Planet Drupal

A lot of different people has started experimenting with Phonegap and Drupal. You have Jeff Linwood and his Drupal plugin for Phonegap for iOS, and I just discovered Drupalgap as I was planning this post the last weeks, which does more or less (actually it does more, but not all) some of the same things I will try to do in this post.

If you want to get up and running real quick, Drupalgap seems great. If you want to learn the code behind it, and extend it yourself (this was my motivation), keep reading.

Tags: planet drupalappsjavascriptphonegapservicesdrupal 7

Saturday, 4th February 2012Drupal Association Opens its doors to the community At Large - and I'm running for election!

The Drupal Association is, for the first time in history, opening up two spaces on the Board for "At Large" members. Voting is open now only for a few days until Feb 7. I decided to nominate myself after hearing further about the elections during the Drupal CxO event in Amsterdam last weekend, so instead of writing up all the interesting stuff that's been going on recently at the CxO event and Drupal ScienceCamp the week before where I gave my first session and videod many others, I find myself caught up in election fever and spending the weekend answering questions which were posed during two conference calls we had on Thursday - one at 1am and one at 5pm. It was great being part of these discussions with a group of passionate people from around the world, an inspiring moment in my life I shall remember for a long time!

I'm reposting my answers here as the wiki page is a bit messy, plus I want to reach out to my own community at large as they may not even know elections are on, it seems shouting about this sort of stuff in the Drupal community is not the norm, a shame as we have so much wonderful stuff to shout about!

The Drupal Association, for those who don't know, is "an educational non-profit organization that tasks itself with fostering and supporting the Drupal software project, the community and its growth". It has no control over the software itself, and states its 2012 goals as:

• Improve the collaboration tools on drupal.org and make it rock for developers
• Organize "Drupal in a day" global trainings to solve talent issue
• Drupal as a career choice through University Programs
• Directory of all trainings to solve talent issue
• Regional events targeted at developers organized by DA staff
• Make d.o awesome for site builders (vs. developers) - module reviews, docs, etc.

I am already involved in a number of these efforts and through the events I've been to I see there are many people who want to help out and contribute but simply do not have a mechanism or the knowledge to do so. Rather than go into a big speech now, here's the answers I gave - if you like my ideas please vote before Feb 7! My core process is "fostering connections" - a skill I believe is perfect for the DA.

Candidate intros

Steve Purkiss (stevepurkiss), United Kingdom

Hi, I'm Steve Purkiss and I'm here representing the "normal guy". I've been running the Drupal group in the UK's digital media hub of Brighton for the three years that I've lived here but it was only in 2010 when I went to my first DrupalCon in Copenhagen that I *got* Drupal - it's all about the community and not just software. Since then I've been helping people understand what Drupal is, including organising a 'Drupal Discovery Day' during Brighton's Digital Festival last year where we trained over 30 people in the morning and had over 40 attendees at our conference in the afternoon. I've now been to three DrupalCons, two Drupal CxO days, devdays, and did my first session at a DrupalCamp a couple of weeks back in Cambridge entitled 'From Flip Charts to Features and beyond' building on the work I've been doing with organisations including Brighton & Hove City Council in order to help them quickly and easily understand how to build projects in an agile way using Drupal and its plethora of modules. I also video many of the sessions and upload them to archive.org - I believe we should do much more videoing of events!

My first experience of the Drupal Association was in DrupalCon Copenhagen when I asked if they'd ever heard of a 'Virtual Enterprise Network' and explained it was a structure for enabling organisations including businesses, universities, and government instititions, to work together in order to deliver larger projects - similar to how the film industry works when coming together to produce a film. I asked if there was anyone in the Association who I could talk to about it because I believe strongly we have built a wonderful modular piece of software however we are yet to build a modular business model on top. The answer I received was a point-blank "No, they're all incredibly busy working for very large corporations." This is why I decided to nominated myself and hence why I feel I stand for the "normal guy" wanting to bring back some balance to the board.

Questions and answers

Harley (hyperglide) Regarding emerging markets in asia. Do any of the candidates have an idea on how to handle outreach to those markets to solve the talent shortage?

A: Steve Purkiss (stevepurkiss) The Association is in an ideal position to help pool and funnel resources to those on the ground in order to help them grow their communities wherever they are in the world. Being a focal point for the community, the Association can help the community to speak from one voice and spread knowledge sharing, education and community values wherever it is needed, and not only to those who can afford it.

(tsvenson) Q to each candidate: What do you see as the biggest obstacles for new Drupal users, especially non coders with small or no budgets, often leading to them quickly going elsewhere? And what will you do to change that?

A: Steve Purkiss (stevepurkiss) In Brighton I was going to run a week of Drupal training at £149 per day but was told I couldn't call it "affordable" training as it made other offerings sound expensive. If we only focus on the commercial side of things we have a big problem - and vice versa. I would rather see a focus on creating more sustainable forms of business than focusing on just one sector. To not view Wordpress as a threat here is IMHO a mistake.

I entered professional programming through a government-funded course and I am keen to ensure those opportunities are ongoing for people so I am talking to local colleges, universities and business networks about training students, graduates, unemployed, and career changers in Drupal. I am finding it hard by myself and my local network, if in the Association I would reach out to those around the world who can help on a more focused, local basis and assist in the construction of more support networks IRL.

(webchick) For those who want to promote international diversity, explain how a position on the DA helps you do that more effectively.

A: Steve Purkiss (stevepurkiss) Finding out what resources are needed and how they need to be tailored for particular cultures. At the recent Drupal CxO days in Amsterdam the hosts Microsoft explained a little into the process of how they do this and have offered us some time to help us - I would ensure we follow up on this very generous offer. As was mentioned, we are great technicians but not so great marketers - so why not take some tips from the best and help spread the Drupal community wider?

