How would you describe yourself as a Drupal administrator?
"amazon" do you want to do skype?
"interviewee" I'm fine with irc if that's okay with you, don't have a mic here at work
"amazon" IRC then
"amazon" go ahead with the question
"interviewee" I'd say that I'm an experienced drupal administrator, though I only tend to work with small community sites.
"interviewee" (ie, no big-scale Onion sized stuff)
"amazon" what kinds of experience
"interviewee" I started out by tinkering and setting up my own site, learning how to download and configure modules. Now I work a lot with the code side of things and have a better understanding of what's going on "behind the scenes." So I'm usually able to make my way through confusing administrative tasks, but stuff can still slow me down or force me to check the handbook sometimes.
"amazon" great
"amazon" How frequently do you administer your Drupal site?
"interviewee" Daily.
"amazon" How long do you administer your Drupal site in a single sitting approximately?
"interviewee" If I'm doing daily work to maintain the site, maybe 10-15 minutes at a sitting. If I'm trying to set up new functionality of some kind, maybe an hour or so.
"amazon" ok, great
"amazon" How does Drupal help you accomplish your goals as a website Administrator
"amazon" ?
"interviewee" It lets me add new features rapidly, make different web sites for different purposes with the same code base (so I can leverage experience with one framework), and it has a wide range of existing modules, etc so I don't have to 'roll my own' as much.
"interviewee" Or, do you mean what specific administrative features?
"amazon" specifics are always helpful
"interviewee" from a purely administrative side, the stuff I do every day, day in day out is monitoring logs/stats, seeing what content users have posted (either nodes or comments depending on the site), things like that.
"interviewee" And moderating or fixing problems on the site as necessary.
"amazon" what kinds of problems
"interviewee" File not found errors that could indicate theme problems, configuration problems with modules, stuff like that.
"amazon" ok
"amazon" --Why do you use Drupal?
"interviewee" I guess that would probably be my earlier answer...
"interviewee" It lets me add new features rapidly, make different web sites for different purposes with the same code base (so I can leverage experience with one framework), and it has a wide range of existing modules, etc so I don't have to 'roll my own' as much.
"interviewee" And, when I do have to write code for it, the clean architecture lets me write 'just what I need' rather than building a huge add-on system.
"amazon" versus other CMSes?
"interviewee" Versus other CMSes that I've used, and attempts to roll my own.
"amazon" sure
"interviewee" I've used Xoops, PHPNuke, DotNetNuke, and TikiWiki.
"interviewee" So I can't say anything about Mambo, but it's pretty sweet against all of them. :)
"amazon" got more details on sweet? or we can move on
"interviewee" Well.
"interviewee" Basically, it boils down to the node system and the concept of different pieces working together.
"amazon" ok
"interviewee" Modules doing a particular thing, and combining those modules to accomplish a bigger task.
"amazon" got it
* interviewee nods
"amazon" How does Drupal help the users of your Drupal site?
"interviewee" Well... they have a site to visit :-)
"amazon" :-)
"amazon" anything else?
"interviewee" For the most part, they don't care what I use -- they jst like the fact that I can roll out new features relatively quickly...
"interviewee" and that we benefit from work going on elsewhere in the drupal community
"amazon" examples of features they like
"amazon" particulary examples of features they like being implemented quickly
"interviewee" Adding audio files and playlists for members. Restricting access to those files to members of the site so people don't leech from us. Easy integration of their flickr photos and so on.
"amazon" great!
"amazon" What are some common Drupal administration tasks that you do?
"interviewee" Checking logs (for spikes in incoming traffic from particular sites, 404 errors, any other strange errors that indicate stuff I need to take care of)...
"interviewee" moderating comments, giving new users permissions...
"interviewee" Keeping track of new fixes to modules or patches to drupal
"interviewee" Those are the day-in day-out stuff.
"interviewee" When I'm adding something new to the site, it's a cycle of setting up/configuring a module or multiple modules... testing and troubleshooting to see if things are working, rolling it out to a smaller subset of users for testing (usually using a temporary 'beta tester' permission role)...
