Drupal

This is the first time I am doing an intense 2-day Drupal training in Brooklyn, NYC: DrupalCamp NYC 8. I'm unsure about what to expect, but from looking at the schedule, it looks like an intense one, as there are only about 10 minutes of breaks between the sessions :)

I'm reviewing the sessions right now and here's my list of sessions I want to attend:

• Beginning Drupal 7
• HTML5 and Drupal
• Drush - Intro or What is it good for?
• Drupal as a web services platform for building Android, iPhone and other platforms' applications
• Drupal 7 Module Development
• rules, the next big thing in drupal
• Context - changing how I code Drupal
• Views for Module Developers
• Making Search Usable: Apache Solr and Faceted Search UI Challenges

I can't list all the ones I like, because they are all grea, but I'm sure to post a quick update from this weekend.

One of the things that I love about Facebook is the fact that all my online activities show up as part of my "Facebook Status Updates". Wouldn't it be great to have all those updates available in Drupal? I recently came across a module called "Activity Stream", which offers a Drupal aggregator pulling in updates from Delicious, Digg, Flickr, Last.FM and Twitter. Besides the big 5, it also offers a custom feed option that I haven't tested yet.

Installation of this module was really simple. This module comes with a core package and 6 sub-modules, one for each service (and custom feed). According to the Activity Stream online documentation, those modules can be easily extended in case you're looking to display items from a different service than the one already provided.

The display of feed items looks decent from the get-go. My visual design preference is more organized, so I applied the following style tweaks to the get the items to show up as displayed in the image below. You can just add these lines to your style.css file of your theme:

#activitystream .item-list ul li{
background:transparent none repeat scroll 0 0;
line-height:1.23em;
margin-top:7px;
padding:0;
}
#activitystream .item-list ul li img{
float:left;
margin-right:5px;
}

It seemed strange to me that there isn't a better solution, so I found the Weblinks module (http://drupal.org/project/weblinks), which does exactly what I'm looking for: it allows an admin or user to create Blogrolls (= several list of links). Those lists can be put into categories, such as "Design Links" or "Programming Resources".

What I liked about the module was the fact that it seems seamlessly integrated with the core Drupal modules. It's using the Taxonomy module for categories and has a straightforward installation. The module creates the Vocabulary automatically (after visiting the configuration page once). Any categories can be created through the Taxonomy module. Weblinks comes with three different css files; I chose the weblinks_minimal.css, as my goal was to integrate the module's output into my sidebar.
Another part of the module that's great is the views integration. Using Drupal 6, Views and Weblinks, it's easy to create a page with the most popular links based on user click-throughs (which comes as a predefined block for the sidebar, but the fact that it CAN be easily re-created using views was noteworthy).

One feature that I was missing was an OPLM importer to take all the items from my existing feed reader and import them easily into Drupal, without having to copy & paste every website manually. Apart from that, I think I'll use this module from now on instead of creating custom blogrolls, as it seems to be maintained very well and updated often.