Development Seed Blog

Vote on the Sessions You Want to See at DrupalCon

We're getting excited to come over for DrupalCon Szeged in just over a month. This will be the fifth DrupalCon that Development Seed has attended, and it always amazes me how much these conferences show off just how fast this community is growing and how far Drupal has come as a platform. We've looking forward to talking about some of our latest work to add and refine functionalities to Drupal. Here's a quick summary of the sessions we've proposed to lead. If you're interested in these topics, please vote for them!

Spaces and Context Modules: Tools for Site Building: The Context and Spaces modules are two relatively new tools in Drupal's aresenal that make it easier to build complex websites. In this session, Jeff Miccolis will talk about both modules' approach and show developers how they can be used and extended. He'll also show some examples of the modules in use on community portals, sites-within-sites, and intranets. Vote here.

Messaging and Notifications Frameworks: At DrupalCon Boston, Jose Reyero introduced the beta versions of these frameworks. A lot has been done to improve them since, and in this session Jose will talk about the upgrades, specifically in how they handle subscriptions, notifications of events, and the various delivery methods for sending messages. Another focus of this session will be to discuss the shift way from email only delivery methods to multi-platform methods. Vote here.

A New Aggregator for Drupal 7: Drupal's core aggregator is getting a revamp in Drupal 7. In this session, Aron Novak and Alex Barth will talk about why this step is needed and what you can expect from the new core aggregator. Aron began this work as a Google Summer of Code project last summer and this summer has continued to finetune it. The result is a simple yet extensible and efficient architecture that should serve Drupal well. Vote here.

Attracting and Retaining Drupal Talent: At the rate Drupal's popularity is growing, we're finding that there just aren't enough developers to meet the demand. Web shops and organizations are coming up short in finding the Drupal talent they need to build and run the online tools they want. This session will look at ways to beat out the hiring competition to find and retain Drupal talent. Eric Gundersen will talk about how Development Seed has grown our team, and Kris Krug from Raincity will share his experiences and lessons learned.

You can vote on all the sessions (including BoFs) you want to see at DrupalCon Szeged here. See you in Szeged!

Talking Tech: Mobiles, Design, and Citizen Bloggers

The lazy days of summer haven't hit the DC tech community yet. There's another interesting and full week of technology ahead for anyone in search of good conversations, fellow techies, and air conditioning. Here are the events we're hoping to attend this week. For a full list of what's happening in the DC technology community, head on over to DC Tech Events.

Tuesday, July 22

12:15pm - 1:45 pm

3G: Mobile Media in Motion: The Media Future Now group will be meeting over lunch to talk about the new 3G mobile network and other advances in mobile technology and what it means for mobile media and communications strategy in general. 

Wednesday, July 23

7:00 pm

Or, Check Out the Patch

This year’s Google Summer of Code season I’ve got the distinct pleasure of mentoring Aron Novak’s work for a new aggregator in Drupal 7. Aron’s well into his task and has just rolled a patch for core and an alpha 2 version – time to share why I think that this patch is important and why you should have a look at it. If you’re into aggregation and Drupal, that is.

Drupal’s original aggregator module was designed foremostly for pulling news feeds into your site and displaying in a straightforward fashion: no workflow, very basic permissioning, no API for interacting with feed items, no event aggregation, no custom parsers – to name a few limitations.

Soon contrib modules mushroomed that addressed one or the other shortcoming of the core aggregator: a list of them would start with the aggregator 2 module which was published in the fall of 2005 and would include Leech (I don’t regret its demise), Aggregation (first time use of SimpleXML for parsing in Drupal), SimpleFeed (first extensible architecture) and FeedAPI

Leveraging Organic Groups and Context to Extend Custom Features Within Groups

We do a lot of work building portals and intranets that provide collaborative online spaces for professional communities. Some of these projects are completely private sites, and some are open to larger user groups. In each case we need to provide a toolset that could be configured differently for each site and frequently tweaked in particular groups. To do this we've built Spaces. It's a module that leverages Organic Groups to relate users and content to groups, and it extends context_ui to define 'features' that can be control individually in each group.  Spaces also makes assumptions about how you want groups to work and so is able to reduce the options available when creating groups and posts in groups, making the group creation and content posting processes more intuitive.

To get a sense of how this module works I have taken two screen shots from our own intranet package that we call 8trees. Here you are looking at our own team space on the 8trees install that we run for ourselves to communicate with our clients.  It provided us with a terrific way to test code and ideas on a captive and critical (but forgiving) audience. Clients never know there is anything but their own little space, but we move quickly and easily between them and have different tools (blog/book/casetrack/calander) turned on for different clients depending what stage the project is in. This is what spaces lets us do.

Included in the spaces suite is a core set of feature definitions that provide features for things like the blog and book modules. Additionally there are feature definitions for a calendar, a shout-box, and a case-tracker. When you create a group with Spaces enabled it changes the creation a bit, limiting the kind or group you can create to simply 'public' or 'private' and allows you to select what features should be available inside that group. If it's only appropriate for your group to have a blog, you can limit it to that. If your group needs a more substantial feature set, say a blog, book, and calendar, you can configure that for the group.  Spaces also lets you change labels in a group, so if a set of users doesn't want a 'blog', but needs a 'discussion' they can have it without need to to change any code or use the locale module. Here  is how the setup looks:

If you're not in Washington, DC tonight or just can't break away, you can still follow what's happening at the Drupal meetup. Ron will be streaming the presentations on Ustream, and I'll be streaming some videos to Qik, like this one. We'll be sending out notifications of when we're streaming via twitter here and here, but it will likely be from about 7:30 to 8:30 pm tonight.

DC Tech Events are Heating Up Along with the Weather

It's a very hot week for technology in Washington, DC. There are a ton of great events going on, so many in fact it was very hard to narrow it down to ones we could feasibly attend! Here's a quick look at what we're hoping to do this week. As always, a full listing of tech events is over at DC Tech Events.

Monday, July 14

7:15 to 9:00 pm

DC Drupal Meetup: Tonight we'll be heading over to the monthly Drupal meetup. If you're a Drupal developer or user - or want to be - join us for some cold beers, a game of foosball, and some heated discussions on Drupal.

8:30 pm

Screen on the Green: This summer tradition starts today with a screening of Dr. No. If you haven't seen the flick in awhile or just want a truly DC movie going experience, grab a blanket and a picnic dinner and head down to the Mall.

Tuesday, July 15

11:00 am - 12:30 pm