Blogs

Too Too long. And so much good stuff. I went to Drupalcon Paris, came back, started planning for DrupalCamp NYC 7. And I still need to start my problems and solutions section!

Oh well, coming soon I guess.

Just a quick recap of Drupaldelphia. I attended and also gave a presentation on Drupal Community Awesomeness.

Another excellent event. I really love the camps as a way to meet new drupallers and learn new things. The smaller scale vs a con for example very much appeals to me. As I mentioned in my presentation, if you want to get in with the drupal community - find a way to get to real live events!

Announcing a (coming soon) new feature to my blog (soon as I figure where to stick it on the home page).
Drupal Problems and Solutions will be my quick (and very biased) guide to problems or challenges in building a drupal site (some complex, some simple) and the solutions I've encountered.
Hey, this is mostly for my own benefit. Some place to record my research and thoughts. But I figured, what the heck, maybe it will help someone else too.
So if you are one of my probably very few followers stay tuned.

What are my biases you ask?

• Simple over Complex
• Reusable over one time only
• "Community approved" over "who??"
• The "drupal way" over some other way
• Open source and free over closed or proprietary
• DIY over Yet another module
• Safe over risky

Sounds like some of these might be contradictory? You betcha! Bias and judgment to the rescue!

Wow, another drupal camp in just two weeks. Between the Boston d4d camp and now Drupal Camp Colorado I've been heavily drupalled. It's a great feeling! The real highlight for these last two camps overall is the incredible jump in my knowledge, but perhaps more importantly some of the awesome people I met (or reconnected with).

Here are my subjective highlights from Drupal Camp Colorado

Wow, so busy. It's a fun time. So rather than try and think this morning, just some quick links to what I've been up to...

• Attended awesome drupal event for designers - maybe the best Drupal event I've ever been to
• Posted an issue about "Markup" which seems to have taken off a bit
• Fought with Drush - see starting from comment 5
• Finally made this site look decent - analytic theme with some mods
• Twitter feed on blog - done! (Needs some slight theming work)
• Slight beautification of blog - done! Hey I like The Morning After, but it was just lazy not putting my own header pictures! One free tweet for anyone who identifies the banner pictures on the homepage and the node page
• About to attend Drupal Camp Colorado - woot!

There was some cool family stuff too

• Oldest daughter turned 18! A milestone for her of course, but for me too!
• Two daughters school graduations this week
• A pretty cool summer for them coming up (and for me and my wife too)

Oh emfield, why do you need information I already have?

In my previous post I spoke about caching issues. Still a valid discussion, but it got me to thinking. For an emfield image provider why would there need to be any calls to the provider api other then when initially creating a node or perhaps when updating the emfield field in a node?

Just a couple of updates here...

Turns out new emfield providers are being created as separate modules so you can check out mine here.

On another note I've had additional thoughts about caching and emfield providers. Something seems amiss to me so planning to dig in a bit more.

Oh yes, and I'll be adding a video provider for smugmug. Smugmug has pretty nice video support!

So I finally did it - made a real contribution to Drupal. It isn't live yet, but I think it is RTBC (Ready To Be Committed). In this case it was a new provider for emfield image allowing users to embed smugmug images into their pages similarly to the existing providers such as Flickr, Photobucket, etc.

Some easy, Some hard...

So was it hard? Well, like all coding some was easy, but there are always gotchas.

Documentation sprint was a cool way to end Drupalcon DC. It felt good to spend a day trying to make some small improvement to Drupal. It wasn't without its frustrations though. Documentation can be hard! Didn't help that quite a bit of the handbook page heirarchy is broken (a drupal.org upgrade issue apparently).

I think documentation will be getting easier (and the docs pages better!) really soon though. With the kind of turnout we had for the documentation sprint on Saturday (over 75!), as well as the obvious focus of documentation leaders like Add1sun on fixing problems and paving the way forward, I hope improvements will start to accelerate.

For me, documentation sprint day was spent mostly doing the somewhat tedious but important task of "comment rolling". The idea is you find handbook pages with comments (especially if they have a lot), and you roll the useful information from the comments into the help topic, then identify the comment for deletion (we did this by listing URLs in an IRC room created for that purpose). Even with such a staightforward task, there were some surprising difficulties. The obvious one being that a number of times I came across pages where the heirarchy (parent page) was so obviously broken that sometimes it was difficult to know where the page was coming from. Some pages just had to be skipped. And what about pages where the main topic wasn't very good and the comments degenerated into a glorified form discussion? For now I left those alone.

While the less experienced worked on comment rolling, another group did the important task of finalizing a handbook page style guide, while yet another spent most of the day capturing screen shots for future handbook use.

I left motivated to get more involved in documentation.

Are you interested in getting involved with documentation? The Drupal Documentation group is a good place to look for announcements and upcoming doc sprints. You'll also definitely want to learn how to use IRC effectively. Oftimes the doc sprints are global affairs with many (or perhaps even most) participating via irc chat in #drupal-docs.

So Friday was interesting for me. Perhaps against my normal inclinations I found myself in discussions with a number of people about training and curriculum for Drupal. I guess you can't escape your own history (I've been in the training "industry" since leaving college). So I guess more to come on that. The Documentation Sprint may be a good place to do some more discussion around this.

Keynote on OpenID and identity on the web was pretty cool. Not as well attended as I thought it would be. It definitely shows how we'll all have to think about and move in the direction of capturing the bits that someone visiting our sites would want us to capture and then allowing them to make it a part of their online identity in a way that suits them. That will make our sites relevant and appealing. Anyway that was my takeaway.

Friday doc sprint should be fun (if I get my networking to work at all!@#!).