triDUG Hack Night
Date: Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Time: 6:30pm - 9:30 pm
Location: Coalmarch Productions - Google Map
triDUG Hack Night is a (roughly) bi-weekly event for journeyman and expert Drupal users. Hack Night is the group's opportunity to directly contribute code and documentation back to the Drupal project!
It should be noted that while we will be assembling together IRL to work on the Drupal project; you're not required to physically attend. If you want to participate, but Hack Night is too far out of your way, jump on irc://irc.freenode.net/#drupal-nc and we'll be able to integrate you into what we're doing very quickly.
This Week's Moderator: Sheena Donnelly
A newcomer to the Hack Night will most likely be greeted with a lot of heads-down clickity-clack of keyboards and brief discussions about the best way to solve a specific problem. If it's your first time at Hack Night, find this week's Moderator and introduce yourself. The Moderator will help you get started with code or documentation and introduce you to anyone in the group who you can join up with for a project.
In addition to helping out the newbies, the Moderator also does some soft project management for the Hack Night and is there to answer the question "what should I do next?"
To help make Hack Night more productive, let's plan some projects ahead of time. Example projects include writing code for a module, investigating a problem in the Issue Queue, or writing Documentation for a specific aspect of Drupal. Use comments on this post to suggest ideas for the next Hack Night and partner up with other attendees who have similar interests with you.
So much to work on, so little time
Here's a few proposed projects:
- Test the upgrade from Drupal 6 to 7
- Work with Ken on testing and improving the interface for http://drupal.org/node/497804
- Test out some "Novice" patches http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?text=&assigned=&submitted...
- Work on Drupal documentation http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?text=&assigned=&submitted=&participant=&component[]=documentation&issue_tags_op=or&issue_tags=
- Work on one of the other documentation tasks http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/documentation
Cheers,
Julia
Other Suggestions
Also, upgrading modules from D6 to D7. The first step is to go through the modules you use and find one without the "I promise to be ready for D7 by release" tag and concentrate on that first.
We can also try to improve the simpletest code coverage for core, which is a common sprint activity.
Ken Winters
www.coalmarch.com
Testing, Oh My
@Ken: I would really like some help figuring out how to quickly write simpletests. I can copy and modify existing ones but I haven't been able to come up with them from scratch for a module. I think it would be useful to help the modules that have promised to be ready for D7 write tests.
Julia
Tests
Sure, I can help with that. Check out the uc_payflowpro module if you want an example of a test that I wrote for function that return data, as opposed to the form submit tests in the node admin form we were working on.
Ken Winters
www.coalmarch.com
Changes to triDUG Hack Night
When the triDupalUsersGroup started last year, I felt encouraged to get my feet wet with Drupal. I now have my test site taking shape and I'm at the point when the learning curve is almost straight-up. I knew this would happen but felt secure that I'd get the support and mentoring needed through the triDUG. So, I feel that members like me are being abandoned, suddenly, so you guys can move on and make names for yourselves in the wider Drupal community. I agree that contributing back to the drupal project should be one of our missions. But note, "one of our missions". Seeding and growing users in the community used to be a mission also. Can we not address both?
Judith, your issue is
Judith, your issue is definitely something that we have been thinking about while considering this change to Hack Night.
One of the big problems with having Hack Night be more of a group tech support meeting, is that those of us who are seen as the "experts" of the group, end up being heavily burdened by Hack Night. We love to help people, and we absolutely expect to continue helping folks out in the community. However, as a result of Hack Night, some of us have been overwhelmed with group members contacting us personally to ask directly for help (I've even received phone calls while at work, which is ridiculously inappropriate).
I believe that the right way to handle support is through the community. There are a huge number of resources within the larger Drupal community for support, and as for triDUG, we have both this g.d.o forum (where people get a lot of help) and the IRC room (#drupal-nc on irc.freenode.net), where you can be sure to get a helpful answers to your question without worrying about getting snark from the larger drupal IRC rooms.
I think the format of using the online community tools, where Users can ask for help and receive it (relatively) immediately from whichever group members happen to be available, is a much better way to deliver support, rather than expecting group members to hold onto their questions and problems for 2 or 3 weeks until the next Hack Night.
Over the past year, we have done absolutely nothing, as a group, to contribute back to the Drupal Project. Our focus has been completely on support and education for beginning users and I feel your insinuation that we are making this change in order to gain some sort of Drupal Fame is incredibly unfair; if not for developers selflessly devoting their free-time and energy, none of us would have a CMS to work with. And with the release of Drupal 7 in the works, the need to contribute to the project over the next 6 - 12 months is incredibly important.
