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Drupal Newsletter - March 2008

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Submitted by aaron on Thu, 2008-02-07 12:41

Drupal Newsletter March, 2008

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: March 11
PLANNED PUBLICATION: March 18

Letter from the Editor

Table of Contents

Feature Article: Drupalcon Boston 2008

[I'm thinking this is a good place for the session write-ups to go... - mlsamuelson]
by Michael Samuelson, maybe you, maybe you, et al.

here's dries' state of drupal: http://www.archive.org/details/DrupalconBoston2008-TheStateOfDrupal
let's find a couple of good flickr pix too
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=drupalcon2008&w=all&s=int
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hadsie/2309672430/ dmitri & chx
http://www.flickr.com/photos/asy/2316807916/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/neoliminal/2314339137/

Report from formal Drupal usability testing at the University of Minnesota Libraries

In February of 2008, Drupal representatives and individuals from the University of Minnesota Libraries conducted formal usability testing on Drupal 6 in a state of the art usability lab with web-savy first-time Drupal users. The results were surprising. Participants asked to create a form with simple fields so users could list upcoming workshops struggled with terms such as "content type." They expressed distrust with the help system after a trip there meant they lost data from the form they'd been on, and they became confused when after finally submitting a node the welcome message disappeared from the front page of their site, taking it's helpful links and information with it.

Perhaps most surprising of all was the eye-track video of a participant flitting up and down through a Drupal administrative page for what seemed like minutes, from one chunk of text to the next, missing the desired explanation or functionality, until finally, amid the audience's sympathetic laughter, the on-screen user clicked submit and the room erupted in cheers and relief. If the previous explanations by the presenters hadn't made it clear enough, this did. There is some work to do to make Drupal easy and intuitive for first-time users who don't know the lingo so that their first experiences are positive ones.

For more information and to get involved, see http://groups.drupal.org/usability

more write-ups to sort through:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/9363
https://association.drupal.org/blogs/kieran/Drupalcon-Boston-video-update
http://www.lullabot.com/blog/drupalcon-schedule-visualization
http://walkah.net/blog/walkah/drupalcon-boston-2008-let039s-rock-this
http://www.lullabot.com/blog/drupalcon-report-formal-usability-testing-u...
http://www.lullabot.com/blog/drupalcon-state-dries-buytaert
http://www.developmentseed.org/blog/2008/mar/03/nonprofit-intranet-and-n...
http://2bits.com/news/presentation-drupal-fun-and-profit-making-a-career...
http://www.dogstar.org/drupal/node/407
http://www.lullabot.com/blog/drupalcon-earl-miles-talks-about-nodequeue-...
http://www.dogstar.org/drupal/node/408
http://krimson.be/en/one-image-module-rule-them-all-finally
http://krimson.be/en/dries-keynote
http://www.anelloconsulting.com/drupalcon_boston_day_1
http://buytaert.net/great-day-for-acquia
http://acquia.com/blog/great-day-drupal
http://codesorcery.net/2008/03/03/come-say-hi-at-drupalcon-boston/
http://www.angrydonuts.com/drupalcon-boston-2008-day-1-report
http://alligatorsneeze.com/drupalcon-boston-first-day-first-impressions
http://pingv.com/blog/laura/200803/popsci-case-study-presentation-today-...
http://www.lullabot.com/blog/drupalcon-future-fields
http://jacobroufa.com/node/20
http://www.kevinbridges.org/node/136
http://www.anelloconsulting.com/drupalcon_boston_day_2
http://deekayen.net/drupalcon-boston-2008-day-2
http://krimson.be/en/future-fields
http://krimson.be/en/drupalcon-boston-2008-day-2-random-thoughts
http://www.dogstar.org/drupal/node/409
http://robshouse.net/2008/03/05/event/drupalcon-boston-solr-bof
http://urlgreyhot.com/personal/weblog/slides_presentation_available_no_t...
http://www.lullabot.com/blog/drupalcon-simpletest-and-future-test-driven...
http://www.drupalconlive.com/
http://krimson.be/en/gentlemen-start-you-test-engines
http://www.anelloconsulting.com/drupalcon_boston_day_3
http://www.dogstar.org/drupal/node/410
http://www.cascadingstyle.net/blog/2008/03/05/druplash-and-druplex-prese...
http://deekayen.net/drupalcon-boston-2008-day-3
http://morten.dk/blog/sex-drupal-amp-rock-n-roll
http://www.dogstar.org/drupal/node/411
http://www.dogstar.org/drupal/node/412
http://krimson.be/index.php?q=en/may-coder-module-be-you
http://www.lullabot.com/blog/drupalcon-information-architecture-architec...
http://www.anelloconsulting.com/drupalcon_boston_day_4
http://zivtech.com/blog/drupalcon-boston-2008-wrap-up
http://www.lullabot.com/blog/drupalcon-drupalorg-redesign-panel-discussion
http://www.lullabot.com/blog/drupalcon-zen-and-art-philosophy-development
http://ken.therickards.com/2008/03/07/drupal-and-the-knight-foundation-p...
http://www.civicactions.com/blog/slides_from_information_architecture_to...
http://krimson.be/index.php?q=en/drupalcon-code-sprint
http://www.dogstar.org/drupal/node/414

DrupalCon 2008 videos available

Thanks to hard work, and perseverance, the Drupalcon presentations are now available in video format at archive.org. Tag: drupalconboston2008

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=drupalconboston2008

Announcements & Upcoming Events

http://groups.drupal.org/node/9468 for good listing

Blog Posts of Note

http://chapterthreellc.com/blog/zack_rosen/doubling_drupal

Case Study

Following up on the Popular Science Case Study presented at DrupalCon Boston 2008 by Kevin Bridges (cyberswat), Laura Scott and others at pingVision, along with Megan Miller and John Mahoney of PopSci.com, here is a written case study on the development approaches for PopSci.com.

