Prep Work

I'll definately check back to this thread because I'm interested in hearing what other people say about it.

I've been using Drupal for the last five years or so, and during that time my interest in it has gone from being a tool that allowed me to run a basic website while focusing most of my effort on creating content for it to being so impressed that the same site is all but dead because all of my free time now revolves around either learning more about it or the various standards and software it makes use of.

I'm signed up primarily for the developer track 1) because I want to watch other people work and see if this causes anything in particular to click for me, and 2) because even if it doesn't, I figure that not much of the material will be lost on me. Certainly I would like to be able to make myself useful as a coder, and I've put in some time trying to teach myself how to do just that. My experience has been that I'll spend a few hours, with progressively more successful results, that conclude in discovering some untenable problem that defies obvious solution. In hindsight, I've realized that my luck so far has just stunk -- my last effort was an attempt to update DBA to 4.7, which involved familiarizing myself with the forms API (and DBA is mostly a form in hook_settings).

What I didn't recognize at the time was that I'd run into an incompatability between MySQL versions with the database I was using, which resulted in an infinate loop when the settings table would only accept an initial value and then refuse to update further. While I didn't know this at the time, I also spent the next six hours or so trying to figure out what I could have possibly done wrong to cause this.

In the near term, my goal is simply to identify a project that I can contribute to, in the interest of repaying some of the value I've gotten from the software and its community. Realistically, I think the most optimal task would be documentation in some capacity, but I'm open to whatever opportunity to make myself useful becomes available. I did write Adrian and Vladamir about a documentation project they were working on for theme functions, but as I haven't heard back, it seems likely its either done or at least well in hand.

In the medium term, I want to get up to speed on CCK and views, which I simply haven't had an immediate application for and have been secondary to understanding the theming process better, AJAX, which means at a minimum learning enough about javascript to make sense of how it integrates with everything else, and lastly, the installer project, with emphasis on its ability to provide preconfigured installations.

Anything else is completely open.

And on the other end of the spectrum...

I've been using Drupal for about a month. I know basic XHTML and CSS. I just spent the weekend (with a fair amount of help) setting up Apache, php, and MySQL on my computer in preparation for next week. I can pretty much guarantee I will be the newbiest newb of them all!

It should be an interesting if not perplexing couple days!

i've rolled out one CMS site in plone (www.healutah.org), but my organization has decided to work with drupal/civicspace for future client sites. i have a working knowledge of html, css, and can poke around in php. i'm pretty excited about drupal, and just need to get up to speed!

davina pallone
www.dharmatech.org

where are all the comments?

this is tomorrow.. i mean.. 2 days away lol..

I'm a developer that's mostly written custom solutions in the past, but would really like to get a much deeper understanding of how Drupal really works. For example, how the database schema is set up, how modules work in relation to the DB, how to author custom modules, etc.

However, I've only worked with Drupal on the front end so far and haven't found much good documentation on the inner workings of Drupal online yet. Does anyone have any suggestions for things I could read prior to the Camp?

I have been working with civicactions for about a year. I had deployed a few drupal sites before that using civicspace. I have no formal computer training, especially not in code.

I am becoming a bit of a drupal configuration wizzard i would say.

Recently have started tackling the Views Module, and I will be happy to share my experience with that.

3 sites i have been invovled directly with since joining civicactions
http://www.envethics.org
http://www.jimhightower.com
http://www.defectivebydesign.org

and http://www.civicactions.com

I use both 4.7 and 4.6 and know my way around lots of contrib modules and CiviCRM.

I'll be facilitating many of the non developer sessions. If you have questions about accomplishing certain functionality with existing drupal modules, come with your questions, I am happy to talk about how to achieve it.

I would love to see some folks tackle some of the anoying admin issues that I have written about (http://dev.civicactions.net/moin/DrupalAdminInterfaceImprovements).

http://www.CivicActions.com
http://www.GregoryHeller.com

Having spent perhaps a bit too much time trying to figure out how to get a flat-file installation of Ubuntu to work, I made a seriously depressing discovery; my laptop has not been charging its batteries, and appears to be dead (I'm really hoping this is not the case).

Upshot being, I will do everything I can to get it working, BUT... I may arrive with a notebook and a pen. * Heavy Sigh *

Regardless, A) I've been looking forward to this for the last couple of months, so I'm not going to give up that easily and B) if me reading over everyone's shoulders is too obnoxious, I at least owe for the t-shirt and donation for taking up the space, so you guys can kick me out after I get my shirt.

