Some things to be aware of when enhancing Drupal site with FLV video playing/conversion features.

• Setup wizard for the free JW FLV Media Player (and the JW FLV Media Player itself)
• Flash Video in Drupal 5: A complete multimedia tutorial to the flashvideo module
• actual flashvideo module page on drupal.org

As an update to WordPress anti-spam plugins, I highly recommend Spam Karma 2. For a time, it seems to be the ultimate protection. I turned off all the other anti-spam plugins (including Aksimet), and everything’s just perfect! SK2 gathers up to a thousand spam comments/trackbacks during a single week on this blog, and I never had a complaint from blog visitors on their inability to add a comment (though some did have to fill in captcha to post a comment with links).

And SK2 still works under WP 2.5! (SK 2.3 was released to support WP 2.1)

Kudos to Dave!

It would be a pity if this excellent plugin is abandoned and stops functioning in one of the upcoming WP releases.

Update: SpamKarma is now GPL (at google code).

This post provides several links which would be useful for the beginning Drupal developers, or developers deciding which CMS to use as the base for their next project. Also, strengths of Drupal are highlighted.

Intensively working with Drupal during the past two weeks, I find it to be an excellent tool, and also much more than a YACMS.

Now I think that Drupal is also a framework - providing invisible to developer caching, session handling, access control, theming, localization, and more. The minimal effort required to extend already huge Drupal functionality is to write your own module - and, if done right, your module will immediately benefit from all the bonuses Drupal provides.

But Drupal also really shines as a CMS! You can start with a free design theme, and without any PHP knowledge have your custom portal built within a week - with your own hands, if you desire! (Note: “within a week” is true, but only if you already know what exactly you should be doing; learning time is short, but it’s not within that same week.)

What makes Drupal so powerful? I’d say that beautiful core and numerous modules.

What Drupal has to offer?
Read the rest of this entry »

Is that only me, or WordPress is really leaning towards the Drupal ideology?

Here’s what I mean:

• user levels were changed to user roles - just like in Drupal
• now, instead of categories and just recently introduced tags, the word ‘taxonomy’ is used - which is a Drupal slang
• ‘widgets’ work just like ‘blocks’ in Drupal - even style IDs are assigned the same way, e.g. id=”widget subscribe_to_comments_widget”
• (add here the similarity you found yourself)

I wonder, what will be next. PHPTemplate support, as default theming engine?
Or no-backwards-compatibility policy?
Or, best for WP users, advanced Drupal-like caching and throttling techniques?

drupaldojo.com - at the moment of writing, has 42 video-lessons (screencasts) of developing with Drupal.

Drupal technical introduction
It’s quite old, but as it describes core functionality, it should be still actual.

Please comment if you know of any other good high-quality technical Drupal introductions/descriptions.

ExpressionEngine (EE) by EllisLab (see dislaimer). EE is available both as free and as paid-for: free has somewhat limited functionality, but enough to start the simple news site or blog. ExpressionEngine is suitable both for content-centric and news-centric (blog-like) projects, though in my opinion it’s more geared towards news/blog-like sites.
Read the rest of this entry »

Today I moved my blog and gallery into MySQL5 databases from an elderly MySQL4. Also, both WP and gallery are now updated to the latest versions. Soon I’ll change the WP and G2 themes - for the lighter, less cluttered - and will remove some ads… and will also add some others instead

Update generally went well, except for the message I got on the main page:

Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.

It was quite easy to figure out that new WP conflicts with an elderly “Sideblog” plugin - so I had to deactivate that one, and will have to update all the active plugins to avoid some other less evident problems… (actually, just completed updating all the plugins… quite a time-eater, that was.)

Also, there will be a slight change to what and how I write. No other details for now - but stay tuned! All the changes with no exceptions are planned for the good of readers, and for the users’ benefits!

Updated on Apr 8, 2008.

Stimulated by the post of Eric Daniel, I compiled the most recent ffmpeg SVN source into Linux binary, which runs fine on my shared hosting (note: I’m using older ffmpeg binaries, which are at the end of the post).

mini-FAQ:
Q: Why the title has “for Gallery2″?
A: Just because I avoided the inclusion of libraries, which were not found on my shared hosting server. I hope this will work for other shared hosting environments.

