Drupal social publishing software

A quick note on using Pressflow as the basis of a Drush build using Drush make can be a little confusing as the changes necessary to use the newer github-based repository aren't abundant. So without further ado here's what works:

Note that the previous instructions around the web tend to be problematic because the tarball file contains a git repo which Drush make doesn't know to strop since it's getting it as a tarball instead of from git.

When you work with the great folks I do every day it comes as little surprise that when the stuff hits the fan and some site is in need of help there will be a legion of folks who jump into round-the-clock action to get things in a better place. While this could be a whole blog post about that alone it's not about that. Rather it's about one of those nagging little problems we came across while working on a site this Thanksgiving "holiday".

The problem is one that many have seen at one point or another:

In fact this problem pops up enough that it has its own page in the Drupal Handbook. The problem is pretty straightforward to understand. Some object was serialized for storage in the database and has become corrupted.

Finding the source of the problem, however, can be challenging. The Handbook page has several examples and more in the comments of some quick hacks that can be done to bootstrap.inc or can be employed with their own database connections to test these serialized values. There are times when neither hacking bootstrap.inc nor connecting to the db directly are practical. Indeed for many using Drush is a good way around both of these. I spent a couple minutes looking and didn't find any scripts out there yet so I cobbled together a quick Drush command to help out here.

A post on Dave Winer's blog today reminded me that I've been meaning to write about the big flaw in the iPad. Actually it is a flaw in iOS but I notice it most on the iPad.

First a little background. I've had an iPad for as long as they've been around and eagerly stood in line for the iPad 2's new cameras. More than the first iPad the iPad 2 is a transformative device. It is comfortable to hold in bed to read, it has an amazing cover that just works and it's a bright white color instead of the heavy black. (How the color affects the perception of weight is another topic for another day.)

As awesome as the device is for me. It comes with a horrible flaw. This first came to light the very night I picked it up. After the headache of convincing my credit card issuer that yes it really was me staying in a hotel and buying an iPad at an Apple store I met a friend and we headed out for dinner. Being a Drupalcon dinner there were plenty of tech folks. Since the line for Chicago pizza was longer than the line for the iPad 2 we had plenty of time to talk. Eventually I succumbed to peer pressure and opened the box.

While peeling away the shrink wrap on the box (even the box is slightly smaller than the previous iPad) thoughts of taking a few pictures of the group with the new iPad came to mind. With a creative group of smart people what could we do with this new technology while waiting for a dinner with a week's caloric intake? And then all at once it happened.

A little over a year ago I blogged about moving to using a Drupal Planet tag to determine which posts about Drupal get posted on Drupal Planet. This is certainly better than having every Drupal related post appear in Drupal Planet. Why not send everything? Well there are a number of smaller posts that don't need to land in the hundreds of RSS inboxes around the globe but should still appear on my site.

However, the separate tag method has its drawbacks. For one thing it means my site now has, by default, two pages of Drupal posts. One contains all the posts and the other just those that went to Drupal Planet. Visitors to my site, however, don't need to see this distinction. In fact they are put off by it because it's a nonsensical differentiation for these visitors. Even somebody following a link from Drupal Planet is left with just a few posts and might not find some other smaller posts that could be helpful.

Given that the ability to post content and selectively send it to Drupal Planet is important and that I'd like to do so without hindering the usability of my website what's the solution. In true Drupal fashion there's a module for that. In this case it's the Flag module to be precise. Here's a quick look at this simple setup.

After installing and enabling the Flag module the next step is to create a Drupal Planet flag. Adding a flag starts with visiting Administration >> Site Building >> Flags >> Add (/admin/build/flags/add) on the site.

A couple of settings are key to making the Drupal Planet flag work well. First it should be a "Global" flag meaning that each node is either flagged or not and individual users can't set the flag differently on each node.