drupal

I use this trick all the time, practically every day in fact when I'm building a website. When you need to test a PHP snippet or you want to find out how something responds -- you want to see the structure that taxonomy_get_tree() returns, for example, or you forgot what the structure of the data returned from a multi-select form element is -- you can use this shortcut instead of going through the whole tedious process of writing a module or running the risk of blowing up your site by saving the PHP in a node.

As the maintainer of the Facebook-style Statuses module for the Drupal content management system, I like to read around the web and see what kinds of statistics and innovations I can find on comparable systems. This week, there was a gold mine that indicates that the "status movement" is going to grow its already expansive online presence exponentially.

To illustrate the point made in my last blog post, I'd like to offer some visual representations of the burst in social media adoption within Drupal. To start, here's the usage chart (with outliers corrected) for my Facebook-style Statuses module for Drupal. The figures shown in the chart are estimated to be about half of the actual adoption rate because of the way the figures are collected.

The social networking scene has been evolving over the last few years. Today, Facebook's 250 million users demonstrate beyond doubt that social networking is an important movement, and one that Drupal should pay special attention to as it evolves. But social networks are a different animal than conventional websites, and one must understand the differences in order to build a successful social network.

I was recently asked to download a series of images from a remote server. The image URLs were not known ahead of time, so to figure them out, I had to submit a search form, parse the results for a way to determine the file name, and then download the images onto the local server.