drupal

At Drupalcon Boston I was in a session that Boris Mann of Raincity Studios was giving and he made a throwaway comment about how TinyMCE doesn't actually suck - if you know how to configure it correctly.

Well, I always thought it sucked and caused more problems than it solved, so I contacted Boris and asked him how he configures TinyMCE. He pointed me to a Bryght install profile for Drupal that automatically sets up various TinyMCE profiles.

A Developer's Assistant: Using Coder for Module Developers and Maintainers

Session led by Doug Green from Civic Action, maintainer of the coder module.

The Coder module aids developers in adhering to Drupal's community coding standards as well as helping with security pitfalls and upgrading modules from one version of Drupal to the next. Specifically, Coder reviews:

• style (lots)
• comments (lots)
• sql (some)
• upgrades (lots)
• security (some, but not a lot)
• performance (well - not so much)

Coder mainly uses regular expressions to perform the various checks. It is able to check modules regardless of if they are enabled or not. Doug announced today that the module now supports drush (=drupal shell - running Drupal from the command line).

Drupal Security - Best Practices and Process Discussion

Greg Knaddison and James Walker, both on the Drupal security team, presided over this session.

They talked about the various attack vectors that hackers utilize:

• authentication
• authorization
• client-side attacks (XSS and cross site request forgery [CSRF]
• information disclosure

They stressed the idea of being a secure user by using a strong password, avoiding unecrypted WiFi and FTP (opting for ssh/keys instead), and being really, really careful with UID 1. On the server side, using SSL for login pages (via the Secure Pages module) if desireable, if possible.

Here's a brief rundown of the sessions I attended today.

FastCompany.com Case Study

This site recently re-launched in a massive way - the entire site (as well as a companion site) was re-written in Drupal with social networking at it's core. It launched with more than 500,000 nodes that were imported from a previous content management system.

One of their goals was that they wanted users to find each other from common ideas, not common resumes. Facilite new relationships - not existing ones.

During the design phase, about 200 professionally wireframes were created. Lullabot and Achieve Internet did a lot of the heavy lifting for the site's functionality while Tree House Interactive did the themeing.

I'm in Boston for the 2008 edition of the Drupal lovefest (U.S. edition), and holy cow what a difference a year makes. I arrived just as Dries was taking the stage for his State of the Drupal keynote, and I was amazed at the size of the crowd. I knew that the conference had sold out (800 attendees), but I was shocked at the sheer visual spectacle of the size of the crowd compared to the 2007 Drupalcon in Sunnyvale, CA. Jusy about everything about Drupalcon Boston is big; the crowd, the venue, the session rooms. The only thing that isn't big: the food court at the convention center. Yikes.

Keynote