acquia drupal planet

Smashing magazine recently published an article titled "10 useful usability findings & guidelines." There's a lot of good information here for both core committers and themers.

Of the findings, I found myself disagreeing with only one - "Most users do not scroll." In my testing, I've found the opposite - so long as false bottoms are not present. To avoid false bottoms, make sure content or design elements run past the bottom of your browser. See illustration below.

As of the final Drupalcon Paris code sprint, http://groups.drupal.org was upgraded to Drupal 6, and its site search has also started running on Apache Solr. Since last summer we have used a scrubbed groups.drupal.org database dump which we updated to Drupal 6.x as a test set for Apache Solr Search Integration functionality and screen shots. Having it live on the groups site is great because we've been able to see for months the kind of improved search results that are possible, but frustratingly unable until now to access them in real life.

The groups.drupal.org upgrade was only one of the exciting developments, lively BoFs, or informative presentations around the integration of Apache Solr with Drupal last week. I enjoyed hearing Mike O'Conner's talk about his efforts to integrate Solr search with Ubercart, and several teams discussed their plans to use Apache Solr for existing sites or upcoming projects.

I just came back from Drupalcon Paris this week. It was an action packed conference with lots discussed and many things done to further Drupal's reach. In my case, I've submitted sessions to teach people to write modules the right way, theme Drupal in minutes and translate Drupal interfaces to multiple languages. Thankfully only this last submission was accepted, but that was about a new service on drupal.org which first needed to launch. Way to get people to advance services on Drupal.org!

Last week at DrupalCon Paris, we demonstrated a pre-alpha version of Drupal Gardens, which will allow non-technical users to go from design to online with a powerful Drupal 7 social publishing website in a matter of hours instead of days. The Acquia engineering team has been hard at work implementing Gardens on top of Drupal 7 and we wanted to show a small taste of things to come.