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

The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) is an organization that seeks out and tests innovations in journalism to find the best solutions for use in the real world.

Their new Palantir-developed Drupal website replaces a custom PHP website and two WordPress.com blogs. Part of our assignment involved migrating content from RJI's WordPress blogs into Drupal.

Initially, we intended to do this using the WordPress Import module. However WordPress Import is a stand-alone module that does not integrate with CCK fields, meaning that you cannot import WordPress post categories or authors as CCK text or node-reference fields. It also has limited options for importing files attached to WordPress posts.

To solve this problem, we created WordPress XML for Feeds, a module that allows Drupal's Feeds module to parse the WordPress export file (WXR). It uses a map to create Drupal nodes (or other entities) in the same way that Feeds uses a map to create Drupal nodes from an RSS feed. This allows site developers to create an arbitrary map that tells Feeds module where and how to store the WordPress post's data in Drupal (e.g., as a CCK field, as a property on the Drupal node, or as some other entity).

2010 has been a big year for the Drupal Association. Early in the year new members were brought on and the Board of Directors saw some changes. But most noteworthy is what the Drupal Association did for the Drupal community;

Drupal.org Redesign Completion

Drupal.org has a new look and feel. If you have not seen it (have you been under a rock!?) go check out Drupal.org right now!

It took a few years and many iterations and volunteers, and even that was not enough. This year the Drupal Association came to the party with funding to finish the job. Contracts went to tender and were won by Neil Drumm, Achieve Internet and 3281d Consulting.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the Drupal.org redesign for all your hard work and effort to pull this off. And especially thank you to the Drupal Association for funding the last several miles that could not be covered by volunteers alone.

Drupal.org will never be the same again! Find out what is next for Drupal.org.

DrupalCon San Francisco

Photo by Kathleen Murtagh

How could we ever forget? DrupalCon San Francisco, was epic. By all measures, it was the largest and most spectacular Drupal event yet.

The Drupal Association bootstrapped the funding and locked in critical contracts in order to secure the venue and other services. Many of the DrupalCon San Francisco committee members also serve the Drupal Association. The Drupal Association managed all the finances for the event and coordinated the local team and service providers with the rest of the Drupal community.

And that is just the beginning of what the Drupal Association did to make DrupalCon San Francisco a reality!

Git Migration

Sam Boyer. Photo by Fox

The Drupal Association recognized the urgency to update Drupal.org's version control system (currently CVS).

Drupal has an active, amazingly awesome and amiable community. One of the reasons for this, is that Drupal.org is our home. It has everything Drupal developers need, all in one place. However the last couple of years has seen a trend for contributions to be distributed elsewhere.

The Drupal Association realised that if Drupal.org did not offer modern version control and code-distribution tools, then Drupal.org would cease to be a central repository for contributed Drupal code. And that would ultimately be damaging to the community and the project.

So earlier this year, the Drupal Association hired Sam Boyer to work on detailed planning and foundation work in preparation for the migration of Drupal's gigantic CVS repository, including about 9000 contributed themes modules and other projects, to Git.

This work is underway and is making good progress, but has some way to go yet. Sam is leading the effort but the success of the project is highly dependent on volunteer effort too. You can get involved on g.d.o.

Paid Staff

Early in the year, Treasurer Jacob Redding was hired as full-time General Manager for the Drupal Association. More recently, the Drupal Association hired Neil Kent as a Events Manager and Megan Sanicki as Sponsor Wrangler (Fundraising Manager).

Jacob does a wide range of tasks including managing financial assets and tasks, lawyers, accountants, contracts, bills, Drupal Association meetings and boot load of other tasks that arise.

Neil is working hard on a range of administrative, logistic and financial tasks related to DrupalCon Copenhagen 2010 and DrupalCon Chicago 2011, as well as trying to document it all and make DrupalCon production more sustainable, so that it is not so much work to reproduce DrupalCon in a new location every 6 months.

Megan is working on raising funds and managing relationships with past, future and potential sponsors, for both DrupalCon and other projects of the Drupal Association. She is also exploring new avenues of revenue.