We are simply trying to create a balance, and since Support has, in the past, been our main focus, it undoubtedly seems like we are cutting it back too much, but we are not.
Hack Nights == Contribution; g.d.o & IRC == Support; Monthly Meetups == Education.
That's a helpful explanation
That's a helpful explanation Sheena. Would you mind reposting it under: http://groups.drupal.org/node/33280 ? I didn't want this type of discussion to get buried in a semi-unrelated discussion node.
I'm a step ahead of you ;)
I'm a step ahead of you ;) Thanks for opening a new discussion.
"I feel your insinuation that
"I feel your insinuation that we are making this change in order to gain some sort of Drupal Fame is incredibly unfair"
+1 most of the experienced Drupal folks in our group already have established chops in the larger community.
Fame seeking
Growing up in Los Angeles surrounded by Hollywood people, I never thought that accusations of fame-seeking would come from my trying to promote and improve an open source project. :)
In all seriousness, I think that we all are on the same page now and I look forward to helping those with less experience in Drupal figure out how to improve the documentation, test patches, and get help on IRC. I think that we'll also find that contributing to Drupal will improve our personal projects for the better.
I hope to see everyone in this thread at Hack Night!
Julia
Thanks!
Just wanted to say I'm sorry some of you have felt overwhelmed by support requests, and even if we don't say it enough (or at all), I'm sure most people in the group are as thankful as I am that you've been willing to provide help to us clueless n00bs. It's been great to have the face-to-face support, but I can understand how that could get burdensome for the organizers. If that's not how you imagined the hack nights would work then it's probably a good idea to restructure them as you've done, so everyone is clear on what to expect.
I didn't know about the IRC room-- good to know there's another source for local help, I'll have to give that a try. It's hard to know where to look for help sometimes-- with my site in particular, since in general, things that apply to Drupal sites often (usually) don't apply to mine, and I have to preface any support request with "I've got this FrankenDrupal site...."
Good information about contributing to the documentation, thanks! I would be happy to try to help with that at hack night or just on my own, so I don't feel like such a leech. I'll try to get up to speed with that process before the next hack night.
THANK YOU for all you do! :)
-Nik
D6 to D7 Module Lists
Please reply to this comment if you have extra suggestions for modules for the hack night group to convert to D7. Here's my list of modules that will probably need D7 conversion help and could feasibly be done:
This doubles as a giant list of neat modules.
Ken Winters
www.coalmarch.com
Core Issues
http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/drupal-core/usability has a good list of issues that need to be done by Dec 1st, and many of them are fairly workable.
Other important issues are marked "Critical" in the core queue, which are linked in the contributor links block on drupal.org (lots).
Ken Winters
www.coalmarch.com
Roles
No, not Drupal Roles. Real life roles.
What, if any, is the role in this for someone who cannot create code from scratch? I figure I would be of no help at one of these, but rather than assume that I thought it responsible of me to verify my worthlessness :)
My background: former Web Master (if you can believe that) at the NC General Assembly. But back then (2000-2002) all our stuff was html and perl. I was the first to introduce CSS there. Yes, there was a time when no one knew what a style sheet was. I didn't know perl so I did some stuff in ASP b/c my only programming background was using ASP/SQL/Visual Basic. I can now edit perl and php, but not much of a creator.
I have a degree in Business Administration (Economics, Marketing, Management, Statistics, etc) from UNC-Wilmington. So, I feel quite stupid around you Drupal gods but perhaps I have something to bring to the table... end user testing? Planning?
If there are any theme/template related issues I could perhaps better contribute there as well. Or any CSS stuff that Sheena doesn't want to be bogged down with.
I have music practice almost every Wednesday night, so if you don't need me I won't be offended.
BAM, there is tons of
BAM, there is tons of documentation work that needs to be done, and that requires no programming skills. Check out this page for more info: http://drupal.org/contribute/documentation
what about themes
given that it's a chronic complaint that Drupal doesn't have enough themes, is there any place for community developed themes?
ugh, tell me about it. I
ugh, tell me about it. I actually began building my first for-contribution theme a couple of months ago and ended up abandoning the project (hopefully not permanently) because I realized that the undertaking is ridiculously more complex than I imagined.
For example: a menu. It might be from Drupal core Menu module, or it might be from the Menu Block module, or the nice Menus module, or the Taxonomy menu module, or it could be a view that you created to simulate a menu. Each of those options has its own theme components - wrapping divs or CSS styles - that will affect a contributed theme's output.
So, it's really no surprise that the pool of contributed themes is so small and weak. Other than http://drupal.org/project/themes I don't know of any free Drupal theme sites.