Author: Tendenci Open Source Software

Wow, it’s been a long ride here in San Francisco. From our training for CiviCRM to Day 1 and Day 2, we have seen a bunch of Drupal. Wednesday was no different. Here was some of the interesting news from the final day.

Best Practices when running a Drupal shop

This panel was filled with leaders of Drupal companies from around the world like Phase 2 Technology, Development Seed, and Lullabot. From a 6 man shop to one with over 60 employees, the panelists answered some moderated questions along with those from the audience. The questioned covered the whole gamut of running a business:  internal processes, sales, hiring, growth, and working with the community.

This group was especially great because, while the panelist all work with Drupal, there aren’t necessarily competing with one another. Each company has their own specialty and focus, and to see the coming together to benefit the community is wonderful. Many of their companies sponsor certain Drupal modules, which they see as a big benefit to their business. Of the advice they gave, my favorite was the notion of slow growth and giving back to the community.

Drush and Advanced Drush

Drush, which is a powerful tool in Drupal to use the command line to do some of the heavy lifting in configuration, was featured in back-to-back panels. The first was lead by Dmitri Gaskin, a 14-year-old who has been coding with Drupal for over 4 years. Though young, he lead a fantastic session. He covered the basics of installing Drush, and then showed many of the functions of things you could do with it. He demonstrated with ease the ability to create new sites almost instantly and how to enable/disable modules or do more advanced things like updating core and contributed modules. Dmitri handled questions like a pro with quick, concise answers. When some asked about something that Drush didn’t do, he simply answered “we are accepting patches”, which in the Drupal world means “build that yourself and share it”.

Following Dmitri was the Advanced Drush session. This was less of a live demo you could follow and more of a show-and-tell of future features for Drush. One of the new main features is a command-line interface special to Drush with custom commands that make navigating sites on the server much easier. The second feature, which is active in the Drush 3.0 beta, is the ability to have site aliases. This is a huge timesaver, since many Drush commands need to be repeated for those administering multiple Drupal sites. A site alias lets you specify the location, URL, and shortcut name to a site. Instead of having to type “/var/www/drupal-install/sites/sitename.com” you can just type “@sitename”. As someone who administers Drush, I can say from personal experience this is great to have.

Open Source in Government

David Cole, who is responsible for administering whitehouse.gov, spoke about decision to use Drupal and the implementation of the site.  You can watch the entire Open Source in Government presentation online. To quickly recap, David explained how the government sees value in the open source community, and discussed how the Drupal framework is used for the site. He showed different features of the site and talked about the modules that were used. My favorite part was the announcement of new contributed modules, which are discussed at the White House Tech Blog.

David was followed by Andrew Hoppin from the NY State Senate, who discussed what was being done at the state senate. The NYSS team has also contributed modules back to the community, available at https://www.drupal.org/project/nyss. The big focus was on getting participation from people in the state who will now have an easier time participating in their local government.

Turn that UX frown upside down

Steve Fisher lead this session, which mostly discussed the importance and use of good user interface design in websites. While his talk was not necessarily Drupal-specific, it certainly was important to the community. Drupal has been known to not have the greatest UI, but Steve discussed how Drupal can have great UI by focusing on designing the front-end for users and not for the admins.

Steve showcased some of the basic things that make sites easier for users like highlighting the navigation when you are on that page, or keeping the search field in the top right. He also talked about thinking about the site as a new user, and not as a yourself. He recommended simple user testing by asking your mom (or just someone who hasn’t seen the site) to test things out. Finally, he discussed the importance of error screens (like 404s) and how users may not know what that means, so you should explain the error in common terms and give them helpful options for moving forward.

Module-Building Demo

Chris Shattuck of buildamodule.com lead a session where he explained module development. He talked about the different type of modules that are built, as well as some of the different methods to building a module. This included ways of using another modules code to learn and change things to build a new module.

He then demonstrated building a simple module that modified a new page form. He showed the Devel module, which is hugely useful to module developers, and worked step-by-step so those of us in the audience could follow along. While I have spent some time in module development, this session brought some clarity to best practices and gave tips to speed up development.

Closing DrupalCon

After that was a closing session to give thanks to all those who planned and participated in DrupalCon SF 2010. The Drupal community is truly wonderful, and being able to put faces to screen names was fantastic. I’m very excited to keep up connections with the new people I met, as well as plan for DrupalCon 2011.

If you have questions about how Drupal can benefit your organization or improve your website for users and admins, contact us at Schipul to see if we can help you use Drupal to meet your needs.