These funds allow the Association to;

• pay salaries of staff
• fund hardware that keeps Drupal.org online
• fund projects like the Drupal.org redesign and the Git migration
• pay contractors to keep Drupal's websites up to date, secure and useful to the community

Megan's, Neil's and Jacob's responsibilities are critical to the health of the Drupal Association. Which is in turn, critical to the Drupal community and the resources they depend upon, such as Drupal.org and many other infrastructure services.

Legal and Financial Achievements

Through the careful management of Jacob Redding, the Drupal Association has managed to achieve all of this with less than 25% overhead. That is incredibly low for any non-profit or trade organisation.

DrupalCon Inc. received its 501c3 (not for profit) status, which allowed tens of thousands of dollars to be put right back into the Drupal community. This was a major process to work through the processes of the Internal Revenue Service agency of the US government.

Additionally, the Drupal Association;

• got payment time for invoices down to less than 30 days (from more than 60)
• turned over more than a million US dollars
• registered for tax purposes in four countries
• was a fiscal agent for 3 major DrupalCamps in the US; NYC, Colorado and Chicago

Mission Statement

Another important achievement of 2010 was updating our mission statement. We began this process in April in San Francisco at our full-day-long meeting, then iterated on it over the following months to reach the final wording.

You can read more about the process and work that went into the missions statement in this blog post by Robert Douglass. Or you can just skip to the result;

Mission Statement

The Drupal Association fosters and supports the Drupal software project, the community and its growth.

The Drupal Association does this by:

1. Maintaining the hardware and software infrastructure of Drupal.org and other community sites.
2. Empowering the Drupal community to participate in and contribute to the project.
3. Protecting the GPL source code of the Drupal project and its community contributions.
4. Protecting the Drupal project and community through legal work and advocacy.
5. Organizing and promoting worldwide events.
6. Communicating the benefits of the Drupal software.

The mission statement helps guide the Drupal Association in it's decision-making, and makes it clear to the community what the Drupal Association does and does not do.

Priorities

Another of the main outcomes of the full-day-long meeting in San Francisco was a list of the five highest priority goals;

1. Completing the implementation of the Drupal.org redesign
2. Continuing to build a sustainable model for DrupalCons
3. Improving internal processes and decision-making
4. Hiring permanent staff to help the DA better execute on its initiatives
5. Improving the technical infrastructure of drupal.org

We completed items 1 and 4. Double yay!

We made excellent progress on item 2, including hiring an Events Manager and outsourcing website development to Growing Venture Solutions. However scaling the production of 3000-person bi-annual events is a large project that will take time and never be completely finished.

Similarly, item 5 is never really "done". Maintaining Drupal.org hardware, software and infrastructure is a never-ending job that volunteers work at tirelessly and with very little thanks from the hundreds of thousands of members and visitors to Drupal.org. The Drupal Association applauds their hard work and thanks them sincerely. The Drupal Association funds some of this work from time to time when volunteered time is not sufficient, and also pays for hardware and expenses required for the task.

As for item 3, the mission statement is one significant achievement towards this goal, but there is a lot more to it than that. Additionally, the Drupal Association has hired a consultant experienced with non-profit organisations to help us determine changes to structure that will help us achieve this goal. We are looking forward to report the changes that we decide to implement and how this will improve the efficiency of the Drupal Association to better serve the Drupal community.

Thank You!

Thank you for empowering the Drupal Association with your financial contributions and volunteer effort. You can continue to donate to the Drupal Association by;

• sponsoring DrupalCon
• becoming a member
• advertising on Drupal.org
• inquiring about other engagements such as funding for a specific feature you would like to see on Drupal.org

Today is a new beginning. Today is my first day at Palantir.net. I am now a "Palantiri"! (That's Palantiri-speak for someone who works at Palantir.net. ;)

Palantir.net is a high-end Drupal consulting & services company based in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Palantir.net has a great team of Drupal developers and contributors, including some friends and past colleagues from CivicActions and NowPublic. And I am excited to be a part of that team!

"Bevan joins our Front-end Development (FED) team as a senior front-end developer. A permanent member of the Drupal Association, Bevan is an active community member and a jack-of-all-Drupal-trades with expertise in theming, Javascript, and module development.

— Palantir.net/blog

This means that I will be traveling back to North America again in June already, for a one-week long Palantir on-site, DrupalCamp Chicago and one-week working in-house in Palantir's offices.

My title at Palantir.net is "Senior Front End Developer" (aka "themer", or "FED").