Then, if nothing else, I can pose like I made it to the thing...

Drupal is new to me. I just installed it two weeks ago. I have been in web development for 7 years mostly using LAMP (with Postgres every now and then). I hope that Drupal will be a framework I can offer my clients for future projects.

I'm definitely interested in the details of building themes and modules particularly with new/unique sets of data or processes that require connecting with other applications (for instance credit card authorization). Plus it will be a nice break to just dig in and learn something new. One of my favorite things to do.

I've been working with Drupal for about five months and have built a couple of client sites on 4.7 (starting with 4.7b3). With any luck we will be launching our new site www.3ring.com tomorrow before we hit the road for Seattle. The site is built on Drupal 4.7 using many core and contributed modules like events, category, cck and views to name a few (but there are over 40 modules enabled).

3RING is a small team distributed across Canada, working virtually from places like Toronto, Halifax, Vancouver and Galiano Island. Drupal will be the framework for one of our core offerings which is a search-optimized CMS, and we have plans to build a few modules related to SEO and e-marketing.

Here are a few topics I would like to explore this week... some of them I have specific ideas and questions about; in other cases I'd just like to see what others are doing to solve similar problems.

Category module

This module seems to be the ticket to building complex, corporate websites with many sections, aggregating nodes from all over the place and presenting them in a structured way. Overall I'm very impressed - just one minor issue: How to prevent menus from being sent back to the default menu once you have relocated them? (happens when you edit the 'top' category for that menu -- would love to find a fix for this). Of course I haven't used any of the more abstract features such as distant parents and transforming other content types.

CCK and Views

These two modules have made my life a lot easier after using flexinode for content types and php snippets to list nodes in the past. Combined with jstools>tabs, CCK can construct a pretty nice tabbed node.

I can't wait to see the imagefield module become stable and available -- this is the last hurdle as far as I'm concerned before we can start using it widely as a replacement for flexinode. I also have one question about how to properly implement a simple yes/no field... so far I have a drop-down with 0 and 1 in it which is less than ideal.

Publishing to multiple sites

We have come across scenarios where it would be useful to have one central Drupal mega-site that pushes out content to several other satellite sites hosted in different locations. It seems that this would be possible using the Publish and Subscribe modules as Boris suggested to me several times... does anyone have a working site that uses these modules that they'd like to demo?

Also, it would be ideal in some situations to be able to publish a Drupal site to static HTML files.

Distinct staging / production environments

Which brings me to... how to best implement a distinct staging and published environment? In my previous job I worked a lot with The Level CMS. One of the best features in my opinion was the strict separation of the staging and published environments. Basically the client could do anything they wanted in staging (like blow it up, delete it, etc) while the published side remained pristine.

Draft nodes

In a recent project we have had to deal with a common situation where the client wanted to be able to edit a node that has already been published, yet keep the existing version visible on the site until the final revision was ready to be published overtop of the previous version. Unfortunately the site we are dealing with is heavily dependent on flexinodes...which do not support revisions. Hence Nally's deux noeuds project below. I've been told that the book module works like this natively, and that the core revisions functionality should function this way -- in my past experience it hasn't, but I haven't set up a sandbox for a while to test it out with the latest versions.

I would also be happy to hear anyone's input on how this situation can be best dealt with using category and cck modules as these will probably become the core modules for most of our future sites.

Dev environment best practices

We recently got set up with subversion thanks to Bryght. This has made things a lot easier to manage... but I think we could benefit from learning about others' best practices for managing multiple Drupal deployments, each with dev, staging and production versions of each site.

• when to use multisite features... when to create distinct deployments
• how to separate configuration changes from content changes in the database
• how to allow for content entry while configuration tweaks, theming, etc are underway

Multiple languages

We'll be doing several English and French sites given that a lot of our business comes out of central Canada.

Ajax and Drupal

What kind of tricks are up Drupal's sleeve? Hopefully someone will demo a few of the ajax modules that are available... or reveal their plans for future development.

Permissions

Not granular enough! A few gripes:
- how do you authorize a user to manage other users (and assign them roles) without letting them grant themselves admin access?
- how do you give a user access to just the watchdog logs (or some other specific item that is grouped together with others) without everything else that goes with it?
- it would be nice to give users access to the admin>content interface, yet still restrict them to view/edit/delete only specific nodes, terms or content types

I'd like to find out what the best access control modules are, and how to approach some of the above situations without hacking core modules.

Performance

I'd like to hear some tips and tricks for optimizing Drupal for high-traffic sites.

Nally's 'deux noeuds' project

Because of our need to be able to keep an unpublished draft version of a node (and we're using flexinodes which are not revision-aware) while still keeping the original node published, Nally is embarking on this project which proposes to keep 2 versions of every node -- public and private; published and draft; whatever you want to call it. We'll be building a custom module and using workflow and actions modules.

This turned out to be a bit of a lengthy post... sorry it was so late! See you soon.

==

Colin Chudyk
http://www.3ring.com
http://www.visiontechnologies.ca

See everyone tomorrow, but here's a brief (?) intro in the meantime...

Currently I'm and an AmeriCorps VISTA. Working with DANEnet. When I got started, I became involved in an interesting (and complicated to explain) course at the University of Wisconsin called ePICS. Basically ePICS is a team-based, interdisciplinary service learning course where students put together websites, and marketing materials for NPOs (useless trivia: supposedly Madison has the largest number of NPOs per capita anywhere in the US). Long story short, clients asked for complicated dynamic sites, and maintaining custom coded projects was (for many reasons) impossible. We started looking at open source CMS packages, and found ourselves debating between Mambo and Drupal. Last year we used Mambo (and most of the sites you can see at epics.wisc.edu are mambo sites), deciding to switch to Drupal in the fall.

While I've become more and more familiar with Drupal, it's become increasingly clear to me that I would like to continue this work with NPOs after my VISTA time is up. I'm most interested in soaking up whatever I can pick up. I definitely need to familiarize myself with CiviCRM and CCK, but mostly just want an overview of "how things work"

See y'all tomorrow...

I've been creating a few sites with CivicSpace/Drupal for a little over a year. I'm really exited about the potential of the platform specifically for NPOs, NGOs, Political Organizations and the like. I would describe myself more as a site administrator than a developer, but more and more I am finding the need to get a better understanding on what is happening under the surface.

I'm coming to this Drupal Camp hoping to meet all of you other like minded people and to see how you're using the tools. I'm basically wanting to learn as much as possible, especially in the areas of CCK/Views, advanced CiviCRM use (CiviNode, og2CiviCRM etc.), Organic Groups, Massmailing, and phpTemplate.

See you all tomorrow.

• dave hansen-lange

I've been involved in 4 drupal projects now, mostly in non-technical roles doing UI design, information architecture, and project direction and strategy.

I have done some theming and a little bit beyond that. I know my way around the admin menus and a number of the modules, but want to get under the hood a little more and get to know 4.7, which I just got installed and running. Also just looking forward to seeing what others are up to and what people are excited about.

I'm currently working at the New Progressive Coalition, and have also done work for the Online Progressive Caucus, and the Democracy Directory, which uses drupal's multi-site config to serve differently themed versions to match the look and feel of the sites that host it, such as http://directory.mydd.com/ and http://directory.democracyforamerica.com/. I also did work for GoJoinGo, which is a CivicSpace project that is currently in the process of upgrading to 4.7 and undergoing some other improvements in the process.

I'm a Seattle local and my name is Jesse. See you all soon.

I've been building drupal sites since 4.4 and I've built more than 20 sites, mostly for nonprofits and social justice groups.

Lately I've been trying to catch up with all the new features and new modules out there now, and also getting more into customizing and building modules.

Looking forward to this! I've had a crazy few months & pretty awol in the planning for this, but I've been cheering from the sidelines : )

look forward to meeting ya'all.
-sam (www.digitalaid.net)

looks like i'm not the only one who couldn't sleep last night!

unfortunately, i am not feeling great this morning...scott's going to have to represent for the both of us, and i'll try and make it over after lunch...

i'm bummed i'm going to miss session A: the intro... probably the most useful for someone at my skill level!

see you all at some point!

I plan to attend the June 2007 Drupal Camp and rather than start a new thread I thought it might be better to throw in my hat here.

I have been designing Graphic User Interfaces for Drupal sites for the past 2 years. In addition I have been the main Client Relations and Project Manager for my little design firm Intrinsic Impressions. I have mostly focused on creating sites for educational organizations (www.rmmsint.com), healers (www.valeriealma.com), artists and arts organizations (www.oraclegatherings.com, currently redesigning www.capitolhillarts.com).

Drupal is by far the best CMS I have worked with and I love how flexible it is and how much you can customize almost everything.

Interface Designer, Project Manager, Client Relations

www.intrinsicimpressions.com