Drupal Voices 95: Jen Simmons on Usability, CSS3, and Getting Bartik into D7
Jen Simmons is on a mission to get a new theme into Drupal 7 within the next 12 days called Bartik. Drupal 7 core co-maintainer Angie Byron said in the issue queue that "the deadline for new core themes is May 17, 2010 to allow for a few days to squash any additional bugs before the beta."
In this interview, Simmons talks about the evolution of Bartik and how she'd love to get some help in the Bartik issue queue. There's also a demo site that highlights the different features of the theme. If you'd like to see a new theme in Drupal 7, then be sure to jump in and get involved.
Simmons also talks about her Drupal Core Developer Summit presentation on "Why Clicking Buttons in Drupal Sucks" that calls for the creation of a Drupal Module Developers User Experience Guide.
Simmons also gave a DrupalCon presentation on "CSS3: The Future is Now, and she gives some highlights from her presentation.
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Installing Varnish on Mac OS X (with MAMP or any other server)
Varnish is an excellent high-performance, HTTP accelerator. The technical term for Varnish is a "reverse proxy cache", meaning that it handles the requests when you visit a website acting as a cached layer of content on top of Apache. This means that after a page has been requested once from the web server, Varnish keeps a copy of that file in an ultra-fast storage so that the next time that page is requested, it returns it immediately instead of starting up Apache, PHP, MySQL, and any other technologies your web site may be built upon. If Varnish doesn't have a copy of the file or page being requested, it will request the page from the normal web server.
This article explains step-by-step instructions on how to get started with Varnish on a local Mac OS X sandbox. I personally set it up with the MAMP package, but because it doesn't make any difference what web server you use, you can use these instructions to set up Varnish in front of the built-in Mac OS X Apache or anything else you may have installed from MacPorts or compiled from source.
If you're not familiar with setting up a web server on Mac OS X, you'll need to get that working first. I'd recommend the Lullabot videocast on Installing a local web server on Mac OS X.
read more »Drupal Voices 94: Derek Wright on How to Help on the Project Module
Derek Wright (aka dww) of 3281d Consulting talks about some of the recent and future changes in the Project.module, including a bit of the plans for transitioning from CVS to git, adding features for the Drupal.org redesign, and writing more test the project.module.
If you're looking to help contribute to the Drupal community, then getting involved with helping the Project module is one of the best places to jump in and help out.
Podcast 83: DrupalCon Wrapup
Jerad Bitner, Kent Bye, Angie Byron, Jeff Eaton, Karen Stevenson, and Jeff Robbins talk about DrupalCon San Francisco 2010.
read more »Drupal Voices 93: Dries Buytaert on the State of Drupal 2010
Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert gives an overview of the major points of his bi-annual State of Drupal keynote address and talks about the future of scaling out the Drupal community, what moving to a distributed revision control system of git may mean for Drupal, as well as the latest news from Acquia and Mollom.
Dries talks about how about 50% of the work in Drupal 7 was done by 25-30 developers, and so he had Greg Knaddison gather up a list of the top 20 patch contributors for Drupal 7 by looking through the CVS commit message attributions for Drupal 7.
- catch 337 patches
- sun 313 patches
- Damien Tournoud (DamZ) 265 patches
- yched 212 patches
- chx 197 patches
- Dave Reid 188 patches
- jhodgdon 159 patches
- pwolanin 158 patches
- David_Rothstein 132 patches
- boombatower 125 patches
- c960657 122 patches
- Crell 103 patches
- moshe weitzman 89 patches
- dww 84 patches
- Berdir 81 patches
- Gábor Hojtsy 76 patches
- andypost 68 patches
- quicksketch 67 patches
- drewish 67 patches
- johnalbin 65 patches
Derek Wright also posted a list of top Drupal Developers who have marked issues as duplicate as another metric of participation.
You can watch the full State of Drupal keynote down below:
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Drupal Voices 92: Jeff Walpole on the Future of Drupal in Government
Jeff Walpole is the CEO of Phase2 Technology, and gives a synopsis of his "Future of Drupal in Government" DrupalCon session. Phase2 was a subcontractor on the WhiteHouse.gov Drupal site, and they're going to be taking a lot of the lessons learned from that project to create an Open Government Drupal distribution. Walpole talks about some of the possible modules that might be included within that such as a Section 508 Accessibility checklist and GovDelivery Integration. He talks about some of the process challenges for working in government, and hopes to see a lot of community collaboration on their future Open Government Distribution.
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Drupal Voices 91: Sheldon Rampton on the New York State Senate
Sheldon Rampton is currently the lead Drupal Developer for the New York State Senate website. At DrupalCon San Francisco, the team released a lot of their custom modules under the umbrella project of NYSS. Sheldon talks a bit about the cluster of glue modules as well as other functionality that they broke out into other modules such as Open Legislation Drupal integration with their custom Open Legislation java platform that allows citizens to browse, search and share legislative information from the New York State Senate. He also mentions the Whitelist module as well as future plans for implementing deep linking to videos via transcripts scraped from the YouTube Closed Captioning API.
