes.

Keep in mind this is totally alpha code, but I thought since this is such a useful module, I should share it with everyone and encourage people to contribute to the effort.

Development was mainly sponsored by CivicActions.

I got en email from Bob Christenson over at mustard seed media:

1. Thanking me for block theme (others deserve credit as well, see the Project Page )
2. Pointing me to this wicked video tutorial on how to get it running for your site and what it does

More after the jump…
Read the rest of this entry »

I had the privilege of working with Srijan Technologies this spring on Drupal and Agile Development trainings for their team and helping them get Apache Solr kicking for the India Environmental Portal which just launched last week to much fanfare.

The site is based on Drupal 5 and features:

• Over 250,000 consciousness–changing-content-laden nodes
• 7,500+ terms that would give any librarian a serious biblio-complex
• Feeds from hundreds of in-house and our of house publications
• A killer example of Apache Solr being amazing: Apache Solr search for “water”
• And probably a lot more. You should read more about it at Srijan’s site: http://blogs.srijan.in/2008/08/10/a-year-to-live-a-powerful-way-of-living-your-life/ (A full fledged case study is in the offing)

What is an environmental portal?

India Environmental Portal is an initiative of the Center for Society and the Environment, one of India’s oldest and most revered environmental NGOs. Here is an excerpt from their about page:

This is the age of environment. And to make a difference, in our lifestyle, in policy and in practice we need information, which is accessible, well categorized and easy to use. The India Environment Portal is our effort to put together a one-stop shop of all that you want to know about environment and development issues. Its politics is overt: to build open, networked and informed societies, who can use knowledge to make change…..

This is a people’s portal. It will actively collate and exchange data, research and information from people working in the field, in campaigns, in scientific institutions, in research and in industry.

I recommend checking out the about page to find out more about this exciting resource:
http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/content/about-us

Congratulations to Ipsita, Rahul, Syed, Shashank, and all the rest of the excellent team at Srijan!

And a special thanks to drunken monkey and Robert Douglass for their work to integrate Drupal and Apache Solr.

Some press about the launch

http://www.financialexpress.com/news/National-portal-on-environment/347761/

http://in.news.yahoo.com/43/20080811/812/tnl-national-online-portal-on-environmen.html

http://www.thehindu.com/holnus/002200808112067.htm

http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=104697&keybold=climate%20forest%20environment%20warming

http://www.indiaprwire.com/businessnews/20080811/32685.htm

http://alootechie.net/content/indiaenvironmentportalorgin-launched-provide-environmental-information

Hey folks,

I finally got around to porting the Admin Role module to Drupal 6. Thanks for Pasqualle for getting the ball rolling on this and everyone else who contributed. Although certainly the simplest and smallest of my contributions to Drupal, Admin Role is by far the most well know and widely used. I’d really like to see it end up in core, because I think it is something people want… but perhaps there is a good reason not to.

The idea is that on many sites, you want more than one “super” administrator - that is, someone who can do anything. Unfortunately in Drupal, you cannot do this. The only way is to create a role such as “Admins” and then for every module you install, go to the permissions page, and check off all the little boxes to give permissions to that role. Adminrole simply does that for you whenever you add a new module.

I’ve marked the 6.x release a beta because I haven’t had any testing from the community yet, and only minimal testing from me, but I think it works great

For anyone out there using adminrole, please give it a whirl. Also note that I released a new version of the 5.x line last week.

Thanks to everyone who helped with these releases, in particular:

• Bevan
• majortom
• Benjamin Melançon

And thanks to CivicActions for partially funding the development of this module.