Turn it to 11: Drupal goes 19-for-18 in the Google Summer of Code
I'm at DrupalCon Paris right now, and between the amazing people, interesting sessions, and gorgeous City of Lights, I only have a few moments, but I wanted to make a quick (and exciting) announcement. The Google Summer of Code officially wrapped up last week, and the Drupal students and mentors did an amazing job this year. “How amazing?," you ask. Well, not only did all 18 of the students that worked directly with Drupal mentors successfully complete their projects, but we got an extra bonus successful student.
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Drupal handbooks IA work begins
The top priority in the Drupal documentation roadmap that was published earlier this summer was to reorganize the information architecture (IA) of the handbooks to make them easier to use and maintain. Becca Scollan volunteered to take the lead and she has been researching and building out a plan of attack. We are now at a good stage to start doing some work that the whole community can engage in.
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Camp/Conference formula for Drupal
With over 500 camp attendees and 60+ session proposals, us organizers of Drupal Camp LA needed a Drupal site that was built for organizers and attendees, with lessons learned from 3+ DrupalCons & 2+ DrupalCamps. Here is our formula for our awesome camp site.
"DrupalCampLA.com was built on Drupal 6 using core & contributed modules to handle event registration, sponsorship management, featured speakers, user bio's, and session proposals. The website features an attendee driven event schedule where members propose sessions and only registered members pick which sessions they'd like to see (in the BarCamp style). Planning the schedule for the day of events has been made flexible enough to allow organizers to maintain a master schedule with ease. Not to mention that all attendees get their own schedule view with the sessions they pick."
"The web site was based on the latest Drupal 6.x release and utilized many of the current generation modules such as CCK for content customization, imagefield and imagecache to handle imaging Views & custom theming built on Zen for content presentation." (A full list of the modules used is in the case study - http://drupal.org/node/519100 )
The download link is available in the case study post - http://drupal.org/node/519100 and has been made available by LA Drupal & This By Them.
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Drupal Tour Centroamerica 2009
From 1st of August to 9th of September 2009, I'm travelling from Nicaragua over El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize to México. During the trip, I'm doing drupal workshops with people of the free software community.
Del 1 de Agosto hasta el 9 de Septiembre 2009, estoy viajando desde Nicaragua hasta México, pasando por El Salvador, Guatemala y Belize. Realizo talleres de drupal con comunidades de software libre durante este viaje.
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Drupalcamp Atlanta Registration is Open!
The inaugural Drupalcamp Atlanta is now open for registration, and will be held on Saturday, September 19th from 9am – 5pm on the beautiful campus of Kennesaw State University. Our mission and purpose is twofold: (1.) we want to educate people about Drupal and (2.) further evangelize Drupal within our geographic region.
A critical look at the implementation of Plugin Manager - Underlying issues and possible solutions
I have been harboring some growing concerns about the direction of the plugin manager integration proposals for Drupal core almost since their inception, but have not been able to make an informed opinion on the subject until I had properly reviewed the proposed system on a much deeper scale.
While my impressions of the project and the current implementation are fairly negative, I have aimed to frame my criticisms in a positive constructive manner because I believe that the goals of the project are worthwhile, and that for a large section of users this could be a very flexible and usable solution.
Unfortunately a lot of my concerns have been well founded, and I believe that the implementation of this system needs to be taken in a different direction for it to be able to succeed in its goals, while not negatively affecting projects like Aegir, Open Atrium and many other ‘serious developers’.
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DrupalCamp Kyiv - first big Drupal conference in Eastern Europe, August 28 - 29, 2009
DrupalCamp Kyiv 2009 is the region’s biggest conference for web-developers that use Drupal. This year the conference will gather more than 200 developers and entrepreneurs from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus for the purpose of communication, ideas, and knowledge sharing. The key mission of the event is development and strengthening of Drupal community in Eastern Europe.
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Drupal Comes to Dallas -DrupalCamp set to Run in Dallas August 1-2, 2009
Drupal fever is hitting Dallas. Over the weekend of August 1st-2nd, Drupalers from all over the state of Texas will congregate at Improving Enterprises in Dallas to learn, share, and discuss all things Drupal. Organized by a group of Dallas area Drupal enthusiasts, DrupalCamp Dallas will feature two full days of sessions. Sessions will cover everything from structured presentations from local and national Drupal experts, to unstructured "Birds of a Feather" sessions, where people with similar interests form small groups to learn and collaborate.
Read moreDrupal Camp Los Angeles 2009
DrupalCampLA is the annual FREE conference organized by the LA Drupal user group, and hosted by UC Irvine this year, to unite and improve the Drupal Development Community on the West Coast. The event will be taking place August 8-9th 2009, from 8am-7pm each day, and will feature three large tracks and two community rooms for BoFs (birds of a feather). RSVP is required and the event is free to attend.
Doc IA interviews needed
One of the many pieces of feedback that Becca needs to help with redesigning our doc information architecture will be gathered through stakeholder interviews. Who are stakeholders? US! We need people who use (and maintain) the Drupal docs to help us with interviews, both as interviewers and interviewees. There is a sign up form to get involved.
Becca will provide more info on how it works, but basically we'll have a little script of questions to ask which you can use to chat in person or over Skype, etc. Record the interview (either in notes, audio or both) and then upload your results. It is a great way to get to know other community members while really helping to make our docs better. I have a bit more about this and some related things in a recent post on my blog (which went to the Planet a few days ago).
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