Info Drupal

Registration for DrupalCon Paris opened this weekend, and already several sponsors have claimed coveted top sponsorship spots for the September 1-5, 2009. Whether or not Sun will sponsor for the 5th time in a row is something I'll be checking into over the coming weeks.

Although the agenda and session schedule for DrupalCon Paris has not yet been posted, there is already some interesting content planned for the event, including full day immersion style training in Commercial Training tracks. Whether or not Sun sponsors this DrupalCon, I plan to make this one my 5th in a row.

In other DrupalCon news, San Francisco is making a bid for North America's DrupalCon in March 2010.

Almost 3 months have passed since Bonnie and her team performed the ultimate party trick: materializing a 1400 people conference out of thin air.

In the meantime many of you have been organizing camps, launching client projects, training new developers, contributing new modules and beautiful designs. You have been extending core, writing tests, attacking patch queues, reshaping D7 and madly sprinting to keep ahead of the impending code freeze.

You are awesome. Really. You are what drives the DrupalCon Paris team. You make us want to put together a DrupalCon to remember. All the hours we spend selecting the right wine, cheese and pastries and the nights away from our families hand-picking the perfect hotel rooms and apartments... it's all for you.

Because we love you.

Come check out what we have in store for you. The new paris2009.drupalcon.org is ready to take your orders. Be quick: the early bird ticket price isn't going to last forever...

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Chris Brookins is the Vice President of Engineering at Acquia, and talks about their Drupal MAMP stack, one-click installer (aka DAMP) as well as some of their other services and future plans with their hosted solutions of Fields and Gardens

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Many websites use asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) to provide all sorts of whizbang improvements, such as smooth interaction without page reloads. It took me a week to figure out how to do all the effects specified in our information architecture document: callouts, modal dialogs, in-page calendar navigation, and so on. I was pretty happy with what I did, considering it was my first serious work with JQuery.

Then my project manager said, "If I go to the event details page from the month view and hit back, it takes me to the day view instead."

I said, "Welcome to the wonderful world of AJAX. This might be tough to fix."

Making the back button work in AJAX applications requires a lot of effort. It doesn't look like people have a nice and clean solution for it yet, although there are a number of libraries that try to address the situation.

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In a little over two weeks we are going to have the first-ever conference dedicated entirely to open source documentation. It's called Writing Open Source and it's happening in Owen Sound, Canada the weekend of June 12-14.

The first day is conference-style set of talks by five industry leaders:

• Fame, Fortune and Technical Writing by Dru Lavigne, Author
• Information Architecture: panning for gold by Lynda Chiotti, Information Architect
• Learning styles and instructional design by Belinda Lopez, Instructional Designer
• Cat Herding 101: Community management in Open Source by Addison Berry, Documentation Lead, Drupal
• Licensing and Authoring by Megan Langley Grainger, Lawyer
  

The second day is an unconference including the following proposals:

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The CiviCRM events calendar seems to be getting quite crowded. Here are some upcoming events in the next few weeks:

• Wed May 27, 6:00 - 8:00 pm: :CiviCRM meetup in Washington DC
• Mon June 1, 6:00 - 8:00 pm: :CiviCRM meetup in San Francisco
• Thu June 4, 6:00 - 8:00 pm: :CiviCRM meetup in New York. We are looking for a space to host this meeting. If you can offer space for this meeting, please send email to lobo at yahoo dot com.
• June 23 - June 24: CiviCRM training camp in London, UK (paid event)

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I've rewritten Module Finder to support searching for keywords in any order. You're no longer limited to searching for exact phrases (though you still can if you want to). This makes finding what you're looking for easier and more Google-like. Of course, the results still update in real time, as you type.

Check out the full details over on Drupal Modules.

There is a hardening issue which provides a rare glimpse into the convoluted process a security patch needs to go through. Sack race

while coding is neither easy nor fun.

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One of the most useful features in Drupal is its cron hook. It allows modules to execute stuff at regular intervals when cron.php is run. This is used for many things, such as indexing new content that was added to the site, cleaning up old watchdog entries and many other things. In many cases, though cron hooks implemented by modules can cause added burden to a site. This is specially true if you run cron too frequently or too infrequently. An example for a client came up recently. They are using xmlsitemap, like many sites do.

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I recently learned about the fact that the Berkman Center for Internet and Society is using Drupal. The Berkman Center for Internet and Society is a research center founded at Harvard Law School whose fellows included internet gurus like David Weinberger, John Perry Barlow, Dave Winer, Jimmy Wales, Doc Searls and many more.

