Drupal.geek.nz Bevan on drupal, usability, web, open source, tech...

Kathryn Ryan of Radio NZ interviewed Don Christie, president of the NZ Open Source Society and Kevin Ackhurst, managing director of Microsoft NZ on Microsoft's failure to renew their multi-million dollar contract with the NZ government.  The interviews and Kathryn's questions are intense and very interesting as Don Christie defends the government's choice to break out of a reliance on Microsoft's products, and Kevin Ackhurst tries to defend Microsoft's position, touting it as a success.
Highlights for me were Kevin Ackhursts rehearsed tape-recorder responses that avoid answering Kathryn's questions, and Kathryn's obvious frustration with his failure to state things as they are.  It's clear that Microsoft wants to paint this as a success story, but is failing pretty badly.
I love Don Christie's "Microsoft software is like a virus..." which reminds me of Microsoft's "linux is a cancer" statements.
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It is not often I blog off topic, so I hope that you can appreciate how important this is, and spare a few minutes to save your own future, your children's and grandchildren's futures and home planet.

Would you just stand around and watch as your home burned down with your children and pets inside? No? So please don't stand around and watch while we destroy our home planet.

This December, world leaders, including New Zealand prim minister John Key, will meet in Copenhagen to decide what the world should do about climate change. John needs our support in order to do the right thing in Copenhagen. Please Sign On today. This is a great chance to make a difference.

Over 50,000 New Zealanders have already Signed On, from Lucy Lawless, Stephen Tindall and Cliff Curtis through to Rhys Darby and of course, me too!

If you don't live in NZ, find out what you can do locally. Write to your local politicians, heads of state or ask Greenpeace in your country what you can do.

Don't sit around and do nothing. How are you going answer to your children when they ask why you didn't do anything about climate change before it was too late?

There is an edition of the International Herald Tribune published 6 months in the future which demonstrates the importance of having a voice NOW.

Click the following link to sign on now http://www.signon.org.nz/join-me/77782406

Our unborn children and grandchildren are saying thank you.

Earlier this year Jenn, Owen and I worked on a proposal for Greenpeace NZ. CivicActions didn't win the contract, but the website has just launched.

SignOn.org.nz – a Drupal site – was implemented by Catalyst IT, a FLOSS software shop in Wellington New Zealand which employs Josh "fiasco" Waihi, Drupal 7 PostgreSQL maintainer and NZ IT Rockstar 2009 winner and Brenda "shiny" Wallace, Drupal contributor.

Catalyst has done an excellent job and the campaign was featured in NZ's national Sunday newspaper a couple of weeks ago.

They've got many Kiwi celebrities on for the campaign, some which are known internationally too; Most notably Lucy Lawless (Xena Warrior Princess) and Keisha Castle Hughes (From Whale Rider and award-winning other films).

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The NZ SSC has rejected Microsoft's offers for a new licensing contract. This is a big loss for Microsoft (Though I'm sure MS would have you believe otherwise and try to paint the picture back to front) and big win for NZ Government and NZ's IT industry.
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Vertical tabs are finally in Drupal core!

Screenshot of vertical tabs on an 'Article Edit' page in Drupal 7.

A week ago Angie "webchick" Byron committed a large patch from #323112 Vertical Tabs to Drupal 7 core. This change is quite possibly the most significant usability enhancement to Drupal 7 to date. Two of the three formal usability tests did usability testing with vertical tabs and reported positively.

Screenshot of a 'Story Edit' page in Drupal 6, before vertical tabs.

UPDATE: Rob Loach has created a patch to implement vertical tabs on the node-type form.

UPDATE: See other issues about vertical tabs in Drupal core .

What is more interesting about this however, is the process, time and effort that it took to get this change into Drupal core. It all started over a year ago, well before DrupalCon Boston 2008 even before Drupal 6 had a stable release. The discussion around part of that patch goes back as far as November 2007! Along the way countless people have been involved in many discussions, worked on heaps of mockups, lots of prototypes, and loads of code.

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While there were many great presentations at DrupalCon DC, Young Hahn's Limitations of the Drupal Theme Layer was the only one that blew me away. Most of the session attendees and readers of the related blog post seem to miss his main point; a proposal for a rule-based theme layer.

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The jQuery.dashboard() plugin for jQuery provides a framework that makes it easy for web application developers to create highly configurable dashboard-like user interfaces (similar to iGoogle) in their web applications. Jump straight to the demo.

jQuery.dashboard() requires jQuery UI 1.7's (the new 1.6rc6) Sortable library, which in turn requires jQuery UI Draggable, core and jQuery 1.3.

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UPDATE

Internet Blackout NZ is thus far successful. We successfully delayed changes to Section 92A for 4 weeks! I expect, and we are all hopeful, that this will give the new government time to fully understand their #$@%-up, and dismiss the law change entirely.

The original post follows, and here is what drupal.geek.nz looked like during the week of February 16-23:

Click for full size

It's a blackout!

In response to the proposal of the worlds harshest copyright infringement laws, many are protesting with a blackout. Not sure what my website used to look like?

Do you think it's fair that your internet can be disconnected if your provider suspects you might have downloaded copyright-infringing material, without proof?

How can you help?