"interviewee" mucking around with the theme and so on to get things working with the look of the site, and then rolling it out to everyone
"amazon" what does mucking around with the theme mean?
"interviewee" adding template files for anything I need to customize in the module's output...
"interviewee" adding blocks or other pages to hilight or take advantage of the new features, etc
"amazon" got it
"amazon" What are some infrequent Drupal administration tasks that you do?
"interviewee" Building new sections of the site usually involves planning out what will go there and how it'll look, building views for the content of the section, designing a 'main page' for that section, and then theming it.
"amazon" sorry, go ahead
"interviewee" nah, tat's it for that
"interviewee" infrequent?
"amazon" yes, infrequent tasks
"interviewee" let's see.. changing filter settings, altering workflow options, things like that... once those are set up they tend to stay the way they are on my sites
"amazon" ok, got it
"interviewee" the difference between "Initial Configuration", "Ongoing site-building" and "Daily maintenance"
"amazon" yes, please elaborate
"interviewee" when I'm first setting up a site from scratch, I have to do things like setting up the file directories, setting up basic roles and permissions, naming the site, choosing the theme, etc
"interviewee" creating accounts for my first batch of users, and so on
"amazon" ok, what about ongoing site-building
"interviewee" usually setting up the taxonomy stuff, the views and sections, the crop of modules i'll need.
"interviewee" ongoing site building... that's adding one or two modules at a time and setting them up in order to add a new feature to the existing site, adding a new section or a new kind of content for users, etc...
"interviewee" it's ongoing, though not very frequent. every couple of weeks or months depending on how things are going
"amazon" ok, very enlightening to see it categorized like that
"amazon" When I administrate my Drupal site, I find it is easy to? When I administer my Drupal site, I find it hard to?
"amazon" s/I/you
"amazon" s/my/your
"interviewee" hmmm. I find it easy to add new functions via simple modules, change themes, post content...
"interviewee" with certain modules like views I find it easy to create sections and promotional areas of the site
"interviewee" I find it hard to work with large groups of anything. nodes, comments, users, etc.
"amazon" interesting
"amazon" why hard?
"interviewee" for example, I wanted to reqork the organization of the site, and needed to categorize a bunch of weblinks so they would go into the right sections.
"interviewee" because previously they had just been tagged using a free-tagging vocabulary.
"interviewee" In dividing things up, I wanted to put about a third of them in one term, and the rest in another, but I had to do it one by one for several hundred nodes.
"amazon" ok, so categorizing content needs to be improved?
"interviewee" Approving/Deleting/Moving/Categorizing things in groups is ... painful sometimes.
"interviewee" The taxonomy stuff was just one example. In another case I wanted to change the author of a bunch of nodes, in another I needed to unpublish any nodes in a particular taxonomy, because my client needed to rewrite everything on a particular topic.
"amazon" that's very interesting, this came up in an interview earlier to day
"amazon" it's like view + changes to that view
"interviewee" right
"interviewee" I was able to do it by digging in with some SQL queries, but for a lot of stuff, the small list of nodes in the node/content page is just too small and its filtering is really limited.
"interviewee" someone suggested views wwith lots of 'exposed filters' plus actions module.
"amazon" can you give some examples of limited filtering
"amazon" ok
"interviewee" It sounds really cool, though I haven't had a chance to try anything like that.
"amazon" Any other hard things?
"interviewee" For day to day stuff, it's that, and the fact that lots of things I need to be aware of are scattered around in different places.
"amazon" what do you mean by scattered?
"interviewee" incoming trackbacks, incoming comments, new nodes posted, new users, error conditions with modules, etc
"amazon" how would you like it to be less scattered?
"interviewee" I'd like to write up a dashboard kind of thing for myself but haven't had time. I figure that sort of thing is less useful for static sites, but on community ones it means I have to make half a dozen stops to make sure there's nothing I need to fix or take care of.
"amazon" I see
"amazon" if you remember other hard stuff, then go ahead and let me know
"amazon" What are some other important Drupal administration tasks that we did not cover above?
"interviewee" like, "the files directory hasn't been created" or "audio module can't find the mp3 tag library" or "hey, there's a HUGE load of 404 errors this morning"
"amazon" ah!
"interviewee" some of those are 'stateful' messages, others are more like event logs (ie, content was posted, comments need to be approved, etc)
"interviewee" Not sure how else to explain it off the top of my head :)
"amazon" that's okay, I am getting the picture
"amazon" last questio
"amazon" n
"amazon" What are some other important Drupal administration tasks that we did not cover above?
"interviewee" yep
"interviewee" Hmm. I would probably say 'figuring out how to tie different pieces together.' I'm not sure that makes a lot of sense, but a lot of the work in the initial setup stage, and the building stage, boils down to 'figuring out how to tie the features of module X into module Y'
"interviewee" a lot of times it requires theming, etc.
"interviewee" That might not be administration, really.
"amazon" well for our purposes it is
"amazon" we are casting the next wide
"amazon" the net wide
"interviewee" OK. I'd say that, and keeping up with module updates, are the two big tasks that weren't covered.
"amazon" explain how you tie features of of module X into module Y
"interviewee" And I don't know that a UI change can help that as much as just educating people and developers so that there is a better understanding of how to 'tie things together
"interviewee" OK.
"amazon" what would help?
"interviewee" OK... I wanted to...
"interviewee" For example, I wanted to have a section on the site for recipes and crafts stuff, and a section for gaming related stuff.
"amazon" sounds fun!
"interviewee" I got recipe.module, which seemed like a natural, and decided to use 'story' nodes for game announcements. then I wanted to have links to other sites, and polls, and book reviews, and stuff like that. :)
"amazon" so how did you go about tying it together?
"interviewee" After a lot of experimenting, a combination of Views, some custom blocks, and things like that.
"amazon" how did you get to that point to use that combination?
"interviewee" I'm stil not satisfied with the breadcrumb type stuff (when I go to a weblink, it doesn't really 'know' that it should be under the 'games' section versus the 'recipe' section, but that's OK for now.
"interviewee" Lots of experimenting. :) First I jsut had lots of taxonomy terms that applied to everything. But some users found it confusing because some kinds of content only made sense in certain sections.
"interviewee" posting a recipe node to the games section or a file download to the 'crafts corner' etc. :)
"amazon" ok, so iterating with your users to see what they like was important?
"interviewee" Yep.
"interviewee" LOTS of that.
"amazon" so error reporting
"amazon" how's that done?
"interviewee" At least for small communities, I've found that happens a lot.
"amazon" ok, great
"amazon" one last thing
"interviewee" amazon: they usually send me email or pm me on IRC to let me know something is broken...
"interviewee" if it's obvious that is. if it's not, I usually spot it when checking error logs,etc
"interviewee" or watchdog and so on
"amazon" let's talk about theming it all and why that is important, and why it's hard to do
"interviewee" OK
"interviewee" Unless modules have been designed really well to integrate tightly with each other (and that's unrealistic many times, I think)...
"interviewee" it takes a lot of work in the theme and the templates to make things 'make sense' in the structure of the site.
"interviewee" hiding certain links on the nodes, making sure that things in one section of the site look 'distinct' from others
"interviewee" or making the output of a module not clash visually with the output of another, etc.
"amazon" what tools do you use to accomplish this?
"interviewee" a pad of paper and a pencil, a whiteboard and a dry-erase marker, most of the time. :)
"interviewee" that's why I usuall roll stuff out to a smaller group of people in one role
"amazon" excellent!
"interviewee" so I can see if it is okay, then try to build it into the additional sections that I set up for the site.
"amazon" I really like this notion of a tester role
"interviewee" sometimes it's hard if modules implement their own browsers etc and don't provide ways to override it.
"interviewee" it's really nice to just toss it in and say, 'Go!' but it's a lot harder to integrate it into my existing site that way.
"amazon" I see
"amazon" well this has been great!
"interviewee" I mean, it is good, because sometimes folks don't want to have to go roll their own. :)
"interviewee" but yeah. :)
"amazon" yeah
"interviewee" (Taxonomy is the biggest culprit, by the way ;)
"interviewee" but that's another story. :D
"amazon" that's good to know