Photo by S.L.M.

Day 1 was pretty good, but Day 2 brought even more useful knowledge from the community and the presenters. Here is a bit about the different sessions that I was able to attend.

Drupal 7 here we come

Dries touched on some of the new features on Monday, but this session dove into greater detail (especially from a developer’s perspective). The large group from Palantir.net discussed many of the refinements in Drupal 7. Drupal 6 combined with many of the current modules gives you a huge amount of power, and Drupal 7 puts some polish on the usability of these features. As developers we are able to have much more control over the backend and are given some great tools to theme sites much easier.

The other great innovation is the GUI interface for uploading new modules. If you’ve ever had to FTP into sites/all/modules (or accidentally into /modules), then you know some of the difficulty in adding new features. The new interface will let you upload and configure your new modules straight from the browser. We at Schipul are very excited about this because it gives out clients an easier path to upgrade their own sites and add on great features from new modules.

Drupal in the Cloud

There was quite a bit of discussion about the cloud on Tuesday, but this session helped to set a realistic understanding of what the cloud means for businesses and end users. Josh Koenig discussed his product, Mercury, which has partnered with Rackspace to allow people to launch Drupal sites in the cloud that are already preconfigured to run a highly optimized stack capable of serving pages 200 times faster than a traditional server. The cloud hosting, which is similar to VPS, lets users launch, pause, backup, and shutdown new server instances very quickly. The server size also scales very easily so you can grow with a few clicks in a web interface.

One of my favorite parts about Mercury is that, just like Drupal, it is completely open source. If someone has the technological know-how (or the time) you can setup and host your own Mercury server. This is fantastic because it shows how open source can actually be used to run a business. Along with that, Rackspace is involved by helping to connect the code with their giant pool of servers and opens up some of their technology to help Mercury sites scale. To cap off the presentation, Josh did a live demo (a bit “cowboy-ish” according to him) that demostrated the ease of setting up a Mercury site. Great job Josh!

Views 3 for developers

This was another nerdy session like yesterday’s OOP in Drupal, and oddly enough it was given by the same guy, Larry Garfield. First he gave an overview of how Views works and what changes are coming in Views 3. The separation of tasks at the core were my favorite, because it really helps in training new people to use Views.  I especially enjoyed this presentation because he did a live demonstration of a couple of tiny plugins for Views that add custom functionality. This was great for much of the audience because it gave everyone the tools to fill their custom needs when it comes to making Views.

Keynote by Tim O’Reilly

Tim O’Reilly came in to talk about the Cloud and what it means for everyone (not just Drupalers). Tim described the internet and all of the data that makes it up as a huge knowledge base that can be shared through APIs. Part of the problem with understand the “Cloud” is that the word means things that are different to everyone. He cleared the air to really explain that the cloud is knowledge and that the Internet will soon need a better operating system to manage and share all of this data.

Drupal 7 is coming out with RDF support built in, which allows smart data tags to share data across the web. This is a great advancement in moving toward the eventual future of everything being in the cloud. After hearing the earlier talk about Mercury, I am now finding more and more cases where the cloud makes sense for both my own needs and for my work. Tim finished with discussing data.gov and other ways that big pieces of data are being shared. Data sharing is needed, data sharing is the future, and data sharing will be done in the cloud.

Apache Solr Search

While Drupal core comes with a Search module, it is tied to the database and can really slow things down on a large Drupal site. Solr is an application that runs on the server that stores search information in a different place and is highly optimized to serve great results quickly. The panel (James McKinney in particular) talked about how you can take a standard install of Solr and combine it with Drupal to make customized search results pages with great filtering and smarter sorting. If your Drupal site has a large amount of content and you think your users will want search, spending some time with Solr may be much better than complex taxonomies and customized Views.

Making Drupal Admin Simple

This was a much needed panel, because by default, the Drupal administration is not so easy. The group discussed some of the smart things that make content entry and site moderation much easier. Combining things like specialized node referencing along with a custom admin theme can go a long way to providing the end users with a better experience using a website.

During the session they had several live demos and examples of some of the backend tweaks that they recommend. All of these little distinctions combined together can make a Drupal site admin area look gorgeous. Some of those recommendations included the Rubik theme, the Admin module (2.0), and node relationships. If you aren’t using these on your site, give them a shot and see if the give you a better experience.

DrupalCon Day 2 continued the trend of being packed with information. We are very excited about some of the things coming in Day 3. Come back tomorrow for a recap of the final day of DrupalCon SF 2010.

Photo from ceardach.