• Visit CreativeFreedom.org.nz
• Write to your MP
• Put a banner on your website
• Blog about it
• Tweet about it
• Talk about it
• Ask what your ISP is doing to protest it
• Blackout your twitter/facebook/other avatar
• Blackout your website

I created the Translation Links module as a way of making translations of nodes easily accessible on partially translated multi-lingual websites. Such websites will have Drupal 6 core's Content Translation module enabled, but not many or perhaps any of i18n and it's modules that enable multi-lingual features for menus, views and taxonomy.

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Now that I have been a full-time Drupal Developer for a couple of years, and a part-time Drupal developer for a year before that, I am beginning to recognize recurring patterns and problems in Drupal projects and people's experiences with Drupal. This is a report on my experiences, and a summary of learned lessons and recommendations for those entertaining the idea of a financially-driven Drupal project.

Executive Summary

1. Don't undertake a Drupal project without, at the very least, someone on the team or available to the team, to check solutions are architected the Drupal way, monitor development for employment of good practices, look for learning opportunities for the less-experienced Drupal developers on the team, and be available in a timely manner to answer the question What would Drupal do?.
2. Don't underestimate the cost of learning Drupal. It is almost always greater than the difference in price between experienced and inexperienced Drupal shops or developers.
3. If you do not have an experienced Drupaler on your project's team, expect it to go several times over budget, and/or be under-delivered. Most of the time it will be cheaper to have the developers use the tool they already know.

Introduction

As more and more people discover and decide to use Drupal, the more and more popular it becomes. Given the way a crowd-attracts-a-crowd, especially with free and open source software, Drupal is quite clearly set to become the dominant open source web CMS in the professional and business-oriented web-development markets – if not the dominant CMS of both open source and proprietary options. It's also likely that Drupal will dominate in the amateur and hobbyiest markets too, when usability bugs get ironed out with a little more time and a couple more Drupal versions.

Many non-Drupal web development shops are recognizing this, and are beginning to realize that it's too expensive to maintain their own proprietary CMS, or – worse – maintain skills in multiple different CMS, when one could rule them all, and even do a better job.

The Problem

Businesses and individuals seeking websites also recognize this. In fact, many clients looking for a web shop have already decided they want their website to use Drupal. Instead of shopping for a general solution provider, they often look for a Drupal developer or Drupal shop.

I have seen this many times now, always with one of the two following results;

• They find an experienced Drupal developer, recognize the value and importance of siad Drupal developer's experience and role in the project, and get them involved.
• They don't find (or find, but can't afford) a Drupal developer or shop, fail to recognize the importance of this, and contract web developer or web shop with little or no experience.

Unfortunately – because of the high demand for experienced Drupalers – most end up in the last category. This is understandable, given that most clients seeking someone to build their website do so because they lack the expertise to do it themselves – they are therefore not likely to understand that – even with software, including Drupal – a tool is only as useful as the skills and experience of it's user.

This always – with no exception – ends up leaving the developers running frustratedly in circles, and the client burned with an under-delivered and over-budget product.

I have seen a number of non-Drupal web development shops talked in to using Drupal for the project because it was what the client wanted. The developers or shop often tell clients that "Drupal is a PHP application, and we're a PHP shop, so we can do Drupal". Even the developers often fail to recognize that Drupal is worthless to them until they have learned "the Drupal way", have experience with Drupal, have become self-dependent Drupal learners and can confidently answer the question What would Drupal do?. For most web development shops this is a significant amount of resources to commit. In fact for most run-of-the-mill shops, which are typically small businesses of 5-15 persons, it's too-large an investment.

The Solution

And indeed it is a large investment – after working full time with Drupal for a couple of years now, I'm still learning new things about Drupal just about daily. And there is no possible way any person or even small group of people can recall, understand and know how to use even half of the almost-4000 contributed modules.

The solution is to develop mentoring relationships. Every Drupal project needs at least one person who is sufficiently experienced with Drupal such that he or she can guide other developers through the project, showing them what Drupal would do. Finding this mentor or Drupal developer is key to the success of any Drupal project with any non-trivial amount of configuration and code.

It is the responsibility of project stakeholders to find these people. It is also the responsibility of web developers to avail themselves in a mentoring capacity to less-experienced Drupal developers.

It's not User Testing!
A number of times recently I have heard folk in the Drupal community and elsewhere talk about User Testing. While many people use this term and it is not strictly incorrect it is misleading and also far from correct A better term to use is Usability testing or UI testing. Here's why;
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I recently needed to purchase two replacement batteries for Apple laptops. One for a MacBook 13-inch white, and one for a MacBook Pro 17-inch. I decided to purchase third-party batteries since the saving was about 30% and they came with a 12-month warranty. While I had the original and third-party replacement batteries in one place, I decided to snap some photos so that others can see the differences between Apple's replacement batteries and third-party ones.

The photos are on flickr;

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Microsoft announced in January that Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) would be standards-compliant, but only if you included a special meta tag or http header indicating that the page should be rendered in standards compliance mode. The uproar from the standards community led Microsoft to change the default behavior of IE8. Now IE8 will render all pages in standards mode by default, unless you specify otherwise with the X-UA-Compatible meta tag or http header. Interestingly, the Microsoft followers did not seem to feel short-changed as the standards advocates had.
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