Drupal is helping to facilitate more transparent and open government in the New York State Senate, and Sheldon talks about how he hopes how the releasing of some of their source code will inspire other state and local governments to start customizing and implementing Drupal sites similar to NYSS. The NYSS team doesn't have a lot of extra time to help set up the Drupal infrastructure for other government entities, but they are encouraging members from the Drupal community to jump in and help out where they can in refining and spreading the modules that are a part of their platform.
For more information, check out the Open Source in Government Keynote panel discussion featuring Andrew Hoppin, who is the CIO of the NY State Senate.
Drupal Voices 90: Debra Moriarty on the White House moving to Drupal
Debra Moriarty is the Program Manager for Managed Web Services for the Executive Office of the President of the United States. She works with General Dynamics Information Technology, which was the prime contractor for helping move WhiteHouse.gov to Drupal last October.
Debra talks about the process of moving WhiteHouse.gov to Drupal, her plans for evangelizing Drupal to different agencies within the United States Government, and some of the future plans for facilitating more citizen participation on the White House website. She also mentions that the White House has started publishing Visitor Records, which is facilitated by the Table Wizard and Schema modules.
Debra also mentions how the White House was able to contribute back four Drupal modules to the Drupal community with more details at http://www.whitehouse.gov/tech
Back in November of last year, David Cole was the Deputy Director for Technology within the White House New Media team. Cole attended a Drupal Meetup in Washington DC where he announced plans for contributing code back to the Drupal community. Cole has since moved on to be the Senior Advisor to the CIO of the Executive Office of the President, and he gave the official announcement of contributing code back to the community during his DrupalCon San Francisco keynote presentation on Wednesday.
The four custom Drupal modules contributed back to the community are:
Three of the modules were submitted by the CTO of Phase 2 technology Frank Febbraro, and the GovDelivery module was submitted by Chuck D'Antonio of Acquia. Each of these Drupal module contain the credits of "The development of this module was done as part of the Whitehouse.gov project and was sponsored by The Executive Office of the President."
You can watch David Cole's full presentation and panel discussion with Andrew Hoppin, the CIO of the New York State Senate down below:
Some of the Drupal modules that Cole specifically highlighted during his keynote presentation are:
- Views
- CCK
- Organic Groups
- Custom Page
- Apache Solr
- Context
- Table Wizard
- Schema
- Voting API
- Fivestar
- Webform
Cole also posted a slide mentioned listing a number of other Drupal modules in use on WhiteHouse.gov including:
- Acquia Network Connector
- Admin
- Captcha
- Coder
- Core searches
- Date
- Devel
- FCKEditor
- File Field
- Google Analytics
- ImageAPI
- ImageCache
- ImageField
- IMCE
- iTunes
- jQuery UI
- Libraries API
- Link
- Memcache API and Integration
- Menu Trails
- Modal Frame API
- Nagios monitoring
- Node Blocks
- Nodequeue
- Node Relationships
- Organic Groups Mandatory Group
- Pathauto
- Rules
- Scheduler
- Simpletest
- SWF Tools
- Token
- Views Bulk Operations (VBO)
- Views Node Taxonomy Filter
Last day of 25%-off Sale
Today is the last day of our Week-of-DrupalCon 25%-off sale. All Drupal tutorial videos and everything in the Lullabot Store is 25%-off this week. And this week ends today!
To be the first to know about upcoming Lullabot sales as well as coupons, news, and updates, be sure to get on the Lullabot Mailing List and/or follow us on Twitter.
CCK To Fields, Getting There From Here
I just finished my talk on moving from CCK in D6 to Fields in D7, and promised to post my slides, which are full of references to the relevant issues. There is no place to do so on the DrupalCon session, so I'm posting them here.
For reference, the session description was:
Fields in Core will be exciting and powerful, but we still have some work ahead of us. Now it's time to figure out how to get there from where we are now. Hundreds of developers need to update their CCK-related modules, and thousands of administrators will need to update their data. Plus not everything about CCK made it into core. Which modules and functionality were left behind, and why?
Karen Stevenson, one of the CCK maintainers and part of the team that got this code into core, will talk about the upgrade path and the 'left-behinds', and what those of us who have been using CCK in Drupal 6 will need to do to adjust to Fields in Core in Drupal 7.
Lullabot Party In San Francisco on Monday
We previously mentioned that we're planning a party at DrupalCon San Francisco. Here are the details!
The super-awesome Lullabot party will be held at:
Jillian's101 4th St.
