develOOp another fine develOOpment

There have already been a couple of glowing reviews of this book recently. But they fail to mention what is so great about it.

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Got a website with ten or more content types, and you want a neat way to promote mixed content to the front page/side bar? Here is one solution.

The Twitter dataset is an insanely valuable source of useful social networking information. That explains the huge number of Twitter-related sites that spring up, each one performing one specific analysis of Twitter data. The one I was looking at today is TwitterSheep which just creates a tagadelic-type cloud of keywords, from a user's followers' bios. Pretty neat idea, but it was frustrating that the Web application didn't let me actually see who of my followers are in which category - and make a list out of them, and email them, etc.

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Ah, the spring. So many things happen in the spring. Snow melts. Flowers bloom. The Easter Bunny sells cheap chocolate. People set their clocks ahead in an attempt to confuse their pets. It is also the start of conference season in the northern hemisphere, which means flying about the country talking about Drupal. This year is especially busy, with 10 presentations in 4 cities so far. (Possibly more to come.)

Here's where you'll be able to stalk Crell in the coming weeks:

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The results are in, and it looks like Palantir will be all over DrupalCon San Francisco, which kicks off in just under five weeks.  Nine of us will be on hand to spread the Drupal love (and some great swag) everywhere from the stage to the Birds of a Feather (BoF) room to the hallway. Here's the low-down on the Palantir track:

The preliminary DrupalCon San Francisco session schedule was released yesterday, and I wanted to get an overview of all of the sessions and so I created the following graphic:

As with every year, the schedule is bound to change a bit between now and the actual DrupalCon as there are still some conflicts and sessions to be confirmed, but this will at least start to give you an idea of some of the sessions that will be happening.

For more details on these, then be sure to check out the full schedule here.

Todd Nienkerk of Four Kitchens explains the concept of CSS grid systems and gives some tips on how to get started with working with the 960 grid system. He talks a bit about the 960 Grid System Drupal theme as developed by dvessel, who was actually able to get some of his content-first innovations ported back into the 960 framework. He also briefly mentions the 960 Gridder module that sets up a javascript overlay to verify that your design is properly lining up. He talks about the general trends of CSS grids and some specific resources that help with getting started on creating a grid-based design.

Coming back from an excellent time (and an excellent talk, updated slides here) out at SxSw Interactive, I've been thinking once more as always about what it really takes to get Drupal "to the next level."

Clearly there are multiple fronts we are proceeding along as a community. The amazing development work being done in core and contrib is obviously key, as are the boundary-pushing efforts to integrate more and better infrastructure for enterprise-scale use-cases, as is the continuing drive to test everything in an automated/continuous basis. However, I wanted to throw out yet another thing we should be thinking about as a development community: monitoring.

Now to be clear, I'm not talking about what you can get out of Munin (although that's nice). It's good to know your server load, but what I really care about is my page execution time, my per-bootstrap memory consumption, my most-frequently run (or longest running) queries. Many of the pieces are there in terms of code already written into the devel module and others, but we don't have anything to compare with what other platforms are doing to expose the internal metrics of their application:

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Coming back from an excellent time (and an excellent talk, updated slides here) out at SxSw Interactive, I've been thinking once more as always about what it really takes to get Drupal "to the next level."

Clearly there are multiple fronts we are proceeding along as a community. The amazing development work being done in core and contrib is obviously key, as are the boundary-pushing efforts to integrate more and better infrastructure for enterprise-scale use-cases, as is the continuing drive to test everything in an automated/continuous basis. However, I wanted to throw out yet another thing we should be thinking about as a development community: monitoring.

Now to be clear, I'm not talking about what you can get out of Munin (although that's nice). It's good to know your server load, but what I really care about is my page execution time, my per-bootstrap memory consumption, my most-frequently run (or longest running) queries. Many of the pieces are there in terms of code already written into the devel module and others, but we don't have anything to compare with what other platforms are doing to expose the internal metrics of their application:

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The D7CX movement is based around the idea that while it's really important that we launch Drupal 7 by finishing off the critical issue queue it's also enormously important that we have our many contributed modules ready to go the day that Drupal 7 is launched.

Drupal core is an amazing piece of software, but Drupal core without the many wonders of contributed modules and themes is nowhere near as much fun.