To new beginnings...

I scheduled the "tpl.phps are not real templates" session and discussion as a BoF session on Wednesday at 11am in room 212 at DrupalCon San Francisco.

From my original post;

"Drupal's template files (*.tpl.php) are not really templates. This is what my DrupalCon core developer summit submission is about. The slides briefly explain why tpl.phps are not real templates, what real templates are, why this is a problem for the Drupal project and community, and mentions some possible solutions to the problem. It also provides some basic guidelines as a starting point for tpl.php standards, should that be pursued."

Links

• Download the slides here.
• Read the discussion to date.

The new year (this post is a little late!) has brought me new opportunities and some new roles;

• As of 21 December 2009, I am a front end Drupal software engineer at NowPublic Technologies Inc, aka NowPublic.com (Clarity Digital Group and Examiner.com).
• As of 3 March 2010, I am a permanent member on the staff of the Drupal Association.

New job at NowPublic

At NowPublic I work on front end theming and customizations for NowPublic.com and Scan — a realtime twitter and social media tracker for NowPublic.com, Examiner.com, WashingtonExaminer.com, SFexaminer.com and The Vancouver Sun.

Currently I am the skeleton dev team that maintains NowPublic.com, while the rest of the NowPublic dev team works on the Examiner.com migration to Drupal 7. Though I spend most of my dev time in the depths of the javascript and theme layer of Scan.

One of the most exciting things about this job is that I am able to work with an amazing team of developers including some other CivicActions alumni, whom I respect and seek to learn from. Such as chx, kkaefer, douggreen and Morbus Iff and many others.

Vancouver

The new job at NowPublic saw me relocate to Vancouver for two and a half months, from just after DrupalSouth Wellington

at the end of January, until DrupalCon San Francisco, this week.

Vancouver has been astounding! Some highlights of my first trip ever to Canada and my stay in Vancouver include;

• meeting fun people and making great friends
• the winter olympics, especially watching Canada;
  • win the first ever olympic gold on home soil
  • win more gold medals than any country in any winter olympics ever
  • defeat the USA in the ice hockey finals; a heart-stopping match with a golden-goal by Canada's favourite player – Sidney Crosby – in overtime
  • celebrate unreservedly and fanatically — even as crazily as I remember Argentines celebrating World cup football match victories on the streets of Buenos Aires in 2006

  

• meeting the NZ winter olympic team on the streets of Vancouver, by accident
• snowboarding at Mt Baker, Whistler-Blackcomb and Grouse Mountain
• cycling around Stanley park
• visiting Victoria, now one of my favourite cities

Returning to New Zealand

This Friday 16 April I depart Vancouver for San Francisco, where I will stay with the Clarity Digital Group developer team at Westin Hotel Market street for 8 days, for the Drupal core developer summit, DrupalCon SF, code sprints, meetings, social events, and a Drupal Association retreat.

Finally, on April 26 (after losing April 25 to the date line) I will arrive home to Christchurch NZ to stay indefinitely. It will be exactly 8 months since my wife and I departed Christchurch for DrupalCon Paris and a journey across 5 continents. I am looking forward to having a home (when we find and rent one!) and our bed back.

Drupal Association

Being elected onto the Drupal Association's General Assembly was largely unexpected and came as a surprise to me. I have been a core part of the DrupalCon Asia-Pacific Organisers (DCAPO) group on groups.drupal.org since it started in September 2009 and collaborated a little with Cary Gordon (Drupal Association Board, Director of Events) over that time. Cary asked me to join the Drupal Association to help centralise international DrupalCon coordination efforts (as per the events plan) and provide the association with a more internationalised perspective.

It is still early days at the association, but my goal (as per my application) at the Drupal Association is to empower a team to organise and run a DrupalCon somewhere in the Asia-Pacific region, hopefully around 2011. There are some ideas and projects at the association to do with scholarships and mini-conferences — but I will save that for another time, when it is ready.

NZ government is negotiating a trade act that will impact your civil liberties. And they are doing it behind our backs — in secret!