San Francisco, CA
(right next to the Moscone Center)
On Monday, April 19th
Start Time: 7:00 PM
End Time: 10 (or so)
We hope to see you there!
Updated DrupalCon San Francisco Schedule Visualization
Here's an updated version of the DrupalCon schedule based upon the version currently posted on their website. Some of the session times may still change, but this should be a good way to take a quick look at which sessions are happening concurrently.
There's also the source excel file in case you want to tweak it any way.
If you see any errors, feel free to leave them in the comments.
Drupal Voices Podcast to Cover DrupalCon San Francisco
DrupalCon San Francisco is coming up next week, and I will be roaming the hallways of the Moscone Center doing another round of Drupal Voices interviews.
Of the 89 Drupal Voices interviews conducted so far, 46 of them happened at DrupalCon D.C. last Spring, and the other 43 of were at DrupalCon Paris last Fall.
The intention of Drupal Voices has been to feature the voices and personalities of different contributors to the Drupal Project as well as cover any major announcements and any other general buzz that is happening within the Drupal Community. I'll also be dropping by the Drupal Developer Summit to cover some of the other pre-conference happenings this weekend.
So if you feel passionate about a particular topic, module or general trend within the Drupal Community that you feel like needs voicing, then be sure to wave me down at DrupalCon for a quick interview. Or feel free to just say "Hi" if you've enjoyed listening to the Drupal Voices series on your daily commute.
If you have any specific topic suggestions for me to cover, then be sure to drop a quick comment down below.
(Photo Credit: Jen Lampton)
Announcing Lullabot's New Drupal Trainers
As Drupal project founder Dries Buytaert has mentioned on his blog recently, Drupal is growing and the demand for high-quality training is growing. Lullabot has been teaching people to use Drupal for over 4 years now and we often feel like proud parents watching so many of our students get great Drupal jobs, go on to create amazing Drupal sites, and become involved and influential in the Drupal community.
A few months ago we posted a request for trainers. Response was overwhelming. We were amazed by the quantity of high-quality applications we received. After a long time sifting through the applications we chose a group of trainers with deep Drupal knowledge, experience in the Drupal community, and the ability to simplify and communicate Drupal configuration and programming methodology.
Lullabot's current training & consulting team includes Addi Berry, Angela Byron, Jeff Eaton, Nate Haug, Karen Stevenson, Matt Westgate, and me. With the addition of our new trainers, we'll be able to offer more frequent and higher quality public and private Drupal training.
We've assembled a group of teachers who are not only clear communicators with deep and pragmatic hands-on Drupal knowledge and experience, but they're also passionate about Drupal and the Drupal community. Here's the list of new Lullabot trainers:
Jerad Bitner
We first met Jerad when he came to a Lullabot workshop back in 2007. Shortly thereafter he joined up with Sony Music where he led development on Sony's artist multi-site Drupal installation which currently runs sites for over 100 Sony artists. He then moved to Lifetime Television before eventually founding Rapid Waters Development. Jerad has written several popular modules for Drupal including Activity and Flag Friend. He is known as sirkitree on Drupal.org.
Randy Fay
Randy has been developing websites since 1994. He dabbled with Drupal during the 4.6 days. But he began as a Drupal core developer shortly after a 3-year bicycle trip in which he rode all the way from the frozen North of Canada to Argentina and listened to every single Lullabot podcast. (We're still not sure which is more of an accomplishment!) Randy has contributed quite a number of patches to Drupal 6 and 7, is a co-maintainer of the Drupal AJAX subsystem, and developed and maintains a number of contrib modules including the Examples module, a great learning tool for new developers. Randy is known as rfay on Drupal.org.
James Sansbury
James has been lead Drupal developer at Sprocket in Atlanta, GA since 2007. Sprocket, a design-focused, web-development shop has been building sites for the past 6 years, but James helped them to standardize their development with Drupal and they've been building some beautiful Drupal sites. James has contributed to Drupal core development and also released several contrib modules including Follow, Profiler, and Region Manager. He is known as q0rban on Drupal.org.
Joe Shindelar
Joe is an artist, graphic designer, and web developer who has been building Drupal sites and participating in Drupal core development since 2006. He also enjoys snowboarding and is a certified level II and freestyle accredited instructor who teaches for Blizzard MN when the weather permits. Joe is known as eojthebrave on Drupal.org.
Jen Simmons
Jen is a graphic designer and front-end developer who has been creating websites and teaching web development since the mid-nineties. She became heavily involved in the WordPress community pushing the limits of WP and learning to bend it to her will. In 2007, Jen moved her focus to Drupal and quickly became very involved in the Drupal community. Jen has a passion for Drupal and loves to teach. She's taught in the university classroom, at professional conferences, and in community workshops. Jen's theme, Bartik, is slated for inclusion in Drupal 7. On Drupal.org she's known as jensimmons.