(Crell) Currently Drupal's face in the world is a mix of face-less Drupal.org and Acquia. Acquia is the face of Drupal, rightly or wrongly, in many eyes, moreso with the new Office of the CTO. Drupal of course is far far more than Acquia. What if anything do you feel the DA can or should do to counter-balance that, or is that even an appropriate role for the DA?

A: Steve Purkiss (stevepurkiss) The two At Large positions are a step in the right direction as we don't necessarily know who's out there in our community now as opposed to years ago when it was relatively small and why most members are from the more established companies. By bringing in outside perspectives with complementary knowledge and networks we enrich the community and move towards a more balanced, sustainable solution for democratised governance.

(tsvenson) Q to all: We just had a live usability test that showed we have still very much to do. How do you propose we can put more efforts into making Drupal, including contib projects, more user friendly and intuitive?

A: Steve Purkiss (stevepurkiss) There are some things as a community we do not do well at the moment, one of those is eat our own dogfood. I hear of many other tools people use running their Drupal business but we should work together to invest time, and funds, in fostering existing efforts such as the open app initiative. We should also develop new methods of people being able to contribute easier to the community - one such concept I've had is http://dropfund.org (hey, I bought the domain name so it's all built and ready, right?!) where people could post their project ideas much like a kickstarter for Drupal. Everything from marketing material through to module development sponsorship could be posted and funded easier than trawling through drupal.org and gdo just stumbling across stuff and trying to figure out what's going on and how to help.

(Slurpee) How many candidates have been to Drupal events outside of their own continent? And can you speak more than 1 language fluently?

A: Steve Purkiss (stevepurkiss) Since DrupalCon Copenhagen I have been to DrupalCon Chicago and London, Developer Days Brussels, CxO Days Brussels and last weekend's CxO event in Amsterdam, and the weekend before that I gave my first session at Drupal ScienceCamp Cambridge. I'm better with software languages than spoken, having spent from age 9 to now 39 learning how to talk in various software languages, from BASIC, through Pascal, ADA, Java, PHP, and now Drupal.

(Crell) Several of you listed things yo want to do or accomplish. The DA, however, has shifted from a staff board to a policy board, so board members are not directly doing anything, but managing, strategizing, coordinating, etc. Those of you who want to "do", isn't the board the wrong place for what you're describing?

A: Steve Purkiss (stevepurkiss) I want to work towards a more level playing field for everyone in the community - at the moment it seems as if the more well-funded operations build their own tools, workflow, and methods of dealing with inefficiencies in tools we have such as drupal.org whereas I believe it's the role of the DA to encourage contribution of these tools back to the community, and pool as many of these resources as possible so they are of benefit to all and not just competitive advantage for a few. Managing, strategizing, and coordinating are the ways in which I will achieve this!

(rfay) In 30 seconds or less, what are the roles of the DA and what are not the roles?

A: Steve Purkiss (stevepurkiss) The DA plays an important role supporting the development and growth of the Drupal community and should take a more active role in enabling those who want to contribute to be able to do so. It is not the DA's role to be involved in the decision-making process when it comes to the software itself, however it should be there to support ongoing efforts by being able to connect funders and those wanting funding, whether for hardware or software development. In terms of funding development then I believe the community and not the DA should be the decision-makers as to what gets funded - the DA should just help with the organisation of these initiatives.

(Crell) Q: Several candidates said they want to better represent or be a voice for "small shops" and independents. In what way does the DA currently not adequately serve small shops, and what would a better service for small players mean in practice? Be as specific as possible.

A: Steve Purkiss (stevepurkiss) It is more that relationships are currently built and maintained around a relatively few number of shops - ones who are either ingrained in the community, or who have the funds to "buy" their way into the community. Mostly I believe this is due to the fact we are not utilising our own software to the best effect to help connect, also because we are still thinking in terms of old-IT top-down big consultancy approach in some ways - perhaps because the biggest businesses involved currently still work that way.

We have built wonderful modular software and we are currently seeming to try and mash that into an old, out-of-date business model. Many large IT failures will still happen if the business models don't change - it's just they'll fail with Open Source Software resulting in harming its reputation. There are other ways, one of which is Virtual Enterprise Networks ('VEN')* where one body represents its members in a commercial environment, enabling sharing of costs such as marketing, and enabling larger projects to be delivered than could be done by any one member organisation alone.

Many smaller shops and independents are technically very capable but not so good at marketing - will a skills shortage and the fact that specific expertise is not geographically specific we should embrace new ways of working together on larger projects than just giving them to to the larger companies. As I discovered at the recent Drupal CxO event in Amsterdam *every* Drupal company there had issues with being too small - whether they were 2, 20, or 50 people. With a VEN a structure would be there for easier collaboration between these companies and individuals.

I believe the DA is in an ideal position to help to work towards the creation of a Drupal VEN, and spearhead not only a modular piece of software but a complementary business model to boot. I see some worrying similarities between what is happening in the Drupal world and what happened in the dotcom days when the company I was working at received $7m investment and immediately went out and hired lots of ex-IBM people. We have a small window of opportunity here to do something different and innovative - we should take full advantage of before balance is lost and we end up repeating old business mistakes simply because we are only listening to those who have too much interest in a particular model, or who simple do not know any other way is possible. A VEN is just one potential structure which should be investigated further in order to see which would be most complementary to the Drupal community in order to utilise the network more efficiently.

* http://www.bioteams.com/2005/07/11/virtual_enterprise_networks.html

(tsvenson) When do you think the first Asian DrupalCon should be held? Also, should that mean 3 cons/year or should they alternate with 2/year?

A: Steve Purkiss (stevepurkiss) I would need to investigate the current situation and any research done so far before suggesting any answer to this. At the moment, I feel if the community is big enough to support it then sure, if not then we should see how we can build or connect the community more so that it is in a position to put on a Con.

(jredding) In 30 seconds or less, what would you say is the most important skillset, expertise, or experience that a board member should bring to the Association.

A: Steve Purkiss (stevepurkiss) Experience, passion, ideas, ears, mouth when needed, sympathy, empathy, commitment, independence, and a willingness to question and challenge the status quo.

(carsonblack) What are some (or one) way that DA can help the small user groups throughout the world better serve their local markets?

A: Steve Purkiss (stevepurkiss) At the recent Drupal CxO event in Amsterdam I spoke to a number of companies who want to join forces in order to help create more marketing materials for Drupal. We should help these companies to contribute as the result will be more material available for everyone to use, including local user groups. We should also make it easier to start and maintain local groups by providing more up-to-date resources of information gathered from existing groups, and continue to provide funding where possible. I won one of the first Community Cultivation Grants with which I created a short video "What is Drupal?" (http://bad-ass.org.uk/what-is-drupal) which helped a little but we need more ongoing support too so we can develop the great work people are doing out there "in the field". Guilds are great, however we should ensure these do not go the way of the guilds of old, which ended up being cartels. There was a similar issue in the Open Source Consortium of which I was a founding member but left soon after as I felt it would go this way. It was set up by Mark Taylor from Sirius IT who has spoken at Drupal CxO events, he confirmed to me it did end up being a cartel so he too left. Not saying Drupal Guilds will, we just have to be aware they potentially could.

(Crell) The DA is officially banned from "directing the development of Drupal". What does that mean to you? Are there ways the DA could "support" development without "directing" development? What would you want to do in that regard? Again, be specific as possible.

A: Steve Purkiss (stevepurkiss) To me this means the DA should be supporting the development of Drupal whatever that development is. For example, if the community decided to rewrite the entire of Drupal using .NET technologies, although it would be a completely ridiculous concept, the DA should support the community's decision. The DA is ideally positioned to be a connector of resources to support the development of Drupal, by working with the community to ascertain what resources are needed the DA can help ensure access to those resources are provided, whether in terms of hardware, funding, or whatever is necessary for the community to continue to grow and flourish.

(tsvenson) Should the DA take a more proactive role about the d.o infrastructure and its improvement needs. Especially in regards to for example content management tools for doumentation and giving better cred/visibility to all those that puts in amazing work that is not project/code related? If so how and what is needed?

A: Steve Purkiss (stevepurkiss) Yes, I believe it is the responsiblity of the DA to support the infrastructure used by the community. I think there is a lot that can be done here in terms of working more closely with companies using Drupal to help them contribute more back to the community in order to help sustain and grow. At the moment it seems as if there's a high barrier in terms of both expertise and time to be able to change much, with a little more communication and connection of existing efforts I believe we can provide much better tools for the community to use, which will in turn show off more of what Drupal can do to the wider world and hopefully make it a little easier to understand for all.

Candidate summary statements

My first job was selling computers to small businesses, and whilst I have also worked with many large corporations, it is the small business person I have most affinity with. As we move into an age of more interdependance as many are laid off from work I believe we need to bring back some balance on the board and provide more assistance to those who have the passion and expertise but not necessarily the cash and connect them with those who have the cash but not necessarily the expertise (or indeed passion!). We need to foster the growth of more tools using our own software to help collaboration and start to build a world based on the ways we work together now, not 10, 20 or 30 years ago. By coming onto the board from this side, I bring fresh new ideas and energy, and a network which provides further reach than the board currently possesses in order to help the Association achieve and exceed the initiatives set out for 2012. I am already involved in many of the areas such as talking to universities and organising free training events, I could do this more effectively and to a greater degree if I were to be on the DA board, thus having easier access to more resources and connections.

ENDS

Feel free to ask me any questions you may have here, on my nomination profile, or on twitter, I'd be happy to answer!

One last thing - don't forget to vote by Feb7! Voting is open to all who have a Drupal account longer than about three weeks old and who have logged at least once in the previous year -  that's around 270,000 people of which at time of writing only 280 have voted.

Make sure your voice is heard and vote today!

tags: drupalDrupal PlanetDrupal AssociationDrupal Association At Large

One of the most important and complex aspects of a DrupalCon is the schedule. An enormous amount of work goes into getting it right – from the huge number of session submissions, which have to be reviewed and selected by the track chairs and their teams, to the people whose job it is to carefully consider and decide time slots for all of them.

Once all of this work has taken place, the schedule then needs to be presented, in print, on meter boards, posters and in the delegate guide, as well as on the website and mobile app.

With around 70-80 sessions over three days and eight tracks, with three possible skill levels and multiple presenters, all split up into different time slots, and sometimes sub-time slots, presenting this lot is not a simple task. I had some great people working with me on the London schedule and I think we did a pretty good job.

For Denver, the plan was to take the schedule a bit further, making it responsive so that the layout adjusts to the size of the screen you are viewing it on. This is particularly useful for mobile phones and tablets, on which the user experience would be very poor if the design wasn't responsive. Initially the Denver team were looking at a table format for the schedule, similar to the Chicago approach: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/schedule. This layout is really good, but tables don't do well with responsive design. Tables have no way of rearranging themselves – if the width of the table shrinks, the cells just squash horizontally until they are stopped by the longest word in each. This looks pretty horrible and usually breaks a website's layout on smaller screens.

DrupalCamp Austin did use a semi-table layout, and importantly, it doesn't actually use table markup, meaning it can collapse. This worked well because the number of sessions in a given time slot was limited. Denver's maximum is seven sessions in a single time slot, which even in a 960 set up, would be really squashing them in on a single row and force them to collapse almost immediately on the slightest resize.

So a different method was needed. Initially taking the approach of a mobile web app, I put together an example schedule using Denver's branding to help demonstrate how it could collapse on smaller screens. The main difference in this layout is that instead of side by side, the sessions are stacked, divided by the time slots. The track icons were produced for Drupalcon Chicago and it felt really right to pick them up again for Denver.

The Denver team then adapted the prototype to fit the website and extended the icon set to cover the new tracks. While implementing, they made some subtle improvements to my prototype, like the track title on hover: http://denver2012.drupal.org/program/schedule

There are definitely more improvements to be made. The hit area isn't very large on the sessions (only the title), so it's not always easy to press with your finger; wrapping everything in an a tag would resolve this. The rooms aren't displayed yet, which would be pretty useful to help you find your way around and some of the sessions don't fall into specific time slots, so we are working on adding these soon. Also the filters are yet to be implemented on the Denver site, but it is worth looking at the prototype on a mobile device to see how I envisaged them working.

This is of course, just one example of a schedule for one event format, but if you are reading this from inside or outside the 'Drupalsphere', I hope you found some of the ideas useful.

@graemeblackwood

People like their Planet Drupal in different style. According to a rather non-scientific survey, two thirds prefer to get the Planet feed with full posts and two thirds reads the feed in some kind of reader.

I belong to the third that prefer the stream of posts to be trimmed to a maximum length -- it makes easier for me to scan for new posts when their lengths doesn't vary between one paragraph and five screen lengths. There has been some discussion about introducing customizable teaser length on Planet Drupal, but has proved difficult to actually get it going. While waiting for this, I whipped up a Yahoo! pipe that takes the RSS feed and trims the posts to a length that you can set yourself. If you're interested, feel free to use http://pipes.yahoo.com/itangalo/drupalplanettrimmed?_render=rss in the reader of your choice. Add "&length=500" to trim the post length to the number of characters you like -- default is 1000. (The trimming is "dumb", so no respect is taken to tags. Sorry.)

I hope this can be useful for someone more than me.

(Note: I know the webmasters on drupal.org is working hard and doing a great job. This forked feed is in no way an attempt to say that the webmasters aren't doing a good job, nor a way to try to draw people away from drupal.org. It is just a way to share something that I find useful with others.)

Interested in more smart Drupal feeds? Check out the "full modules" Twitter account or RSS feed and the "sandbox modules" Twitter account/RSS.

The most basic function of a content management system is the ability to create a page. However, this fundamental activity of website building is often an unexpected hassle for new Drupal users. Yeah, I'm talking about the lack of a built-in rich text editor.

I know there are some strong feelings in the Drupal community about this, but let me try to persuade you that whatever the philosophical or technical reasons for not including a default editor, they're hurting adoption of Drupal and needlessly creating a usability issue for those who are evaluating the platform. 

What Happened To Me

Most of the reasons I have heard for not including a default editor involve respecting user choice. This is a fine sentiment, but let me illustrate the problems it can create when someone is evaluating Drupal.

First, a little context. I've been building websites since 2000. Although I'm a competent coder and have slogged my way through a custom module or two, I've never really enjoyed that aspect of building a site and come more from a design and marketing perspective. I have an MBA, not a degree in computer science, and that's the lens I look through when thinking about websites.

A few years ago, an organization I work for had a site that had grown increasingly difficult to manage so we decided to take a look at content management systems. We were working in a .NET environment and had both DotNetNuke and Umbraco on the list, but we also wanted to consider the "Big 3" PHP platforms - WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.

It fell to me to evaluate these platforms, write up a recommendation and do a brief demo of the top two choices. I started with Joomla because my boss had heard great things about it. I installed it and added a few pages, tweaked some configuration options - you know, took it out for a test drive. I repeated this process one by one until I came to the last platform, Drupal. 

The install seemed to go smoothly...so far, so good. I went to create a page and...hold on a second. I think something went wrong in the install. Where is the text editor? Maybe I need to turn something on?

Ten minutes of clicking through the admin pages.

OK, time for Google.

Oh, I see! You need a module called WYSIWYG. Strange that they don't include that. All of the others did. Well, no big deal. Modules don't seem too hard to install.

Ten Minutes Pass...

WYSIWYG is installed! Now let's create that page!

Uh...no editor. What the hell? Back to Google. 

Looks like I need to add the actual editor. Wow, there are a lot of choices. Also a lot of debate on which one is best. Guess I'll just go with TinyMCE. People seem to like it.

Whew! That was a bit of work but finally I've got an editor in there - let's make a page!

Wait...why can't I add an image? Where is the upload? Oh. I have to install another module.

Check that, two modules - IMCE and IMCE Wysiwyg Bridge.

Are you *!?#ing kidding me? All of this to make a basic page!? 

A Few Things to Consider

Before you tell me how stupid it was of me to not do A or B, consider that my experience is not that uncommon. You see, the Drupal community is dominated by developers, really good developers who embrace complexity and who love nothing more than to muck about with code and get their hands dirty. Installing and configuring a few modules is nothing. Actually it's kind of fun, right?

Unfortunately, there are a large number of people involved in building websites who don't feel this way.

There is a common complaint about the quality of Drupal themes and they are often contrasted unfavorably with WordPress themes. Have you ever considered the possibility that Drupal usability may be playing a role? How can this be, you ask?

Web designers are very influential in the CMS decision making process in many firms and certainly among consultants. They generally just want things to work. If a content management system is a hassle for them, they will naturally tend not to recommend it. Instead, they will choose a CMS that will allow them to spend more time working on the parts of their job they love - designing themes, for example.

The marketing department also likes to have a lot of input into the website. After all, in the large majority of cases, the website is a marketing platform. How do you think they feel about a CMS that seems hard to use right out of the gate?

A Unforced Error

When Drupal 7 was nearing release, I read about all of the usability improvements that were on the way. Finally, I thought, Drupal will get a text editor by default!

Obviously, that didn't happen and it remains a blemish on what are some really great improvements to usability. In fact, had an editor been included by default, I honestly think that Drupal 7 would compare very well to WordPress 3 with regard to usability. 

Now, some folks might mention using an installation profile that includes an editor. That's not really a solution when you think about it. People who are new to Drupal are going to download the default install or perhaps from Acquia (also, very surprisingly, no editor). Installation profiles are generally for people who are already familiar with Drupal and are looking for a time saver. 

An analogy I think is appropriate is with product packaging. Think about Apple and how they package their products and how that affects the buyer's experience with the product. The first 20-30 minutes a person spends with a CMS is very similar. The product speaks to the user. Some may marvel at the flexibilty and power of Drupal. Many others may try to create a simple page and wander off in frustration thinking, "Drupal is too hard."

It doesn't have to be that way.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

Obviously, I didn't give up on Drupal during that evaluation process and have since become an ardent supporter. But I've always wondered why - virtually alone among all the CMS platforms - Drupal continues to omit a default text editor.

I would like to appeal to the Drupal community for two things.

First, please support the inclusion of a default text editor in future versions. CK Editor, YUI, TinyMCE - it doesn't really matter. Just pick something. It can always be switched out later. Including an editor by default will go a long way toward making a good first impression with new users.

Second, let me say how much I respect Drupal developers and the amazing CMS they have built. I only ask that you leave a little room at the table for some of the other important stakeholders that may not always feel heard within the community. I'm talking about the designers, the marketers, information architects, copywriters and even executive decision makers who work together to build great websites. There are more of us out here than you may think. And we would like a default editor, please. It will make the job of selling Drupal to new users much easier.

And that's a good thing for everyone, don't you think?

This is the 21st in our series of Drupal Gardens 'What's New' posts, and we think this one is especially worth celebrating. Need to restrict valuable content on your site to only privileged users? Want to crop, rotate or resize uploaded images in your posts? Wish you could click to perform bulk delete or other operations on lists of users, content or media? Long for better control over how comments are displayed on your site? With this release, we've got you covered.

A lot went into making these features simple, but powerful. For content access control, we started with the powerful Taxonomy Access Control module, and worked with maintainer Jess (xjm) to make it easier to assign access permissions with an alternative user interface. In addition, we created the TAC Redirect 403 module that allows custom upsell pages for different categories of restricted content. For cropping, rotating and resizing image media we created the Media: image editing module. For bulk operations we added the Views Bulk Operations module and worked with maintainer Bojan Živanović (bojanz) to simplify the UI. For comment customization, we created the Comment Goodness module. As usual, the patches and modules developed for these features were donated back to drupal.org so the entire community can benefit. We hope you find them useful!

*/ */

The Drupal Gardens service was updated on Jan. 30th with the following new features and enhancements:

• Crop, rotate, and resize images in the WYSIWYG editor

  Content editors can use the WYSIWYG editor to rotate, crop, and scale images on the fly. To learn more, see Crop, rotate, and scale embedded images.

• Customize how comments are displayed

  Now you can sort comments per content type and customize commenting labels. For a YouTube-like comment experience, you can sort comments by ‘Newer first’ which also moves the comment form to the top of the comment stream. To learn more, see Customizing comments and sorting.

• Eliminate repetitive site administration tasks with bulk operations

  For Basic subscription plans or higher, save time and eliminate repetitive administrative tasks by extending your views with Views Bulk Operations. With this feature you can select multiple items in a view (e.g. content, users, media, etc) and click to bulk delete, bulk publish, and more. To learn more, see Applying bulk actions to view items

• Restrict access to your site's content to privileged users.

  For Professional subscription plans or higher, Drupal Gardens provides fine-grained access control to your site’s content using Taxonomy-based access control. With this feature, you can define access control rules describing which users (by role) can view, edit, or delete content. Then you can apply these access control rules to any content you want. Optionally, you can allow some users to see a teaser of the content, but then redirect them to another web page when they try to view the full version of content in order to upsell them or provide information about how they can get access to your premium content. To learn more, see Restricting access to site content.

• For a complete list of what's new, including updates to Drupal modules and bug fixes, see the release notes.

Tags: acquia drupal planetdrupalgardens

I knew the moment my laptop didn't wake from sleep mode something was amiss. Having retired to my office safe haven for the evening I just wanted to wrap up a few items, log my time and call it a night - the basic end to any Drupal developer's day. My Macbook, however, had other plans.

It was the quintessential nightmare for those of use who live on our computers, a dream we often visualize as worse-case situations but often do nothing to lessen the pain of actualities: a complete computer crash with limited hope of a reboot. But despite the Macabre vibe usually surrounding such thoughts, it's something that doesn't always have to be the ultimate disaster. 

I am working on a multilingual site which requires me to localize the date format for each enabled language.

Here are the available languages and their date formats:
* Spanish(es) - j de F, Y
* German(de) - j. F Y
* Japanese(ja) - Y年n月j日

In order to achieve this, I have enabled date_locale and its dependencies(date_api, locale).

Here are the steps that I took in order to localize the date format:
1) Navigate to "Site Configuration" > "Date and time" > "Formats" > "Add Format".
2) Create the custom format for Spanish and Japanese languages.

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There are a number of Drupal modules that handle node access and which may address many requirements. However, using hook_node_grants() and hook_node_access_records(), you can also define in your own module which nodes a user can view, edit and delete.

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img.right {float: right; clear: right; padding-left: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em; } img.left {float: left; clear: left; padding-right: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em; } h2, h3 {clear: both; padding-top: 10px; }

While this article focuses primarily on the state of Drupal “contrib” (modules and themes which are not part of the “core” Drupal download), it also takes a look at the greater “State of Drupal” in terms of sites known to be running on some version of Drupal, comparisons of the rate of uptake after Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 release, and a small case study involving attempting to perform a “major upgrade” from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 on a site using a significant number of contributed modules.

The recent history of Drupal core usage

As a starting point, I think it is helpful to look at the recent history of Drupal core usage and compare the uptake of Drupal 6, after its release, with the uptake of Drupal 7. On June 22nd, 2008, when Drupal 6.0 was released, there were already significantly more sites using Drupal 6 than Drupal 5 (almost 32,000 on Drupal 6 vs almost 17,000 on Drupal 5). Both core versions of Drupal steadily gained users for a time, with Drupal 5 reaching a peak of about 24,000 sites about 7 months later, but by that time Drupal 6 was running on more than 100,000 sites. By late July 2009 (a similar point to now in terms of months after the major version release), Drupal 5 usage had dropped to about 20,000 sites and Drupal 6 was running on more than 160,000 sites; more than eight times as many installations. Since then, Drupal 5 usage has tapered to about 7,000 sites; a bit more than 1% of total Drupal usage (please note: it’s likely that many of the existing Drupal 5 sites do not report usage back to Drupal.org).

Now let’s look at the usage of Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 since the time of Drupal 7’s release. Drupal 6 peaked with about 355,000 sites, shortly after Drupal 7’s release in January 2011. At that time Drupal 7 was running on about 24,000 sites, a fraction of Drupal 6 usage at that time. Since then, while sites running on Drupal 7 have steadily increased to their present values, about 280,000 sites, Drupal 6 has hovered around the same value, drifting between about 320,000 and 350,000 sites, but not yet significantly dropping. Almost 13 months after Drupal 7’s official release, we still have more sites running Drupal 6 than Drupal 7 (and I suspect that a significant percentage of the Drupal 7 sites are in development rather than production). But what does this really say? Let’s look a bit closer at the numbers and trends:

Note: I banged this graph out in Excel since the Google chart of Drupal usage, normally displayed on project pages, seems to fail as “too large to process” for “core” usage statistics.

Drupal usage has grown by leaps and bounds since Drupal 6’s release. In June 2008, there were fewer than 50,000 sites using Drupal 5 and 6 combined. Now, a bit more than three-and-a-half years later, there are more than 615,000 sites running on some version of Drupal — more than a 12-fold increase in that time period! A year ago, this figure was less than 400,000, so Drupal 7 sites make up a large proportion of the more-than-200,000 Drupal sites added since then. The growth was steeper after Drupal 6’s release, but we still did not have 200,000 sites, total, by July 2009. In any case, it’s safe to say that for most use cases, we have the modules necessary to build a good site based on Drupal 7, so if you are hesitant to use it, don’t be. There are many great advantages to Drupal 7 and with the continual improvement of the contributed modules, we should probably build new sites on Drupal 6, only if modules critical to the use case are lacking for Drupal 7 (or if the “new” site is another site in an existing Drupal 6 “multi-sites” installation). Even if a “critical” module exists for Drupal 6 and not yet for Drupal 7, it may still be worth building the site on Drupal 7 if you have the coding experience to port the Drupal 6 module to Drupal 7, which would help alleviate the current issue that many significant modules are not yet available for Drupal 7.

State of Drupal 7 contrib (modules) Good news: Almost all “Top 100” Drupal 6 Modules are ported to Drupal 7

The good news, especially for site builders creating a new Drupal 7 site, is that most of the top 100 modules are ready for use on Drupal 7. Nine of them are redundant (now included in “core”), 43 have “stable” releases, 23 have beta or RC, 11 have an alpha release, and 9 are in “dev” status, while a couple others recommend using another module which performs similarly.

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We now have an official Media Support Squad to keep the momentum for the Media Initiative at he high pace. First task is to help getting a stable Media 1.0 released. Read on to find out more and how you can enlist to become a squad member.Tweet Widget Google Plus One Digg Smart Button Share on Facebook

We wanted to bring to light a change that we made a few weeks ago; the switching of our SSL certificate away from GoDaddy. As an Association that supports an open source project we did not want to continue to be aligned with an organization that at any point would support such devastating legislation. The SSL certificates have been moved over to Namecheap because we value their commitment to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), their stance against SOPA, and their position on keeping an open web.

There have been plenty of articles about Drupal 7 and entities already. Entities are great. They provide a unified way to work with different data units in Drupal. Drupal 7 is all about entities. They are everywhere: nodes, users, taxonomy terms, vocabularies...

Let's take a closer look at how developers can create their own entities using the Entity API module, which is a great toolbox.

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I'm running for election as an "At Large" board member of the Drupal Association.

"Meet the candidates" forums were scheduled so members of the Drupal community could ask questions of the nominees.  We were all asked to do a brief introduction, then respond to questions either by voice, or by IRC, and then were all asked to make a final statement. 

Rather than adding to the already lengthy wiki summary of the candidate meetings, I'm posting the edited version of my responses here instead.  See the full IRC transcript, and others summaries here:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/207398

My formal candidate statement is here:
https://association.drupal.org/node/14388

Further information on the election, as well as details on voter eligibility, and how to vote is here:
https://association.drupal.org/2012-elections-voting

General Intro

I'm in Melbourne, Australia. Run my own small business, called Creative Contingencies. Been using Drupal for about 5 years. I'm really passionate about open source and the fact it enables people to do things they would not otherwise be able to do.

In terms of Drupal and the Drupal Association, I'd like to be a voice for the 'small voices'. Small Drupal shops, amateurs, hobbyists, non-profits, students and tinkerers. Sometimes we get caught up in the commercial opportunities, and forget that Drupal has been an enabler for many people that aren't using it to make a living.

It's important the Drupal Association develops a more global perspective, and that we work together to invite and embrace more people into the Drupal community.

