Happy Pixels

Florian Loretan's blog on Drupal, creativity and more

drupal planet

Despite the title, wunderkraut has not yet branched out to hatmaking:
The "feature hats" we're talking about is our approach to minimize conflicts when using a code-drive development method for Drupal, especially when using Drupal features for storing configuration in code. This configuration is changed by developers by updating features, i.e. exporting configuration in code via the popular features module – a merge-based source code version management alone like git doesn't avoid confilcts here.

It is a well known fact that pages with many images load more slowly than simple HTML pages. Not only are image files heavier than text files, they also require additional HTTP requests.

In an attempt to solve both of these performance problems, I have created a new Drupal module: Imagilicious. Imagilicious replaces tags that reference an external image to be loaded with a 100% HTML rendering of the same image. Unlike immature technologies like the <canvas> element, Immagilicious uses tables, which guarantee compatibility even with the most outdated browsers.

Here is a sample of the output (no <img> is used, this is a table), using Wunderkraut's logo as a source image:

The Drupal community is a very diverse one. So when the idea came up to make a viral video to promote the DrupalDevDays and invite Dries Buytaert (founder of the Drupal project), we didn't have a shortage of talent in the local community.

As a member of the organizing team, I am happy to invite you to the Drupal Dev Days (aka DrupalCamp Germany 2010), which will take place on May 8th and 9th in Munich. We already announced the event on many German-speaking channels, but I would like to invite those of you who might be coming from further away.

Upgrading Drupal websites from one major version to the next is painful. Most people solve the problem by sticking with the old version, and I've seen a lot of people give up after trying for many days. I've myself done a good amount of (successful) upgrades from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 in the past year and decided to share my experience and hopefully help some people get through with it.

Drupal Media Camp Switzerland took place this week-end, less than a year after the idea of a Swiss DrupalCamp was introduced at a Drupal user group meeting in Zurich. This event was full of good presentations, exciting moments and networking opportunities, and I believe it was very successful in increasing the adoption of the Drupal CMS on the Swiss market.

The RDF code sprint is now less than a week away, and it's time to give you a quick update. For more information have a look at the original announcement as well as last week's blog post from Stephane Corlosquet.

We now have a few more participants, with Stefan Freudenberg, Frédéric G. Marand, Mark Birbeck and John Morahan joining us. There is still room for one more person, so if you are familiar with theming, the Fields API and/or writing tests we would be happy to have you with us.

If you have some friends with a Last.FM account, head over to http://perfectfestival.com, where you can generate the homepage for a fictive music festival where all their favorite bands are playing! Try something like "Hey chx, I'm going to Perfect Festival at the end of June, should I get you some tickets too?"

SimpleTest has brought a technology to Drupal, but also a methodology, both of which have greatly enhanced the Drupal development process. The test automation methodology is common to all testing frameworks. It is the topic of this article and will also serve as an introduction to the Intro to SimpleTest session this Friday at DrupalCon DC.

I was recently faced with the same problem in two different projects: forcing the creation of an image derivative with imagecache so that it is available in the submit handler of the same form in which the image was uploaded. By default, imagecache generates images on demand triggered by an HTTP request, which is ideal for most cases. However, this design doesn't make it possible to trigger the generation of images programmatically, which is why I created the following code snippet.

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