Configuration, version and date can be found in the output of ffmpeg.

Versions built on April, 8, 2008:
ffmpeg (no lame) (checked: can be executed on godaddy shared hosting)

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-swscale –enable-pthreads –disable-debug –enable-gray –disable-ffserver –disable-ffplay –enable-avfilter –disable-network –disable-ipv6
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 15:13:14, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)
usage: ffmpeg [[infile options] -i infile]… {[outfile options] outfile}…

ffmpeg (with lame). For this one, grab libmp3lame.so.

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-swscale –enable-pthreads –disable-debug –enable-gray –disable-ffserver –disable-ffplay –enable-avfilter –disable-network –disable-ipv6 –enable-libmp3lame
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 15:44:31, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)

Based on single request: ffmpeg (with lame and libfaac and libfaad). For this one, grab libfaac.so and libfaad.so.

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-swscale –enable-pthreads –disable-debug –enable-gray –disable-ffserver –disable-ffplay –enable-avfilter –disable-network –disable-ipv6 –enable-libmp3lame –enable-libfaac –enable-libfaad
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 23:53:57, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)

As an experiment, here’s ffmpeg freebsd binary without lame support. Did ran on some FreeBSD 6.3 hosting.

FFmpeg version SVN-r12769, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-swscale –enable-pthreads –disable-debug –enable-gray –disable-ffserver –disable-ffplay –enable-avfilter –disable-network –disable-ipv6 –target-os=freebsd
libavutil version: 49.6.0
libavcodec version: 51.54.0
libavformat version: 52.13.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
libavfilter version: 0.0.0
built on Apr 8 2008 16:15:38, gcc: 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)

Versions built on Ocotber, 28, 2007:
download ffmpeg without libmp3lame support

FFmpeg version SVN-r10867, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-pp –enable-swscaler –enable-pthreads

–enable-libogg –enable-libvorbis –disable-debug
libavutil version: 49.5.0
libavcodec version: 51.47.1
libavformat version: 51.17.0
built on Oct 28 2007 22:46:10, gcc: 3.4.6

download ffmpeg with libmp3lame support

FFmpeg version SVN-r10867, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-gpl –enable-pp –enable-swscaler –enable-libmp3lame

–enable-pthreads –enable-libogg –enable-libvorbis –disable-debug
libavutil version: 49.5.0
libavcodec version: 51.47.1
libavformat version: 51.17.0
built on Oct 28 2007 23:04:59, gcc: 3.4.6

Shared hosting testing reports are welcome.

Below you can find even older versions of ffmpeg, which were tested and found functional on GoDaddy shared hosting.
Read the rest of this entry »

Refreshing my scarce knowledge of Apache’s mod-rewrite, I read through the mod_rewrite guide, and found an extremely interesting section, titled

On-the-fly Content-Regeneration

Here’s the theoretical problem:

1. we are building a high-traffic site with lots of once-per-(hour|day) updated items
2. we have a CMS with just all the features we need, but it’s really CPU/DB-consuming and slow (does it sound familiar? )
3. there’s a need to serve static files

And here’s the ‘radical alternative’ solution:

1. install the CMS of choice
2. tweak the CMS’s output layer to both produce/write to disk (or update) static HTML files, and to dump those same pages directly to browser
3. use the “On-the-fly Content-Regeneration” mod_rewrite rules set

This is it, in short. The “On-the-fly Content-Regeneration” will read the static files if they exist, or will query the CMS, which will create/update the static files and output the necessary page. You can also setup a cron-job to remove all static files older than XX minutes, to force content refresh.

Below is the copy of “On-the-fly Content-Regeneration” from the mod_rewrite guide.
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Recently I learned about Zope, which is an “open source web application server”, primarily written in Python.

Then Django and Turbogears were seen as web-development frameworks akin to Zope. Search revealed an interesting anti-Zope rant at Zope vs Django. Reading until the end, and then following the comments, I came across the comment by Holger Froebe, which is a huge one (probably the longest comment I had ever seen), and represents a detailed explanation with examples of the reasons to use Zope 3. I found that comment to be a really good-written one, so if you are deciding on whether you should use Zope 3 or not, then read the comment here (scroll down or just search for “Holger Froebe”).

