winston's blog

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!@#!).

Wednesday

• OK, so handling async data with Josh Koenig was nice, I left wishing I had attended the JQuery with Dmitri Gaskin. Fortunately I was able to download that a few minutes ago!
• Burned out mentally for a good chunk of the afternoon so found a quiet spot to get some things working on my machine post a blog and mentally move on
• Attended the "Boosting our capacity to provide drupal training". OK, but I left discouraged and disappointed. Probably not the presenters fault - they had some good things to say. Really, is there some reason why the approach to training materials should not be open source too (see wikipedia, etc.)? Felt like a couple of questioners in the audience had their own agenda. Sorry, but certification track = bad idea. And rigid classification of "types of users" to train also = bad idea.

Thursday (yeah!)

• BOF session with John Albin. Not bad. Like the smaller format myself. Looking forward to more theme track on Friday. Sweet handout - thanks!
• Paradigm for reusable features (Context/Spaces modules) by the dev seed folks. Really nice ideas! So good I attended the breakout session after lunch. In the breakout session I definitely left feeling like spaces has a ways to go, but still - fantastic stuff.
• So Thursday is turning into features, deployment and management day for me. Next up was the patterns module presentation. I don't think I was the only one who thought trying to build feature deployment on the back of FAPI/drupal execute was maybe not a great idea. And too many demos failed - sorry folks.
• Aegir followed by Drush. Yeah! Fantastic stuff. Hope someday I have a reason to use it = nice problem to have.
• :) for Thursday

Hey to my new friends Alan, Sumit, and Shino.
Looks like Friday will be Theming day, but who knows...
Chapter 3 - thanks for the party. Years since I played pool (a bit embarrassing that I forgot the rules).

Drupalcon DC 2009 thoughts.
Good

• Volunteering on Tuesday and Wednesday morning! Met many fun people and
  felt like I gave back a little.
• RFD - Fun to meet some new people, good beer and appetizers.
• Even better - being stopped by some DrupalCampNYCers! Made my evening,
  thanks!
• Dries Keynote - awesome...

Not as good

• Internet connectivity was non-existent for me up until a few minutes
  ago
• Presentations feel too static so far. Want smaller sessions, but not much going on with BOF yet.
• No Power (or very little). I assumed from DrupalCamp that this would be a given. Most un-awesome.

Anyway I think I'll focus on meeting more cool people. That will cheer me up.

Just a quick note about our 1 day Drupal Camp New York City held at Polytech in Brooklyn.

I was mentioned in a NY Times article! How cool is that.

Funny thing is I was really intent on finishing the class - I may have been slightly rude to the reporter as a result.

OK, I think the whole T-Shirt thing was a mess. Glad we didn't end up with a skull and crossbones, but after awhile I think a lot of people (including me) were voting for all designs other than that one with a reasonable number of votes in the hopes that something else would win. Sorry to the designer, but no way I was going to wear that shirt even during DCon. Who knows if the "best shirt won"? No big...

Feeling the pressure to be "ready" so I can really get a lot out of it...

Already went through the whole schedule picking out what I think I'll do...

And Drupal Camp coming up on Saturday too!

Hey, so I did end up attending the Rob Feature theming seminar at Mansueto. Good stuff. Thanks to Kwang0274 for setting it up! Looks like a video for the second day. You can find a link for that on the discussion page for this event. Thanks to the "deanmeistr" for posting it.

By the way, do check out Dean's site. Pretty cool, especially the blog. Keep up the good work/posts. Hope to see some presentations from Dean, maybe at DrupalCampNYC or a meetup?

Next up - DrupalCampNYC6. Then off to DrupalCon.

Speaking of Drupalcon. Are you going? Then please go vote for a T-Shirt design other than the black and grey skull and crossbones. PLEASE. I don't think I can wear that one.

So I did get away from Drupal for a little while. Back to the grindstone as they say.

In my last post I said I'd have to stop with Drupalcon 2009 thoughts and get back to work. But now? Well now its time to really start thinking Drupalcon!

And what better way than with some fine Drupal NYC events! We'll start with a Drupal Theming Seminar. Thanks Bob Christensen!! And then, how about a DrupalCamp NYC 6 - the weekend before Drupalcon DC 2009 - woo hoo!!

So its back to Drupal full speed ahead. I'll be posting again soon with fun from Drupal NYC theming and ramp up to Drupalcon DC 2009!

Actually, it isn't totally true that I got away from Drupal. I did end up setting up the latest version of CiviCRM on one of my sites. It is on shared hosting, but I'm hopeful when 2.2 comes out I'll even be able to use CiviMail on my site - won't that be a kick. This was more of a need thing though. My other "hobby", if you will, is helping run a Junior FLL League in my community and the number of people involved was just way to big for my meager attempts at tracking!

Another meetup, but really I've got drupalcon dc 2009 on my mind! Have to stop with that for awhile and get back to work.

Anyway, some fund with svn, json vs. AHAH, etc.

Now back to work (or play)...

So finally getting serious about using VIM for my drupal stuff. Fun stuff, but took me awhile for it to start to click. The power is there though - good stuff.

I was even able to add a couple of configuration tips to the configuring vim page on drupal.

And if you are stumbling on this post you totally want to look up the "VIM for (PHP) Programmers" presenation. Find the latest version somewhere on this page. That really helped me the most.