Angie Byron & Jeff Robbins on TWiT Live Tomorrow
Angie "Webchick" Byron and I will be heading up the TWiT Cottage in Petaluma, CA to do an interview with Leo Laporte on TWiT Live. We'll be talking about... you guessed it... Drupal!
Lullabot helped Leo to get up and running with Drupal on twit.tv back in 2007 and he's been a big proponent of Drupal ever since.
Tune in to the TWiT Live video stream at 12:30pm Pacific time (3:30pm Eastern) tomorrow, April 14th. You can also click the chat room link below the video to participate and send us questions.
Think you might forget? Follow Lullabot on Twitter. We'll send out some tweets to remind you just before we go on.
Let's Party Like Its 2009!
By now, most of you have probably heard some of the legendary stories from the Lullabot party at DrupalCon DC last year. The combination of alcohol, music, Drupal coders, and temporary tattoos created an awesome night of fun. I'm sworn to secrecy on a some of the stories from that party, but you can certainly find some party pictures on Flickr.
So we're doing it again for 2010, San Francisco style! Save the date – Tuesday, April 20th Monday, April 19th – right smack dab in the middle the first night of DrupalCon. We're still nailing down the details so if you want to know exactly where and when the party is, get on our mailing list or stop by the Lullabot table at DrupalCon for an extra-special invitation.
Better yet, follow Lullabot on Twitter to get the party details. We'll also be Tweeting about Lullabot presentations throughout DrupalCon as well as Lullabot book signings, giveaways, and other goodies. To get Lullabot Twitter updates sent directly to your phone, text "follow lullabot" to 40404 and Twitter should guide you through the rest.
We'll see you in San Francisco!
Command Line Basics: SSH and SCP
In this video you'll see how simple it is to connect to a remote server using SSH (secure shell). We'll also look at how you can quickly and securely copy files from a remote server using the SCP command (secure copy). These are both invaluable tools when working with servers that you don't have physical access to.
Ubercart downloads via Amazon CloudFront
We recently started serving our Drupal training video downloads from Amazon CloudFront, a web service for content delivery, through the Lullabot Store. Because of this change we are pleased to say that the download speeds have been drastically improved. The process of integrating CloudFront into your own Ubercart store is fairly simple. However, there is a requirement that your version of PHP is compiled with OpenSSL. If OpenSSL is not enabled you will get errors. We have posted the Ubercart CloudFront module on Drupal.org so that it can be further improved.
Amazon CloudFrontAmazon CloudFront is a web service for content delivery. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services to give developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments.
read more »Announcing Faster Downloads For Lullabot Videos
It's been about a year since we launched Lullabot Learning Series Drupal tutorial videos with the release of Learning CCK and Learning Views. We now have 8 videos in the series with more soon on the way.
While the videos are packaged as DVDs, we also sell them as high-definition video files for download. Since there are no shipping/packaging costs and since the downloads are immediate, the download option has been very popular.
Many of these videos contain over 3 hours of high-definition video and their file sizes easily can be in excess of 2GB. So it's been a challenge finding a video download mechanism which can balance reliability and speed along with integration with our store's Ubercart-based ecommerce system.
Today I'm proud to announce that we've moved our downloads to Amazon's CloudFront content delivery network (CDN) and in our tests we're seeing download speeds as much as 4 times faster than before. And since this is a global CDN with delivery points around the world, users outside of North America should see even higher speed increases.
Just this morning I downloaded Site Building With Drupal and I was getting constant speeds over 2MB/sec through my Comcast service and wireless-N connection. VERY fast!
Users may still be limited by their ISP while downloading these large files. We have a FAQ item with some best practices for downloading. But most users should now be able to get Lullabot videos much faster.
Drupal Voices 89: Mike Anello recommends his favorite 45 Drupal Modules
Mike Anello of Drupal Easy gave a presentation at DrupalCon Paris called "45 Modules in 45 Minutes: The Best Drupal Modules You're Not Using."
In this interview, Mike provides a brief overview and gives some of the highlights of some of the unsung Drupal module heros. Mike eliminated the Top 100 most downloaded Drupal modules, and focused on modules that he's found to be useful, but not already well known or popular.
Mike actively tracks the New Drupal Module RSS Feed and New Drupal Module listing and keeps an eye on modules that he thinks might be useful.
The full list of 45 modules can be seen in his presentation slides below, and linked down below.
45 Modules in 45 Minutes: The Best Modules You're Not Using View more presentations from ultimike. Theming Modules Input Filters Modules Administration Modules CCK Modules Developer Modules- Schema
- Table Wizard
- Migrate
- Coder
- AHAH Helper
- jQuery Plugin Handler
- Popups API (Ajax Dialogs)
- Ubercart Views
- Job Queue
You can watch his presentation here: