Blog: Drupalcon

See you at DrupalCon 2008 in Szeged, Hungary

I’m the first of the Development Seed crew to head out for Hungary, and I have to say I’m excited. I left Washington, DC on Friday for Vienna to have a week of vacation and visiting with friends and family. Then it’s time to hit the DrupalCon circuit again.

There are many sessions I’m looking forward to. Rasmus, the creator of php, shocked us al in Sunnyvale and I’m sure he has some new surprises for us in Szeged. Robert Douglas is leading a talk I’m particularly interested in on the future of search. We’ve been looking into alternatives to Drupal’s search, and it would be great to have a better solution in Drupal itself. Other session’s that I’m excited for are:

• Field API and Fields in Core
• Drupal Databases: The Next Generation
• Performance Tuning Expert Panel
• Panels – Today, and the Future
• Drupal Development Workflow and Deployment Best Practices
  

Several of my colleagues here at Development Seed are participating in some interesting sessions. Jeff will present recent developments on the Context and Spaces modules, Jose will talk about improvements to the Messaging and Notifications frameworks, and Eric will disclose how he attracts and retains Drupal talent on a panel with Robert Scales from Raincity and Tiffany Farriss from Palantir. Also, Aron and I will explain what’s cool about the new core aggregator patch.

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone in Szeged. If you haven’t gotten tickets yet, there’s still time to register and there are some affordable travel options out there. Hope to see you in Szeged!

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!

If You're In Boston, Join us at Lucky's Lounge for Happy Hour Tonight

Three exciting happy hours are happening all in one place tonight, so if you're interested in Drupal and Nonprofits, Intranets, or News, swing by Lucky's Lounge tonight to meet others working in these areas and unwind after the first day of Drupalcon with a few drinks. Come on, it's only three blocks away from the Convention Center. Map.

When you leave the Convention Center, make a left on Summer Street, walk two blocks and make a right on A street. Lucky's is right at the intersection of A and Congress. Be sure to get there early - the first couple of rounds will be picked up and food will be available to order.

Here's the line up:

• Drupal and Nonprofits, 6:00 pm
• Intranets, 6:00 pm
• News, 7:45 pm

We're hosting the Drupal and Nonprofits events, along with Gregory Heller, and want to bring people together who develop and use Drupal at nonprofit organizations. It will be great to share stories, experiences, and needs with others working with - or at - nonprofits. The Intranets event will definitely be eye opening as people building intranets and portals with Drupal come together to show off what they're doing.

After these wrap up the News happy hour will kick off at 7:45, organized by Ken Rickard, Michael Meyers, and Gary Kebbel. This sounds like a great chance for developers working on news platforms to meet people in the news industry. 

Hope you can make it!

Taking Advantage of Core Hooks and Context

At 3:30 pm on Wednesday March 5 I'll be presenting with Jeff Miccolis on some of the ideas that have been
circulating around the Development Seed office on how to tackle the simple but elusive concept of context in Drupal. We'll tackle the topic in classic academic style: define the scope of the problem, review the relevant literature (i.e. we'll look at the code of some seminal modules), look at an exemplary case study (Managing News), and then show how context can help you make a more usable Drupal site.

An Overview of the Latest Improvements and New Features

Some time ago we released the Notifications and Messaging packages as two handy and flexible frameworks to handle user subscriptions, notifications, and multiple messaging methods.

The good welcome to these tools by other developers has pushed us to keep working hard on them and that means a lot of improvements have gotten into both frameworks since the initial release. Thanks to everyone who's been sending feedback and/or patches for them. We've also been using the frameworks for our Intranet for some time now (yes, they work!) so a lot of ideas and improvements have come from our day to day user experience.

Here are a few of the big improvements:

• Two new messaging plug-ins
• SMS developed by Tim Cullen
• PHPMailer contributed by Ted Serbinski
• Better message formatting, improved filtering, and nice HTML to text conversion
• Support for bulk messaging - not just for sending messages to single users anymore
• Many usability improvements and bug fixes

There are now lots of different plug-ins for different subscription types and more
coming. You'll be able to manage them all from your user account. 

Here's a look at the main messaging settings page. See the new SMS and HTML mail (Phpmailer) plug-ins enabled and available:

As a simple proof of how easy is to develop a new messaging method plug-in, both of the new ones are around 100 lines of code and that's counting comments and white lines :-). Also we're learning as we go and based on this experience,  plug-in support is now much improved so itwill be even easier to create new ones.

We'll be presenting this work at the Boston DrupalCon so if you are interested in better notifications for your website users, you shouldn't miss the Mail, Notifications, and Messaging Framework session next week.

Coming soon: Upgrading to Drupal 6

Great Design Sessions Lined Up for DrupalCon

Without further delay, here is the lineup for DrupalCon Boston's Design and User Experience track: 

• Better Drupal Interaction Design with Flex (Chris Charlton)
• Building Capacity through Good Usability: Lessons from Instructional Design (Tim Lindgren)
• Burn the Help Manual: A Strategy for Self-Explaining UX Design (Bob Goodman)
• Converting Mock-ups to Drupal Themes (Maureen Lyons)
• Creating Custom Workflows for Drupal Applications: Taking Advantage of Core Hooks and Context (Young Hahn)
• Design on the Edge of Drupal (Claudio Luis Vera)
• Designing for Drupal (Chris Fassnacht)
• Drupal and Open Laszlo: How an Open Source Flash Solution Fits with Drupal (Kris Vanderwater)
• Drupal.org Redesign Panel (Various)
• Information Architecture to Drupal Architecture (Owen Barton)
• jQuery and Drupal: A Match Made in Heaven (Kyle Browning and Dmitri Gaskin)
• "No Tears" Methods for User Centered Design (Michael Angeles)
• Report from Formal Drupal Usability Testing at the University of Minnesota Libraries (Cody Hanson)
• Scalable Theming: Theming for 100s of Node Types, CCK fields, and Views (Bevan Rudge)
• Sex, Drupal, and Rock n Roll: A Theming Love Story (King of Denmark)
• What's in a Theme: The Power of Enterprise-Level Theming (Michael Caccavano)

The track has a strong mix of sessions aimed at hardcore designers, novice Drupal themers, and longtime community members and developers. Whether you're interested in customizing Drupal's look and feel for an enterprise-level website like Lifetime TV or looking for a robust
dynamic interface solution using jQuery,
Flex,
or Open
Laszlo, the sessions will provide plenty of opportunities for learning and sharing.

Other highlights include Michael Angeles' start-to-finish program on the right ways involve users in the design process, Bevan Rudge's guide to Scalable Theming, aka "How Not to Get Burned When Someone Adds a New Content Type", and the King of Denmark's Sex, Drupal, and Rock n Roll: A Theming Love Story, which is bound to be a blast even if no one knows what to expect.

Longtime Drupal developers and users should definitely keep their eyes
on Cody
Hanson's session. Cody and several other notable presenters,
including Dries himself, will be going over results from the
University of Minnesota's formal user testing sessions which pitted
Drupal's UI against the dreaded everyday user. The results will no
doubt spark some interesting--and maybe heated--discussions on how to
push Drupal's usability forward to the next level.

Keep your eyes open over the next two weeks for more information on these sessions. We hope to see you in Boston!