The March Phoenix Drupal meetup will be held next Tuesday, March 10th at 7pm. The meetup is moving on to the ASU campus thanks to the help of Chris Yates. Event details can be found on the DrupalPHX group page.

Chris will be giving a presentation about the Mars Image Explorer project and how they are utilizing Drupal within that project. There's also been mention of DrupalCon attendees sharing a bit about what went on at the conference.

Hope you all can make it.

There will be a Phoenix Drupal meetup next Tuesday evening at Macayo's in Tempe. See official event details and sign up HERE. This meeting is a chance for local Drupal developers to get together and discuss what's going on in their Drupal world and Drupal in general. While we are working on a more presentation friendly meeting spot for future meetups, this will give us a chance to at least meet and gauge community interest level. Hope to see you there!

In this last episode of getting started with Exhibit and Drupal, we'll embellish the Exhibit we created in part 2 by adding some additional views, exploring the use of lenses and expressions, and adding another facet. Our final Exhibit can be seen here.

Adding Views to your Exhibit

So the first thing we'll do is add several additional views to our Exhibit. The tabular view is nice and provides some great functionality, but Exhibit provides some additional views that are great at visually enhancing the way your data is displayed. We'll start by adding a calendar view. To do this you'll need the following code pasted within your viewPanel:

<div ex:role="view"
      ex:viewClass="Calendar"
      ex:label="Calendar"
      ex:start=".field_date_value"
      ex:end=".field_date_value2"
      ex:eventLabel=".title"
      ex:formats="date { mode: short; 
                         show: date-time; 
                         template: 'MM/dd/yyyy' } 
                  item { title: expression(.title) }"></div>

Ok, now that we know a bit about Exhibit and how Drupal can help us create Exhibits, let's start by getting our Drupal data in Exhibit JSON format.

Setup

The setup I'm using for this tutorial includes a Drupal 6 installation with the following modules enabled: Exhibit, Views 2, CCK, Date, Location, and GMap. I'm only using CCK, Date, Location and GMap to create a custom Event node type with date and location fields. I've also added taxonomies to the Event node type for event type and tags. You can create your own node type and add whatever fields you would like. I'm using this setup to demonstrate the broadest possible uses of Exhibit. With this Event node type, we'll be able to create an Exhibit complete with Calendar, Timeline, Map, and Interactive Table displays. You can visit my playground here: http://d6demo.joshhuckabee.com

Create Exhibit JSON from your Views

In this multi-part tutorial I will show you how to create interactive Exhibit displays of you Drupal data using the Views, CCK, and Exhibit modules. I'll start with a brief overview of Exhibit and how it works, then move on to explain how to get your Drupal data in a format that Exhibit can use, and finally, I'll show you how to setup the Exhibit. If you're already familiar with how Exhibit works, you'll probably want to wait for part two of this series.

What is Exhibit?

Mozilla labs has released a slick new Firefox extension called Ubiquity that aims to streamline the most common tasks you do in your browser as well as make things that seemed otherwise overly difficult or complicated, much more easier. I've seen it being called everything from "Quicksilver for Firefox" to "mashups for dummies". There's plenty of buzz around the net to fill you in on the details, so I won't go into that here.

I certainly like what I see in Ubiquity. It goes way beyond what Quiksilver does (or can do) and its more thant just a "mashup". Its capabilities are virtually limitless. But, what I've liked most so far about Ubiquity is how easy it is to extend. In a matter of about an hour I saw the headline on reddit about "the future of the web browser", watched Aza's cool video, wrote two simple, trivial commands, published my commands, and watched as over a dozen different people (whom I don't know nor didn't pay) downloaded and began using those commands. That says a lot about the tool and the creators over at Mozilla labs.

Its definitely something to check out if you haven't done so already.

Oh, and about those commands. The first allows you to submit any page you're on to the W3C's markup validator. Just ubiq "validate" and hit enter. You can catch that one here.

The last command I wrote is basically a shortcut to Drupal's API. Ubiq "drupal" followed by a core function, file name, constant, global or topic, hit enter and you'll land softly on the correct Drupal API page.

One last thing, if you haven't heard about the IE Death March, go show your support.

If you're not using the InnoDB engine in your MySQL databases, make sure its disabled in your my.conf by uncommenting or adding the skip-innodb directive. This simple change can free up some precious resources since MySQL is now only required to start up one engine.

Before I turned off the InnoDB engine my memory footprint looked like this:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1022       1012         10          0        133        673
-/+ buffers/cache:        205        817
Swap:         2047          0       2047

After I turned off InnoDB an restarted MySQL...

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1022        982         39          0        133        676
-/+ buffers/cache:        172        849
Swap:         2047          0       2047

That small change saved me 33MB of memory. Thats about 3% of the 1GB I have on my small VPS.

Upgrading software, especially web-based software, has always had a negative stigma in my eyes. Working in the industry, I've seen the problems that arise, the headaches it can cause, and the many hours of sleepless nights that result. So, naturally, I've put off upgrading my 5.x install of Drupal - which runs this site - as long as possible. With the announcement of 6.x release candidates for Views and CCK, I figured the time had come.

It wasn't that long ago that it seems I was pushing to 5.x from 4.7.x, and boy did I screw that one up! I don't remember exactly what I did, but I remember it turning into a copy and paste job of my blog posts. This isn't a rag on Drupal, because I will admit I didn't RTFM. I'm sure that had I done my due diligence it would have went a lot smoother.

So, for this upgrade I decided to RTFM. And, guess what? The upgrade went off without a hitch. All my nodes, terms, blocks, and even some contrib module settings are perfectly intact. I've also found a shiny new 6.x theme which I find easy on the eyes.

So cheers to all the developers who put many tireless hours into D6, and I look forward to seeing exciting new things in D7!

There are some very trivial administration tasks that I find myself doing over and over again in Drupal which can't currently be done from the admin interface. As of right now, these include installing a theme or module from drupal.org or adding a new site to an existing Drupal install. So, I've built a tiny Capistrano file that allows me to automate these tasks.

The tasks that I've setup are:

cap drupal:install:theme
cap drupal:install:module
cap drupal:install:site

cap drupal:install:theme

All this task requires is a path to the tar file of the theme that you want to install. What I do is browse over to the list of Drupal themes, find one that I want to try out, and copy the location of the "Download" link for the correct theme. In Firefox and Safari its as simple as right clicking the link and selecting "Copy Link Location". Make sure the version of the theme corresponds to the version of Drupal you have installed.

Once you've got the location to your theme copied, run the task with cap drupal:install:theme. It will ask you for the path to the theme location which you can then paste in. That's it. You should be able to browse to admin/build/themes and see your newly installed theme.