Full case study here: http://drupal.org/node/233090

The Drupal Dojo

Feature 2

by

Past Events

Groups

http://www.tejasa.com/node/162 for http://groups.drupal.org/node/9363

Drupal in the Media

Noteworthy Modules

  • List the common module mishaps, like these are compatible with this, and not with that.

Getting Drupal Done Interview

by Michael Samuelson (mlsamuelson)

Any seasoned Drupaller will tell you that in addition to Drupal being great software, it's also a great community.

There are a number of folks in the Drupal community that "get it" and make consistent contributions. The following interview is dedicated to uncovering a few of the tips, tricks and practices used by one of those individuals to Get Drupal Done.

Interview with Peter Wolanin, aka pwolanin

What sort of work do you do on Drupal?

I maintain a bunch of modules, though I've lagged a bit in updating them since I was putting lots of time into Drupal 6.x development.

I got into Drupal through using it for our local Democratic club, so a number of the modules I maintain are due to that connection.

Describe how Drupal fits into your average workday.

Not much - I work for a small company doing (broadly) biotech R&D. I implemented a chemical inventory system with Drupal for use
internally, but that's not something that requires frequent attention.

So, most of the Drupal stuff I get done is during the evening or weekend, or occasionally on my lunch break.

How do you organize your workspace?

For Drupal, it's usually just the laptop and me sitting on the couch.

Describe your development environment (hardware, OS, software). Any favorites regarding productivity?

MacBook with Mac OS 10.4, Xcode installed to get cvs and other utilities. A logitech trackball with the computer on the lap desk.

I've been using JEdit as an editor - it's GPL, has pretty good syntax highlighting, etc. And has a variety of helpful plugins.

On the laptop, default apache 1.33, and I recently installed PHP 5.2.4 from www.entropy.ch for local testing.

MySQL 5.0 community server, with MySQL GUI tools. Colloquy as an IRC client.

Sometime use an old PC with Ubuntu 7.10 as an alternate test platform (e.g. for PostgreSQL).

I visit http://api.drupal.org and http://php.net frequently to check usage or examples.

How do you keep up with Drupal news and developments? What practices do you use to keep from getting bogged down or distracted?

I read the dev list in digest form. I think that list is critical for those interested in core development (along, of course with all site admins being subscribed to security announcements). When I have lots of spare time, I look at Planet Drupal and http://groups.drupal.org . When 6.x core development was really heavy, I subscribed to e-mail updates
for all my issues, but now I just hit http://drupal.org/project/issues/user regularly. php

Any tips and tricks regarding Drupal productivity?

Don't assume that people are going to see your patch and recognize its importance. Especially for core patches. Even for critical patches you need to keep following up and re-rolling, as well as working to find qualified reviewers. Don't get aggravated when someone finds a typo in a code comment, or a commit means your patch doesn't apply.

Essentially, if a patch is important to you, you need to maintain some ownership of it and advocate for its inclusion. And after the patch is in you should then be a good citizen and help update the documentation, especially when you help effect a core API change.

Oh, and sometimes, just take a break from it and forget about it for a few days (or weeks even).

Share your biggest "breakthrough" or "ah-ha" moment regarding working within the Drupal community.

When I started hanging out more in the IRC channels (#drupal, etc) I was able to get a lot more done. Through this I've built working relationships with other contributors, and I've found it to be really key for helping find people to look at and review patches, post follow-ups, etc.

Any advice for newbie developers on how to Get Drupal Done?

I spent the first several months answering questions in the drupal.org forums. At that point I was still getting a handle on PHP and the Drupal API (note that I had coded C, etc before so not starting from scratch), and by answering even trivial questions, I was able to enhance my own confidence that I understood what was going on. In probably half those first posts, I was wrong in what I posted - so that also gave me a chance to learn when someone else posted a comment to say so.

Special thanks to Peter for the interview.

Overheard on IRC

Resources

Sites, books, and other resources that might be of use and interest to developers, themers, administrators, etc.
+Drupal Theming book(s)
+ ??? Links to buy here there on Amazon,etc.

Submissions

Submissions, queries, corrections, and comments should go to the Drupal Newsletter Group, or contact aaron. Everyone is free to join the Drupal Newsletter Team!

Credits

Add your name to this section so that we can credit everybody who has contributed to this edition of the newsletter:

Aaron Winborn (aaron)
Michael Samuelson (mlsamuelson)
Peter Wolanin (pwolanin)
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg (Alex UA)

Groups:
Drupal Newsletter