So, April 4th we are hosting a D7CX Sprint Day here at our office. We will provide power strips, internet, coffee, camraderie. You should bring your laptop, and some skills in testing out and upgrading Drupal's contributed modules. The sprint will run from 9:30 AM until about 6:00PM - but you are welcome to show up for any part of that time.

Some possible tasks:

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a 1-day Seminar in Denver

Presented by Growing Venture Solutions

April 3rd 2010
9:30 AM - 5:30 PM

The GVS offices
209 Kalamath St Unit 25
Denver, CO
(Free parking)

To ensure a high quality class and a great student/teacher ratio, class is limited to 20 students.

• Early Bird Price: $80 if you register and pay before March 23, 1010
• Regular Price: $100 if you register and pay after March 23, 2010

Your own laptop with wireless internet capability.

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As I've blogged about this before, work on localize.drupal.org's improved functionality was going on heavily in the past weeks. We launched a staging site with interface improvements almost a month ago, and kept adding small improvements on top of that.

Given all the great feedback on the new user interface, it was time to finally launch it on the live site. Here is a rundown of the most important improvements.

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I recently created a module that uses the Google Analytics API to capture the top ten nodes of various content types by day, week, and all time. This is a great option for any site that needs to use caching, and can’t use the Statistics module.

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People on a mobile device are not ‘browsing’, but rather they are looking for a specific piece of information. 
Use the clearest and simplest language instead of a discursive style for site content.

Divide pages into usable but limited size portions.

If pages are too large they will take a long time to load. There are limitations on some mobile devices as to the largest page they can accommodate. Also, we don’t want our users taking a big hit on their (sometimes) limited data plans.

On the other hand, if a page is too short then the user may require multiple page requests to read the relevant information.

Scrolling

The layout of the page should be such that the user can use a simple repeated scroll. The majority of mobile sites scroll vertically, so elements should be “stacked” in this way. Some content requires a secondary scroll, such as maps or some images, but should be avoided wherever possible.

I recently agreed to take on two new roles in the Drupal open-source project: maintainer of the core Search module, and documentation volunteer coordinator, specifically for the in-code API documentation that’s displayed on api.drupal.org. I’m excited to be part of helping Drupal 7 come together, but to make it really successful, we need your help to get Drupal 7 documented! We need to get the API and Module Update Guide documentation fixed up, so that module developers can make their modules available for Drupal 7, and we need to get the Handbook updated for Drupal 7 so that less expert users can figure out how to use it.

Pretty much anyone can help in this effort. To get you started, we have a page listing what needs to be done, and both Ariane (arianek) and I (jhodgdon) are often available on IRC (#drupal-docs or #drupal-contribute). So feel free to jump in at any time!

Also, if you’re headed for DrupalCon San Francisco in April, please consider coming for the Sunday or Thursday sprint days. We will have documentation sprints going on, and people available to get you started, point you to tasks, etc.

Thanks!

With Drupal developers becoming very popular on the job market, the demand for guidance of developers from other technologies becomes high. Last week, with the publication of the article Becoming a Drupal coder: a wise carreer move a clean document guiding to all Drupal information resources online and offline was published.

It happens to be I'm doing a presentation this week targetted at developers working with another technologies. So I decided to publish my presentation slides.

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The list of selected sessions has been posted for DrupalCon San Francisco. We're frantically working on ironing out a few last conflicts in the schedule and confirming a few last speakers, but you are welcome to view our selections now.

In a few days we will be allowing everyone with a DrupalCon ticket to create a personal conference schedule. You will be able to 'Sign Up' for your favorite sessions and design your ideal conference experience. If you haven't bought your ticket yet, Register now before ticket prices go up!

One of the recurring requests in the Views Bulk Operations issue queue is to create a downloadable archive of files attached to nodes. While the general case is not trivial to solve, I was recently hired by research on BLOGS to write a more specific action: create a Zip archive of all images stored in imagefields.

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Jacine Rodriguez of Gravitek Labs talks about the Skinr module, which is a module that allows a Drupal theme to define a set of reusable and modular CSS styles and makes them available through the user interface. The Skinr module was inspired by the Block Theme, but extended to be more flexible.

The Skinr module is the basis for Top Notch Themes' Fusion theme, which is demonstrated in some videos here. And since the recording of this podcast DrupalCon Paris, TNT has released a new website of Fusion-based themes at: http://fusiondrupalthemes.com