Drupal Shop Talk Conference Call (DEC)

Please come with agenda items in mind....

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

Please excuse how sparse some of this is, particularly names - I don't recognize folks' voices very well --
So please let me know if anyting needs correcting -

Drupal Shop Talk Notes Dec. 12, 2006

Gregory Heller - Civic Actions
Steve Hanson - Cruiskeen Consulting - www.thecedar.org
Chris Bryant - Online travel web site with google mapes, etc. whereasspot.com
Favorite module - xstatistics, etc. other stats modules
Rich -
Barry - Paid Classified module - a mashup of workflow and scheduled actions,
ecommerce - Module is scheduled actions.
Katrina - Ambereyes - Gmaps and location - www.connectdc.org - would like to
talk about managing module changes and updates

Chris would like to discuss project management, etc.
CivicActions has quite a few active projects - pushing 20 currently, and
about 20 people working on them - Project management is fairly distributed.
Email and tracking with Trac Wiki and a Ticketing System.
(http://trac.edgewall.org/)
Capturing institutional knowledge around the project - would like to
integrate this with Drupal through the Leech module - pulling all the
tickets into Drupal and associating them with Drupal groups.

Development Seed is using the Case Tracker module for project management.

Some people using Base Camp --

Steve Hanson - DotProject and RT

Katrina Messenger discusses the issues of how to integrate all the little pieces
into an integrated project management system.

Drupal 5.0

Drupal 5 helps with the notion of keeping the modules tracked since you
can see the module versions in the adminsitration module.

Jack - Development Seed joins. Discussion about .info files in 5 keeping
track of the Metadata about the modules. - Has written a few customized
modules for 5.0 - Jquery is great.

?? - One client wanted a CNN-like photo viewer - wrote it in Jquery very quickly.
Could be a module, but hasn't been packaged up that way.
May not be general enough - it requires image cache, etc.
Code is basically just a snippet.

Upgrades - depends a lot on how many contrib modules there are?

Development Seed has been using Case Tracker and Base Camp.
Base Camp has a real limitation that you can't easily assign tasks within it.
Case Tracker does that pretty well.

Trac is working pretty well but it needs a separate instance for every
project,which is painful.

XHTML - outputting XHTML in core modules and some of the code output -
What about that?

People want to make standards-compliant sites, but some of the current
software ends up generating content-types and doc-types that are not
consistent - so the browsers are confused. What is the advantage
to producing XHTML - and why the mishmash? Shouldn't we be working
harder at producing more consistent output. Drupal Planet for example has
a lot of output that is wrong. Garland and Bluemarine do this.

Look for example for XHTML considered harmful -
http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2005/08/xhtml-considered-harmful.html

http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml

Is this just a religious argument?

Could core be written to be more agnostic - could it for example explicitly
close image tags, etc.? Core assumes it is XHTML valid.

We seem to be in good company in doing wrong --- Concensus
seems to be that we're probably wrong - but so is everyone else.

Next Call Jan 23rd. Probably 2:30 or 3 PM Pacific.

IRC log :

Hello.
hello
Howdy!
Morning
* gregory (n=chatzill@63-229-0-222.tukw.qwest.net) has joined #drupal-shoptalk
just calling in now
post theurl
http://7nathanarmy.com/
http://matadortravel.com/b860ca0d221ba254c602a8f3260a5a8b
http://beta2.wheresspot.com (not launched yet)
http://www.thecedar.org
who is talking right now?
http://www.connectdc.org
My site jaspan.com is Drupal 5.
7nathan is drupal 5 too
Mostly core so far.
so much for eat your own dogfood
:)
* tenk (n=tenk@70.91.89.50) has joined #drupal-shoptalk
jaspan.com
sorry: http://jquery.com/api/
what are people using for time tracking?
you know what we are using
I've been doing Time Tracking within RT -
okay, what working methods are people using for time tracking?
rtac does allow for time tracking
I use a per-client text file in Emacs for time tracking. :-)
sort of
bjaspan, a man after my own heart
I've downloaded some Windows apps that do time tracking but haven't played with them yet.
What I'd really like is to convert from my time tracking directly to QB invoices. I may just write a script for that.
apparently there is some kind of api now for qb online
we are using quickbooks online but it relies on activx plugin in ie
so it is a pain in the ass
I use QB local. I've written a script to import sales and think I can import invoices, too.
I really hate QB, though.
i don't like it much either. i would love to see someone develop an open source online accounting system
harvest just launched an API and OS X dashboard widget
rorris: link?
gnucash, maybe.
http://getharvest.com/widget
http://getharvest.com/widget
http://www.getharvest.com/api
http://trac.edgewall.org/
http://trac.edgewall.org/
i use: http://www.mantisbt.org/

Steve Hanson
Cruiskeen Consulting LLC - http://www.cruiskeenconsulting.com