I just helped run Drupal Downunder in Melbourne a couple of weeks back, it was a great success, and like many other camps around the world was driven by the local community to fulfil a need that can't be filled by DrupalCon, because DrupalCon happens on the other side of the world. The DA has already expressed an interest in seeing DrupalCon South America and DrupalCon Asia Pacific - which is fantastic, but I have concerns.

Response to Questions

Harley (Hyperglide)
Regarding emerging markets in asia. Wants to know if any of the candidates have an idea on how to handle outreach to those markets to solve the talent shortage?

Emerging markets are really important for Drupal's growth. There's a pretty critical Drupal skills shortage. Everyone is hitting that. China and India are both huge countries with lots of developers - finding a way to encourage them to participate in the community could help with the global skills shortage. But we also have to acknowledge the economic reality that participating in an open source project as a volunteer doesn't pay the bills. We need to connect with other open source communities in the region, and encourage and support local groups to create and grow their own events, meetups, mentoring, and community learning programs.

The DA can help with some of that, but we're also going to run into some issues. We're going to have address the tension between commercial interests in training and certification with the broad based need for more people to learn Drupal.

 

tsvenson: What do you see as the biggest obstacles for new Drupal users, especially non coders with small or no budgets, often leading to them quickly going elsewhere? And what will you do to change that?

We need to tackle the issues identified by the documentation team. They are the front line for new users. Our online help and support is where new users and new developers go to learn. Infrastructure bottle necks are a real issue holding us back. That is definitely something the DA should address. Even better, it's on the roadmap for 2012 - which is great. I'd support and champion that element of the 2012 roadmap.

We also need to find how to support documentation translations, and better multi-lingual support, on drupal.org

 

webchick: For those who want to promote international diversity, explain how a position on the DA helps you do that more effectively.

Actually, this is the core of my platform. International diversity has been identified as a key goal for the DA. Yet the makeup of the current board is largely homogenous. With one exception, all 8 of the current board members lives in North America. One is in Europe.

No doubt these people have an international perspective, but it's one thing to think about, it's another thing to live it. The heated discussion about the need to travel was educational to say the least.

As an example, the 2nd candidates meeting was scheduled at 4am Melb/Sydney time. We weren't expected to be there, but I wondered how failing to show up would hurt our candidacy? I decided to bite the bullet, get up early to be on the call.

If elected, I'll be noisy, opinionated and irritating. I'll reach out to communities in Oceania, Asia and Africa, and encourage them to engage in the community, participate on groups.drupal.org, share their experiences of running local camps, and national associations - as I've started to try and do so with a BoF at London DrupalCon, and International Drupal Associations on G.D.O

 

Crell: Currently Drupal's face in the world is a mix of face-less Drupal.org and Acquia. Acquia is the face of Drupal, rightly or wrongly, in many eyes, moreso with the new Office of the CTO. Drupal of course is far far more than Acquia. What if anything do you feel the DA can or should do to counter-balance that, or is that even an appropriate role for the DA?

I think the DA needs to look at the apache and gnome foundations. Acquia is incredibly important and powerful - but as far as the DA concerned - Acquia should just be one of many drupal companies. The DA needs to focus on the community and the infrastructure the community needs to make drupal better.

 

tsvenson: We just had a live usability test that showed we have still very much to do. How do you propose we can put more efforts into making Drupal, including contib projects, more user friendly and intuitive?

Continue to improve the infrastrucuture... and invest in the tools we use... eg D.O Conduct further public live streamed usability sessions just like that. Very useful. But the next step is spreading knowledge of what to do with that information amongst the developer community, and ignite their passion to focus on usability challenges.

 

Slurpee: How many candidates have been to Drupal events outside of their own continent? And can you speak more than 1 language fluently?

I have been to drupalcon sanfrancisco and london - I can't speak another language fluently... but I speak a little bit of Dutch.

 

Crell: Several of you listed things yo want to do or accomplish. The DA, however, has shifted from a staff board to a policy board, so board members are not directly doing anything, but managing, strategizing, coordinating, etc. Those of you who want to "do", isn't the board the wrong place for what you're describing?

This is exactly why I want to get involved and be a voice for under represented parts of the Drupal community because all too often the policy gets driven without those things being considered.

If you're not loud and you don't put your voice in when the policies are being formed, it's much harder to move in that direction afterwards.

 

rfay: In 30 seconds or less, what are the roles of the DA and what are not the roles?

The DA can amplify the work of local communities and also support and give credibility to them!

The DA has no involvement in driving the Drupal project itself. It is primarily and administrative entity to manage the affairs of a series of large international conferences. Potentially taking over some of the legal intellectual property issues around the trademark which belongs to Dries Buytaert, and employing staff to help ensure DrupalCons happen, and the hardware and Drupal infrastructure keeps working.

 

Crell: Several candidates said they want to better represent or be a voice for "small shops" and independents. In what way does the DA currently not adequately serve small shops, and what would a better service for small players mean in practice? Be as specific as possible.

I don't know that the DA is failing small shops, I just don't see those voices represented in the current makeup of the board. Most are from North America and large organisations so it's not necessarily that there's a huge gap, but there is potentially a huge gap. I have a sense that this is a problem more than specific criticisms.
But we're not just talking about small Drupal shops. We're also talking about people using Drupal who don't have a commercial interest in it. People who are hobbyists, non-profits staffed by volunteers, clubs and amateurs, and community groups. Tinkerers and students. Many of our contributors have come from this kind of background, it's a valuable proving ground for future Drupal talent.

 

tsvenson: When do you think the first Asian DrupalCon should be held? Also, should that mean 3 cons/year or should they alternate with 2/year?

DrupalCon Asia?
I was concerned about the idea of "drupalcon asia pacific" somehow being "the rest of the world" except Africa. The AsiaPacific region contains 3 of the 5 most populous nations on earth: India, China and Indonesia. They are all incredibly culturally and linguistically diverse. Trying to create a single event for both continents (ASIA and OCEANIA) is going to be an enormous challenge.

