There truly is never a dull moment at Ixis HQ and this week I have been taking part in an election process in a bid to be a director at large of the international Drupal Association board.

Saturday, 4th February 2012Drupal Association Opens its doors to the community At Large - and I'm running for election!The Drupal Association is, for the first time in history, opening up two spaces on the Board for "At Large" members. Voting is open now only for a few days until Feb 7.

People like their Planet Drupal in different style. According to a rather non-scientific survey, two thirds prefer to get the Planet feed with full posts and two thirds reads the feed in some kind of reader.

The most basic function of a content management system is the ability to create a page. However, this fundamental activity of website building is often an unexpected hassle for new Drupal users. Yeah, I'm talking about the lack of a built-in rich text editor.
I know there are some strong feelings in the Drupal community about this, but let me try to persuade you that whatever the philosophical or technical reasons for not including a default editor, they're hurting adoption of Drupal and needlessly creating a usability issue for those who are evaluating the platform. 

There are a number of Drupal modules that handle node access and which may address many requirements. However, using hook_node_grants() and hook_node_access_records(), you can also define in your own module which nodes a user can view, edit and delete.
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img.right {float: right; clear: right; padding-left: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em; }
img.left {float: left; clear: left; padding-right: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em; }
h2, h3 {clear: both; padding-top: 10px; }

While this article focuses primarily on the state of Drupal “contrib” (modules and themes which are not part of the “core” Drupal download), it also takes a look at the greater “State of Drupal” in terms of sites known to be running on some version of Drupal, comparisons of the rate of uptake

With a new Drupal Core release out, it's worth reminding people just how easy it is to pull an update if you're using Pantheon:

One click and you're done! This is the beauty of starting a project off the canonical git history.
Also, of note - updating the stone-age way (unpacking a tarball from Drupal.org and overwriting all your core files) won't give good results. This will stop on the PRESSFLOW_SETTINGS auto-configuration system we use to connect to databases and other external services. Take the path of least resistance: it's also the best practice!

There have been plenty of articles about Drupal 7 and entities already. Entities are great. They provide a unified way to work with different data units in Drupal. Drupal 7 is all about entities. They are everywhere: nodes, users, taxonomy terms, vocabularies...
Let's take a closer look at how developers can create their own entities using the Entity API module, which is a great toolbox.
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I'm running for election as an "At Large" board member of the Drupal Association.
"Meet the candidates" forums were scheduled so members of the Drupal community could ask questions of the nominees.  We were all asked to do a brief introduction, then respond to questions either by voice, or by IRC, and then were all asked to make a final statement. 

General Overview
The Drupal 8 Mobile initiative’s goal aims to make Drupal the leading mobile CMS platform. Certainly, there are some fantastic contributed modules that already make Drupal a great starting point for mobile solutions; modules like Mobile Tools, Domain Access, Responsive Images, as well as a whole slew of new ones that have been released in the past few months. But in order for a CMS to earn the moniker "mobile-friendly", setting it all up needs to be easy.