Other notable Drupal sites at Harvard are the website of the Science and Engineering department, the website of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (they aim to solve major problems that affect society and the well-being of human populations), the website of Initiative in Innovative Computing (a center of expertise in solving very difficult computing problems), and last but not least Harvard Magazine (a magazine that keeps 240,000 alumni connected to the university). Harvard Magazine is also using Mollom.

If you spend a lot of time exclusively in one Drupal version, you develop muscle memory for its API. This can be a pretty dangerous as I caught myself writing the following menu item while backporting a Drupal 6 module.

$items[] = array(
  'path' => 'admin/settings/foo',
  'access' => array('administer foo'),
  // ...
);

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Since I live in New England, and I adore any Drupal social events, I am of course attending Design 4 Drupal this June! I'm excited to have another large event to meet up with and talk with other Drupal enthusiasts.

I am eager to contribute what I can to help designers maximize the Drupal theme layer, so I submitted three sessions: introduction to version control, sustainable theming and image upload for content.

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About two years ago, I created a small module intended as a proof-of-concept for a Drupal base API to generate Google Gadgets, with a sample gadget providing direct access to the Drupal API search.

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Having just completed building another Drupal media streaming website and I thought I'd take the time to share some of my experiences, especially seeing as two of my most popular articles are about Drupal and media streaming (Drupal 6 video streaming roundup and Drupal 6 media streaming with Dash Media Player). Things however, have come along a fiar bit since I wrote those articles.

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SHARETHIS.addEntry({ "url": "http://www.mobiledrupal.com/content/siruna-drupalcamp-colorado-2009-mobile-drupal", "title": "Siruna @ Drupalcamp Colorado 2009 (Mobile Drupal)" }, {button:true} );

Drupalcamp colorado 2009 will take place the 27th and 28th of June, jointly with Ubercamp 2.0. As the biggest DrupalCamp of the region, this will be the place to be for Drupal developers who like to gather and share ideas.

Siruna has decided to sponsor DrupalCamp colorado with a bronze sponsorship and propose a session on Mobile Drupal (titled: The Basics of making a mobile site with Drupal). This session will contain basic information on making mobile websites, and will more particularly demonstrate two new Drupal modules that are currently in development:

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Want to go to Drupalcamp Colorado and Ubercamp? Don't have the cash or resources to get there? Commerce Guys is excited to announce that it will offer two scholarships to to Drupacamp Colorado/Ubercamp 2009. Any individual contributors to the Ubercart project may apply.

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DrupalCon Paris is now ready to take your orders.

On the menu: a familiar recipe, all fresh ingredients and medium spiced with a Parisian twist.

A Quick Revelation on PHP Command Line

I use Dreamhost for some of my personal sites and for some friends. Dreamhost's basic package is nothing too powerful, but I like them; they are cheap, responsive, responsible, green, and funny. I also love some Drush. But for the life of me, the newer versions of Drush were throwing weird errors, mostly involving syntax. But when I went into the code, I could not find any syntax errors. Some of the errors suggested I was using PHP4, but I was like "No, I am definitely using PHP5 with Dreamhost."

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There's been a great deal of discussion about RDFa, HTML5, and microdata the last few days, on email lists and elsewhere. I wanted to write down notes of the discussions here, for future reference. Those working issues with RDFa in Drupal 7 should pay particular attention, but the material is relevant to anyone incorporating RDFa.

Shane McCarron released a proposal for RDFa in HTML4, which is based on creating a DTD that extends support for RDFa in HTML4. He does address some issues related to the differences in how certain data is handled in HTML4 and XHTML, but for the most part, his document refers processing issues to the original RDFaSyntax document.

Philip Taylor responded with some questions, specifically about how xml:lang is handled by HTML5 parsers, as compared to XML parsers. His second concern was how to handle XMLLiteral in HTML5, because the assumption is that RDFa extractors in JavaScript would be getting their data from the DOM, not processing the characters in the page.

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Drupal is not generally taught in schools. Open source is largely off-topic in universities. Many, if not most, of the leaders in open source, including Drupal, are self-taught experts who bootstrapped their learning process. This doesn't mean they aren't bona fide computer scientists and programmers. On the contrary. But Drupal books aren't on many syllabi.

So we seek to grow the Drupalverse one event at a time, through monthly Drupal meetups ... and, once a year (and hopefully more frequently in the future), collaborating with other sponsors and several volunteers on throwing DrupalCamp Colorado, a two-day, hands-on Drupal conference/meet-up/sprint for people of all levels and all disciplines – designers and coders, website administrators and sysadmins, business people and freelancers, community leaders and entrepreneurs.

When: June 27-28
Cost: only $20

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