There has been talk for a long time between DC community members about starting back up a Drupal educational meeting in addition to our social outings in the area. This effort is the start of that movement into reality.

The purpose of this group is to provide educational sessions on the Drupal CMS by community members to help increase the size and quality of the Drupal knowledgeable market. It is intended to enhance, not replace or compete with, the current Drupal offerings in the DC metro area by focusing on training for ALL levels of Drupal experience. Since this is community driven, this is not for those that want a more fast paced or professional training environment.

To capture more of an audience not familiar with Drupal, I have setup a Meetup.com group to help gather and organize people. Sessions will be dually posted there and here on g.d.o to ensure the widest possible audience. I also setup a domain for that site, dcDrupalTraining.com.

If you are interested in Drupal training by the community, please sign-up at http://dcdrupaltraining.com

Also if you are interested in being a co-organizer, speaker/trainer, sponsor, or would like to help out in any way, let me know. The more people we have helping the better chance we have of this succeeding in the future.

I happened to stop by DrupalModules.com today and to my surprise I found that one of my Drupal modules, Better Formats, is currently #1 in the "Top Rated" list.

I know this means little but it is still nice to see one of my modules at the top of a list.

If you have never checked out the Better Formats module, I encourage you to do so. If you like it or hate let me know.

Better Formats 1.0 stable has been released. Actually, I it was released last month but I haven't got around to writing a post about it yet.

If you have not tried Better Formats out yet, I encourage you to give it a spin. If you have ever wanted/needed to tweek the format selection system in Drupal this is the module for you.

Here are some of its features:

• Set the default format per role.
• Set the default format per content type.
• Control allowed formats per content type.
• Hide format tips.
• Hide more format tips link.
• Hide format selection, forcing the default to be used.
• Expand the selection fieldset by default.
• Disable the expand/collapse of the selection fieldset.
• Set selection fieldset title.
• Set more format tips link text.
• Set default formats for nodes and comments separately.
• Sensible defaults and fail overs for ease of use.
• Works with CCK textareas.
• Works with Panels comment form.
• i18n module support for user defined strings.

Below is a screenshot of one the configuration screens.

I am an active Drupal maintainer. I always keep my issue queues clean so report any bugs you find or features you want and I will take care of them.

This is no longer required. Drupal.org now shows numbers normally.

Do you have a Drupal module or theme on drupal.org?

Have you ever wondered how successful it is?

Well since Drupal started using the Update Status module (in contrib for D5 and in core for D6), drupal.org has some great statistics on module/theme anonymous usage by sites that choose to running the module.

At the bottom of every project page is a link labeled "View usage statistics" that will take you to detailed stats for the project. You can also view the complete stats list of all projects on drupal.org.

When viewing that complete list though, I have always wondered how my project was doing in comparison to others. And while the list is ordered nicely the rows are not numbered so I have just guessed if was moving up or down the list. Does the number really matter? Not really. Whether you call it vanity or project managment, I think that it helps give perspective.

Since Drupal uses jQuery, I wrote a little snippet that puts the numbers in the rows and thought it might be useful to to others.

$i = 1; 
$('#project-usage-all-projects tbody tr td a').each(function() {
  $(this).before('<strong>' + $i++ + ' ~ </strong>');
});

You can easily run the snippet on the page if you have Firebug with its console.