"ACTA is a controversial international treaty that impacts digital rights and is being negotiated in secret meetings. ACTA is proposed as a plurilateral trade agreement for establishing international standards on intellectual property rights enforcement. It is being negotiated between the US, Canada, Japan, the European Union, South Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand. Unfortunately, the negotiations have extended beyond trade and physical counterfeiting to potentially cover non-commercial infringement of copyright material by ordinary citizens and issues of digital rights management." — PublicACTA.org.nz

As well as the violating our democratic principles, and the deceitful name of the treaty, ACTA aims to bring back the "draconian" (to quote prime minister John Keys) S92a laws we fought hard against last year with the NZ Internet Blackout.

The PublicACTA event last Saturday produced "The Wellington Declaration". You can and should read the declaration and sign it by Tuesday morning NZ time.

Sign the Wellington Declaration Now!

jQuery for Designers and Themers is a fun interactive session on getting started with jQuery. It is targeted at designers and themers but is suitable for anyone with a decent understanding of HTML and CSS — no programming experience is necessary. It doesn't include any PHP, and only basic programming concepts are introduced.

If you want to see this session at DrupalCon San Francisco you'll need to vote on it here it is at 8:30am on Tuesday 20 April in room 307 (Commerce guys) at DrupalCon SF.

I've presented sessions like this one twice before. The first time at DrupalCon Paris September 2009, and the second time at DrupalSouth Wellington January 2010, where it was successful and well received and both times.

Sample code is available at Drupal.org/Project/jQ4DaT and slides are available at TinyURL.com/jQuery-Designers (Google Docs). (They will be updated.)

Some other related or similar sessions include;

• AJAX and Javascript in Drupal7 (for developers) | DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 by Randy Fay, Rob Loach and Katherine Bailey.
• jQuery, Views, and View Themeing | DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 by Jonathan Rowny

DrupalSouth registrations opened a couple of days ago and there are already almost 30 registered attendees! Capacity is limited to 100 and it is expected to sell out, so get in quick!

Registration costs just $67.50 NZD including GST ($60 for non-NZ businesses) and includes lunch, coffee and tea on both days – not to mention access to a great line up of speakers and sessions on awesome topics. Here is the full announcement;

DrupalSouth Wellington 2010 is the New Zealand Drupal event. It will be NZ's largest ever gathering of Drupal developers, designers, contributers and business folk. DrupalSouth Wellington will be on Saturday and Sunday 23-24 January — just after Linux.conf.au Wellington.

DrupalSouth features some great speakers and attendees from NZ and abroad, including

• Angela Byron (webchick); Drupal 7 core committer, Drupal community nurturer, and co-author of Using Drupal
• Emma Jane Hogbin (emmajane); co-author of Front End Drupal, uber-documenter, Drupal evangelist/speaker and community all-rounder
• Liz Henry (lizhenry), BlogHer.com developer — the largest community for women bloggers, built on Drupal since 2006

Registration costs just $67.50 NZD including GST ($60 for non-NZ businesses) and includes lunch, coffee and tea on both days – not to mention access to a great line up of speakers and sessions on awesome topics. The full schedule is coming soon!

Such a great price for such a high-quality event has only been possible thanks to our generous sponsors, including;

• Xplain Technology Hosting; Web hosting optimized for Drupal
• Sparks Interactive; Straight talking, successful work, simple equation.
• .nz; .nz is our home
• Em Space; Em Space is a web agency in Melbourne, Australia. We build Drupal websites for enterprise, government and not-for-profit
• Catalyst IT; Specialists in Open Source Technologies
• Egressive; Building superior computing solutions powered by Linux and Drupal
• Open Query; Exceptional Services for MySQL and MariaDB at a Fixed Budget
• Fuzion; connect : campaign : communicate.

DrupalSouth Wellington will be at the upstairs function room at Mac's Brewery Bar & Restaurant, on Wellington City's waterfront, and just a few hundred metres from Linux.conf.au at the Wellington Convention Centre.

DrupalSouth Wellington will be the second event of it's kind. The first was DrupalSouth Christchurch November 2008.

Config to Code module for Drupal 5 makes it easy to deploy new views and panels and to version-control changes to existing ones with a source code repository like subversion. It makes it quick and easy to move configured views and panels in the database to code, then safely delete the configured views from the database and finally, expose the views and panels in code back to their respective modules. It is extensible for other types of configurations that can be stored both in database and code.

Config to Code module solves some of the deployment issues that Features module also solves. Though Features solves an awful lot more problems than Config to Code does, and is more comprehensive. Since Features is only for Drupal 6, Config to Code is still a useful tool for Drupal 5 websites.

