fidzu : Drupal

Drupal development can feel a bit like "black magic" when you're getting started. Here's a high level guide aimed at beginners to help point them in the right direction.

DrupalCon Austin

• Where is the DrupalCon going to be
• Why Austin?
• When is it? (June 2-6)
  • With extended sprints before and after
• What does the tech community look like there?
• What does the Drupal community look like?
  • DrupalCamp Austin (June 21st 2013)
• What's the Drupal adoption look like in Austin?
  • It's strongly linked with adoption of other front and back end technologies. (node.js etc)
• Who's going to be the "boots on the ground" in Austin playing "host"?
  • Probably the same people that did it for Portland. Sponsors etc.
  • Four Kitchens, Astonish, Whole Foods, City of Austin, Volacci, etc.

It's Day 3 of DrupalCon, and so much has happened in the last 72 hours! From keynotes and two full days of recorded sessions, gallons of Stumptown, and let's be honest, sore feet from all the walking... well take a deep breath, because it's not over yet!

So, here's what happened yesterday...

We built a website to help the tornado victims in Oklahoma

On Tuesday night, a team of volunteer Drupal developers gathered in the DrupalCon Portland coder lounge to build a website to help FEMA help the victims of the Oklahoma tornado.

This organization theme was inspired by my talk with Kim McCluskey, the founder of SunInMyHeart.com, a charity fund. During his trip to Halong Bay, I have heard about what he did for SunInMyHeart to help orphanage children. So after the trip, I created this theme for organization and non profit purposes.

If you are interested in using this theme for your charity funds, please feel free to ask me and I will send you the package free-of-charge.

We have received many requests to download this theme. As we believe the use of this theme for your websites will bring alot of benefits to other people, especially for charity purposes, we have converted this theme to Drupal 7 and provide it free of charge. No more asking, just go to the theme page and click on the Download tab, you will be able to get it.

WYSIWYG in Drupal 8 is going to rock, simple as that. Practically all annoyances, complications and other stuff we have had to endure In Drupal 7 and earlier has been fixed. Read all about it and also watch Nate Haug's DrupalCon Portland 2013 session about the improvements here.

Unfortunately Nate also revealed that Drupal 8 will still automatically delete files when their usage gets zero. That is a bad thing and I'll explain why I strongly believe that.

Often times it is needed to create module specific custom tables to store persistent data. Drupal offers a set of hooks in connection to this. Most commonly used among these are hook_schema() and hook_update_N(). First hook, hook_schema() holds the structure of table in the form of PHP array.

This Drupalcon has in many respects been about winning the hearts of the user: There's a constant UX track installed for the first time at a Drupalcon; Dries has used his keynote to talk about the importance of improving the web experience management (with some UXy slides!), UX expert Karen McGrane was invited to give today's keynote on the subject of multi-device content.

Her point: Lots of the tools that we build give the user the illusion that the web is print. Instead of using WYSIWYG and other (misleading) instruments, users should be able to add metadata with longer legs, making content multi channel capable. And if there's just one thing you want to watch today: Chris Blow's magically athwart presentation on Design Ops:

Here is one more conversation I had at Drupal Camp Alpe-Adria in April, 2013. Ranko Marinic is from Croatia and has some great perspectives. He works as an IT consultant with a wide range of technologies and with Drupal "by night". He is studying economics and has become interested in the economic effects on local communities of implementing open source software. Ranko also talks about the moment he really started believing in open source as a social movement.

Just a quick note that the St. Louis Drupal Users group chose to reschedule our normal meetup, which occurs every third Thursday of the month, to next week, the week after Drupalcon Portland. Last year, we had a meetup right after Drupalcon Denver and had a great turn out. Those who weren't able to attend learned what it's like to attend Drupalcon, and also got valuable insight into the sessions, keynotes, and other events surrounding this great event. This year, we have at least a few known members who are here at Drupalcon (along with myself for the first time), who will be sharing their experience with the group at next week's meetup.

So if you live in or around the St. Louis area, or know someone who does, please be sure to join us this Thursday, from 7p-9p at the Missouri History Musuem (more details about the meetup can be found here).

Hey, that's not what I was thinking!

That's a very common complaint customers have with developers, when they receive the result of weeks or months of hard work. And it indicates a failure of planning.

We've found nothing that works better to avoid this result than to write up and discuss user stories in detail.

What's a user story? It's a description of the process a person goes through to get a specific result, and what happens along the way.