DrupalCon Mumbai, DrupalCon Shanghai, DrupalCon Bali, DrupalCon Manila, DrupalCon Wellington might all happen one day. When? Yes, well that's a very good question. This year? unlikely. Next year? Maybe. And then 2 years after that.

A DrupalCon in our region is going to happen pretty infrequently, I'm more interested in local communities building their own capacity to serve their needs with local events, than sit around waiting for the blessing of the Drupal Association.

Perhaps the US Drupal community should adopt the North American DrupalCon as it's National event? And the Drupal Association should shift it's focus toward developing one International UberDrupalCongress which is on a different continent each year, more like the olympics, and focus all of its attention on that. I don't know. I just think we should question all our assumptions.

 

jredding: In 30 seconds or less, what would you say is the most important skillset, expertise, or experience that a board member should bring to the Association.

One of the most important things is to bring a sense of collaboration and wilingness to work with the rest of the board on important topics. To try to reach consensus, and ensure we all bring our slightly different perspectives to the table when we're making decisions. People often think consensus is all happy families but you only get there considering many differnt perspectives and figuring out what you can agree on, rather than focussing on what you can't agree on.

 

carsonblack: Q: What are some (or one) way that DA can help the small user groups throughout the world better serve their local markets?

Perhaps put together an info pack? How to build and grow your local community. How to engage with local businesses, authorities and educational institutions. Often what's holding people back, is just knowing where to begin.

 

jredding:
When the DA board member is out n the community how would that member represent themselvs in the community? Would they have a title of board member and use that?

I don't know. I think it's an interesting question and would be keen to explore ideas on how best to do this.

 

Crell: The DA is officially banned from "directing the development of Drupal". What does that mean to you? Are there ways the DA could "support" development without "directing" development? What would you want to do in that regard? Again, be specific as possible.

I like the idea of funding sprints... not directing what happens at them, but helping them happen. Putting effort into the tools the project relies on is borderline... but it's something that needs doing....

 

tsvenson: Question: Should the DA take a more proactive role about the d.o infrastructure and its improvement needs. Especially in regards to for example content management tools for doumentation and giving better cred/visibility to all those that puts in amazing work that is not project/code related? If so how and what is needed?

Yes! We expend effort and resources on ensuring DrupalCon happens, and that the servers keep running. We should be expending effort on the real heart of the community, drupal.org and groups.drupal.org.

We urgently need to address bottle necks frustrating key community initiatives, such as documentation, support, prairie, some of these have lost momentum because of infrastructure bottlenecks, and the fact we can no longer really innovate on drupal.org.

 

Final Statement

I'd like to finish off by saying Drupal is awesome. The community is what makes that true.

I am desperate to give back to this project and this community in the best way I can. I'm not a coder, designer, documenter, but I am good at being on committees, organising events. Following through. I will put in all my energy and efforts to be a useful productive, engaged member of the board.

It's the first time the DA has run broad based elections like this. It is the beginning of a new chapter in terms of how the organisation is structured. There's a a lot of work to do in the future, consolidating what's been done already and continuing to become a more open and transparent organisation. I'd love to be part of seeing that happen and working for the community by being on the board.

I'd like to add, my fellow nominees are all awesome. Even if not elected, the DA should find a way to co-opt them onto other committees. They've all indicated a willingness to serve - let's harness their commitment, competence and energy.

• drupalplanet
• drupal

Voting is now open for the 2012 election of at large directors of the Drupal Association. Two directors will be elected from among the ten candidates.

About the Drupal Association elections

When we designed a new governance structure for the Drupal Association last year, we decided that most of the board is selected through a nominating committee with the goal to carefully balance many factors like needed skills and geographical and sector representation. However, it was also deemed important that we have directors chosen directly by the Drupal community to make sure that the community is always well-represented.

We're holding our first open community elections! Two community "at large" directors will be elected to the Drupal Association Board of Directors, and YOU can get to say who they are!

Where to find out about candidates

• Review their nomination profiles.

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With a new Drupal Core release out, it's worth reminding people just how easy it is to pull an update if you're using Pantheon:

One click and you're done! This is the beauty of starting a project off the canonical git history.

Also, of note - updating the stone-age way (unpacking a tarball from Drupal.org and overwriting all your core files) won't give good results. This will stop on the PRESSFLOW_SETTINGS auto-configuration system we use to connect to databases and other external services. Take the path of least resistance: it's also the best practice!

With a new Drupal Core release out, it's worth reminding people just how easy it is to pull an update if you're using Pantheon:

One click and you're done! This is the beauty of starting a project off the canonical git history.

Also, of note - updating the stone-age way (unpacking a tarball from Drupal.org and overwriting all your core files) won't give good results. This will stop on the PRESSFLOW_SETTINGS auto-configuration system we use to connect to databases and other external services. Take the path of least resistance: it's also the best practice!

This one-day event is for business leaders of Drupal businesses (CEO, Partner, President, CMO, etc.) and it provides networking, business training and collaborative problem solving for common business challenges that Drupal-related companies face. There will be sessions on how to retain staff and build teams, plus a half-day moderated forum. The event fee is $150 and will conclude with a cocktail mixer. Register now, limited seats are available.

Read more about CxO Day

Well, it's been a few weeks since the 1st of the year, so of course most of us are either dreading or hoping for the question: "How are you doing with your New Year's resolution?" Today, I'm excited to report on one of mine!

Private files are great but they are a huge resource hog. In certain scenarios, lower-resolution versions of the pictures are absolutely fine to be public, only high resolution originals need to be protected. In this case you can use Drupal's private file handling as it is and the following simple trick to make a style public.

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