For convenience and in order to preserve this worhty piece of work from vanishing, below is the 99%-exact copy-paste of that comment.
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This is a collection of links related to the multiple-language content in Drupal CMS.

Drupal i18n report: http://www.developmentseed.org/blog/book/print/376
i18n module
i18n: Getting the whole thing to work : http://drupal.org/node/81094
Patch: Translations of menu titles and descriptions: http://drupal.org/node/70919
Translated links: http://drupal.org/node/67814
i18n: menu not expanding with URL-Alias: http://drupal.org/node/80820

There was an alternative module to i18n, but I cannot find it at the moment.

As I previously mentioned, IBM uses Drupal to build a collaborative web-site, as a conscious choice of a solid CMS. They have a series of articles (Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site) describing in details the processes of considerations and actual implementation. About two weeks ago, a new article was added - Understanding the database layer:

Follow along in this series of articles as the the IBM® Internet Technology Group designs, develops, and deploys an extranet Web site for a fictitious company, International Business Council, using a suite of freely available software. In this installment, explore the Drupal database abstraction layer and learn how to use it effectively while developing a Web site. Discover best practices for module developers and details about using the Drupal database functions. You also learn to implement the necessary code to support a new database — IBM DB2® Express-C.

As you can see, not only the existing code was explored and explained, but also new code for DB2 support was added. Personally, I am not quite even sure what are main applicatios of DB2, but anyway it’s good to have one more option, probably for future extendibility or just more flexibility. There’s a discussion thread at drupal.org, you might want to comment.

Meanwhile, I have troubles installing the new Drupal 5.0 beta-1. I used to install Drupal 4.x without any problems, so I suspect that current 5-beta-1 might be more sensitive to server configuration or just somehow initially misconfigured… Need to see into this issue.

Well, not a news, actually, but this one seems important.

Following the discussions, installation and administrative interface became much simpler, and thus easier for newbies. Other first-impression change is said to be the new default theme, which looks good as well.

I will surely check this new release out very soon, but for now you can try one yourself.

Update: beta-2 is available since November, 28, with over 160 bugs fixed.

If you ever need to add AdSense units to your Gallery2 installation, and find no module for this - try following the text below. I compiled it from several sources (primary menalto.com Gallery2 forum), and did everything written here myself here.

Primary source of information was this post, but I recommend that you follow instructions here.

To add AdSense to your Gallery2 sidebar (when using the Matrix theme as a sample): Read the rest of this entry »

Last updated: February 19, 2008.

The newest script version migrates from PHP-Nuke 6.5 to Drupal 5.x.
Download the latest version of the migration script.

In 2002 I set up a PHPNuke-6.0 - based portal. Eventually it died due to the lack of time investments and support from collaborators. Now, when time came to revive the project, I made a search and decided to use Drupal as a base CMS for the portal.
In order to migrate userbase from an old portal to the new Drupal-powered one, and following the topic at drupal.org, I found a script and its modification.
I used it to migrate only users, and made some cosmetic changes:

• added options for custom phpnuke table prefixes
• default user name is now = uname (login), not ‘temp_name’, as before
• I replaced hard-coded links to ‘migrate.php’ with links to $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'], so that if you rename the script you don’t have any problems with that
• now forum topics should not be promoted to the main page (changed 1 to 0 as hinted by Alexis)

Finally, I would like to thank both Karthik Kumar for the original script and Alexis Bellido for the 6.0_to_4.7 modification.
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When you have a new web-project just about to be started, you frequently face the problem of the CMS selection - ‘Which CMS is better’? There’s a hundred and more various CMS out there. To name just a few - PHP-Nuke, PostNuke, Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, e107, XOOPS, Nucleus, Typo3, Xaraya, YACS! (visit http://www.opensourcecms.com/ for much more and try for yourself).

If you gooogle this problem, you will get loads of forums discussing topics like ‘Mambo vs Drupal’, ‘PHP-Nuke vs PostNuke’ etc. But, to be sure, this ’source’ of information is not likely to really help you choose. What you need is a good in-depth overview of the systems.
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