Here is a short screencast demonstrating Config to Code module.

We are excited to announce the DrupalCon Asia-Pacific Organisers group. DCAPO intends to lay foundations that will facilitate international Drupal Conferences (DrupalCons) in the Asia-Pacific region.

DCAPO welcomes and needs input and assistance from Drupal users and communities throughout the Asia-Pacific region. DrupalCons are a lot of work, and are only possible through the community's effort. Please join the DCAPO group to share your opinions and experience, volunteer your time, or nominate yourself or others for roles on the selection team.

DCAPO will later announce a call to the community to suggest and research locations for the first Asia-Pacific DrupalCon. Note that a lot of work goes into researching locations. The DCAPO selection team will only be able to seriously consider locations with suitable venues, dates and event management companies, financial estimates, potential audience and motivated local teams.

But first, as much of the Asia-Pacific Drupal community as possible needs to get involved. You can help by translating and reposting this announcement on other websites where Asia-Pacific Drupal users and communities are likely to find it. Don't forget to note any translations and reposts in the DCAPO group so that we can track progress and share translations with each other.

DCAPO is a result of the Drupal Association's new Events Plan (announced on Drupal.org) to have an Asia-Pacific DrupalCon every two years.

Thank you!
From the DrupalCon Asia-Pacific Organisers group

This hook_world_alter() T-shirt idea was something Trevor Twining came up with way back at DrupalCon DC.  I got a single T-shirt made for DrupalCon Paris.  A number of people said they wanted one – though since I'm not interested in the business of making T-shirts, I thought I'd make the vector file available for anyone and everyone's use.

Enjoy!

This design is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

Following in the success of DrupalSouth Christchurch November 2008, DrupalSouth Wellington January 2010 is in it's planning stages. It will be close to LCA Wellington 2010 both in time and location, and will feature excellent overseas and home-grown speakers & attendees, such as;

• Angela Byron (webchick); Drupal 7 core committer, Drupal community nurturer, and co-author of Using Drupal
• Addison Berry (add1sun); Documentation lead, recipient of $100,000 Knight Foundation grant for Drupal documentation, co-author of Using Drupal
• Emma Jane Hogbin (emmajane); co-author of Front End Drupal, uber-documenter, Drupal evangelist/speaker and community all-rounder
• Dan (dman); Numerous drupal modules and high-profile NZ websites including The Vintage Aviator and Sorted.org.nz
• Others, yet to be determined.

Please take this one-minute survey to help us better determine suitable dates and other logistics. To get updates, subscribe to the NZ Drupal group, follow @DrupalSouth on twitter and get involved!

I was extremely pleased with my DrupalCon Paris session on jQuery for Designers and Themers. It was a great success – my best session yet.

You can see the slides at tinyurl.com/jQuery-Designers and download the sample theme code from drupal.org/project/jq4dat.

I made a couple of references to blog posts and work I've done with jQuery during the session:

• I wrote a jQuery dashboard plugin that uses jQuery UI's Sortable library to make an iGoogle-like dashboard with an example server-side implementation.
• Calling drupal_get_js() and drupal_get_css() from page preprocess functions creates an unnecessary performance hit. This blog post discusses a technique that allows javascript and CSS to be added in the page preprocess function without needing to call drupal_get_js() and drupal_get_css().

I forgot to demonstrate jQuery UI effects. You can see demos of these on jQueryUI.com and I added an implementation of the explode and bounce effects to the sample theme when you roll over the "Hey nice username!" message and click on it.

A related topic is Drupal's javascript theme layer. I added an example of this in the sample code; Defining a theme function, overriding it, and calling it to get some content themed into HTML. The javascript theme layer is based on the same principles of overriding as Drupal's PHP theme layer, so it should be easy to understand if you've ever overridden a theme function in template.php.

I didn't have time to properly explain the subtle differences between Drupal.behaviors functions with the context parameter and simply executing anonymous javascript functions on page-ready. I included examples of both in the sample code with inline comments might help to understand the difference.

Thanks to everyone who attended for your enthusiasm and excellent questions which guided the session and made it more conversational than presentational. I look forward to another opportunity to present this session at the next Drupal event. Maybe DrupalSouth Wellington January 2010?