I proposed 3 sessions for Drupalcon Paris at the beginning of September, and just hope I can get one in. There's one on Debugging Drupal, one on Ctools/Panels Plugins, and one on Upgrade-proofing your site. Looks like they're all kind of low in the running, but they've all gotten some votes. Surprisingly the one that I thought would be the lowest ranked is the highest - the "Upgrade-Proof Your Site: Best Practices to Avoid Major Version Upgrade Headaches".

If you're going and you like any of these topics, thanks for your VOTE!

My session on AHAH in Drupal got accepted for next week's Drupal Camp Colorado in Denver. So it's time to get it ready. (Update: see the materials here.

AHAH (Asynchronous HTML and HTTP) is a technology built into the Drupal Forms API which allows for updates of a form without doing a full page refresh, and it makes some things really nice. All of the "add to cart" and similar behaviors in the Amazon Store module (try it at alonovo.com/amazon_store) are done with AHAH, meaning that you can add to cart and not end up on another page, and not have a long wait.

Basically, pressing a button causes a simple call back to the web server for replacement elements for the form. Instead of submitting the whole page to the webserver and then reprocessing and redisplaying it, only the part that needs to be updated (like your message that an item was added to the cart) has to be done.

Warmshowers.org is my biggest site, with more than 7500 members, and almost certainly the most useful. It's a reciprocal hospitality site for touring cyclists - people offer touring cyclists a place to stay and a shower. It's been in English for years, but that cuts out a significant part of the world's population, and it means that options for cyclists in Latin America and several other places in the world have been more limited than they ought to be.

But we just launched es.warmshowers.org, a Drupal 6 version with all the key parts internationalized and then localized into Spanish. We're very proud of this accomplishment!

It took a lot of work by a lot of people to do this. First, Chris Russo nearly singlehandedly upgraded the site to Drupal 6, a significant accomplishment because of the custom modules we have developed for the site. Then we began learning how to do all of the localization into Spanish, and learning how to get a group together to do the translation.

There are probably four parts to the translation of the site:

For the Amazon_store Drupal module I've been working on for Alonovo.com, I set up several of the pages to use Panels plugins. But there isn't a lot of documentation on how to do this, so I had to dive in and learn it from the examples available in the code. The result was a set of examples of how an drupal module can implement panes, the Panels Plugin Example which is now available on on Drupal.org.  There are examples of content_type, argument, context, and relationship plugins.  I'm hoping that others will review the code and improve it.