Latest shorts

At time of writing, Google employee Becky "technika" Gessler is performing a Drupal usability study which is streaming LIVE for anyone to watch. But you can also watch previous sessions using that link. According to her announcing blog post, there will be 7 participants and each session will be one hour. The previous Drupal usability study was four years ago at the University of Baltimore. Those results were used in the D7UX project to improve the user experience in Drupal 7.

If you use Google+ you may have noticed the excellent feedback feature that they offer. You can click on a button and highlight any part of the site. The site will then create a screenshot where you can add a description and send back as feedback. This could be a great usability improvement for bug tracking and providing feedback in any site. Luckily, some clever developer managed to reverse engineer this functionality. It is a javascript library (available at GitHub) which uses the browser and the canvas element to create a screenshot: html2canvas. Drupal module anyone?

The fourth Drupal Tech Talk was held in Rotterdam (@Hoppinger) yesterday, and included talks from Rolf van de Krol about Ctools (especially howto create plugins and make modules exportable via ctools) and Heine Deelstra about Drupal security (best practices and tips). Rolf demonstrated ctools by showing a cool module called "gnome planks" which allows easy control of blocks in contexts without users having to access context admin UI.

Great article by Domique de Cooman about howto setup SOLR with Drupal 7 and geospatial search which allows you to search within a distance radius using the location/gmap modules. Some of these modules (search API) are not available for D6, but there is another module available for Drupal 6 and an alternative approach by upgrading SOLR to 3.1.