Find the shiny new release candidate on http://drupal.org/drupal-4.7.0-rc1

Why am I mentioning it here ? Well, much like many others, I contributed bug reports, some patches, and it's great to see the project actually nearing its 4.7 landmark.

Maybe it will even allow the new version of Riff News to go online in time.

A few days ago, the designer working on our sites asked me stats about the browsers visiting the sites. She already had the general data available, but this time what she wanted was the info about the "other" browsers.

Which is quite true: once a site has been designed to standards and the quirks of the two or three major choices, work has to be spent on the non-standard non-mainstream ones. But to what extent ? Here are the data.

As I've been working with Drupal since last august, a recent discussion with the designer for our new sites made me wonder how the cost of time was distributed during a project like this one. What portion of the time has been spent getting up to speed on Drupal itself, on developing/maintaining Open Source modules, on creating the value-added private code, on miscellaneous tools and integration tasks, and eventually on the content itself. Here are the results:

Zend Studio is a convenient environment to code in PHP, which is why many Drupal developers are using it. But some settings are necessary to ease its use, due to the specific extensions Drupal uses.

Ofttimes, when developing a site, you can be led to create or import a large number of custom nodes, for instance flexinodes, only to have to delete them later on. Doing it by hand in admin/content is inconvenient when the number of nodes is large, and for custom nodes like flexinodes, the exact entries to delete in the various Drupal tables may not be obvious. Time for a workaround.

Are you aware of what you're pasting from a browser's rendition of a page ?

XML-RPC is a very simple RPC service, but it may not be obvious how to provide it from Drupal. Here's how.

Some sites include a list of terms recently searched for. I've created a patch for Drupal adding this functionality to the current 4.6.x search module.

Taxonomy. That's what sets Drupal apart, and makes it so much more useful than many of its alternatives. But it's unduly intimidating at first: let's peek under the hood to see how to take advantage of it.

Tired of three lines tabs that only give the main riff ? Here's my own transcription of the version of U2's New Year's Day as featured on the "War" album.