Drupal Camp
· Is a CMS, can create community, but can be used for other things. Do whatever you want if you have the resources. Developer/programming skills. Out of the box is ok to have forums, blogs, users on the system, public or password protected.
· Theme layer – you can make it look like anything you want. Rain City does a lot of different kinds of looks and layouts using Drupal.
· Not terribly easy to learn, but all documented on how to create a theme.
· Event registration – there is an event module. Plug in additional functionality. Section on Drupal site called projects or downloads. Can add forums- you enable module.
· (What is difference between Module and Plugin?)
· EVDB, Upcoming.org – can plug your Drupal site into an external registration site. Look like people are on your site, but using the external services, DB and features of event registration of the other services.
· You can also use the Drupal event module right within your system. That’s the one we used to sign up for this Drupal Camp. Simpler, event reminders, session sign up (each session is an event.)
· Extensible and Extendable (what is the difference between these two words)
· Can you add fields to the event sign up module? Content creation kit. In development, pretty stable. You can create any content type.
· Gregory is using it in production. IN 4.6 module Flexinode which allows you to develop fields for nodes, but it wasn’t scalable. The content creation kit lets you say create a content type called “space” with nodes that describe different spaces. The capacity of space, description, notes about how to rank the space. You create space and add fields. Each of those fields might be a text field, number, date, URL – different data types. Then you have your new node. You can control permissions, workflow, theme the display, who can see it.
· From a data structure standpoint, you have 10 nodes with title, teaser, body. The way people solve this is use the story module, you copy it and call it the press release, or the profile. Then you can change the workflow and permissions, which taxonomies. With CCK you can create all these from GUI
· Node: Individual post or some kind of item. One node is one item of that thing. Node = post in wordpress or blogger, but can do a lot more with it. Can have relationship between nodes, can add info to nodes with modules.
· Taxonomy: category, each has RSS feed, can remix
· Who has access to these modules. On site there are stable modules, some in beta (use with insight and caution but help push it forward.)
· http://nylcv.qa.civications.net/policy
o node – title
o taxonomy with terms/vocabulary, fields, categories
o Need to learn more about how to distinguish these terms
o Taxonomy = categories or whatever you use it for
o One example of taxonomy is each blog as a separate piece of the taxonomy. Others use it to categorize.
o Taxonomy has vocabularies which are sets of terms. A blog system tends to have a very simple system. Drupal takes the traditional idea of taxonomy and made it so it can be used simply, hierarchical, can have tags, or very complicated. Therefore it is potentially confusing.
o For starting, start simple and flat.
o 4.7 you can add taxonomy via tags as you go. More like a folksonomy. You can then relate them and put them into a more structured taxonomy.
o Use free tagging and see what happens.
o If you are on groups.Drupal.org there is space for you to put in tags.
o Is there a search and replace function for tags? It is on the wish list.
o All the features we see on del.icio.us, flickr, etc would be nice if they were Drupal plugins.
· What modules do you want in 4.7. If community, forum, and blogs, probably not a lot else. Static you might not use forums, but will use taxonomy. There is a session later, the bootstrapping with Drupal on how to get started, and hit the ground running.
· For taxs use the taxonomy module. Core. What modules do you want in 4.7. If community, forum, and blogs, probably not a lot else. Static you might not use forums, but will use taxonomy. There is a session later, the bootstrapping with Drupal on how to get started, and hit the ground running.
· For taxs use the taxonomy module. Core. You have to set it up in administerà categories.
· Category administration – screen is daunting, could use some help text. When creating or editing a vocabulary, can say what types of content it applies to, if there is a hierarchy. Check free tagging. It replaces your list of terms with an ajaxy field which suggests terms. Can play with it on groups.Drupal.org
· In terms of moving forward, CCK can help you move forward with the same database structure. Over flexinode. If you had ten nodes with 10 different teasers called teaser. Now can add existing fields from other nodes. Don’t have to create field over and over again. Can change what it is called on each node as well. So type is same, but title can be different.
· Weight – teleported from beginning to advance. Learn the web interface and you can do powerful things. You are unlikely to find other CMS that is your widget optimized. You can have a site fully optimized.
· CCK is a set of modules. When you add module, sometimes there are module families. CCK is one module and each content type, widget (numbers, dates, text areas) is it’s own module. Each field type has a module. You could create a large number of data types (from a db perspective.) When you create a new data type you are not creating a new module, but something inside the db.
· Plain text or filtered text
· Max length and allowed values.
· You shouldn’t be working as user ID 1 (admin) on a regular basis so password is not compromised) – have a second user ID with admin priv and first holds the default theme. Back up. Superuser account. No matter how your permissions are set you can do everything. Need to know what you can/cannot configure. Only one or two people with superuser, then have site admin role that has only the permissions needed to do what has to be done.
· If you are working as admin “it works for me” but it might not be working for other users. Test user ID
· Can establish roles and permissions for those roles. Civic space Drupal improvements – would like tabs for permissions, or ajax expand/collapse so you don’t have to scroll through lists. Create and edit would be on the same row.
· Don’t think you are the only one who things something should work differently. Make a mock up. Share how you would like it to be used and share it on the Drupal site. Actionable feedback is really important and invaluable. Encourage.
· When you make changes you have to hit “save”
· Security – being an open source platform allows anyone to hack it and people do this crap. It is also a feature as it makes it stronger. Source code is freely available, you can mod it. Because you can “see” it you can see where and point out the bugs and security holes. Then the community helps fix/plug. With open source, “all bugs are shallow.” The more people looking at the project, greater chance someone will supply a fix. Fix and redistribute to the community and it is integrated into official release.
· There is a security team. Drupal is built on open source structures (Apache, etc.) with interest in security. OS may be more secure than closed. Security team is proactive. A set of best practices. A lot of things have to do with XML/R…
· Security first line is who you give permission to do what on the site. Like giving people php access. Not a good practice.
· If you are a site admin, pay attention to security upates. If you don’t update to the latest security version.
· Core code in 4.6 release had X contributors. 4.7 had 350 different contributors. 700% growth in the year. Wordpress (if you just want to run a blog, awesome) their model has 5 developers, closed development team. Can request a fix, they decide what to do with it. On Drupal.org there is a giant issue tracker for bugs and features requests. Goes through a community process that sets priorities and once under development when the code is stable enough to include. Smaller group of people decide. 4 people. 2 in Belgium, 1 on Germany and on in SF (each is in charge of different parts of the project.) Community people share their work, invite people to look an critique, sharing how it was done. That’s a community act.
· Another part of the community is the development shops. Zak Rosen from Civicspace has some metrics. 150 people making their living in the US doing Drupal, up from 12 18 months ago. At CivicActions, have 15 contractors who make living deploying Drupal and civiCRM. We contribute modules as unit and individuals. I have a client that needs X, map out use cases, try and make it more generalizable and then code it and submit them back in and continue to maintain those modules over time. Upgrade and fix bugs as necessary.
· Three years ago weren’t many people making their living deploying Drupal sites. Now multi-million dollar market. A project succeeds or fails – results go into open community and code gets improved and stands on the shoulders of predecessors and move forward.
· I need x and find 4 others who need it and the development cost is shared, others then add on to that.
· What about the practice community? Groups.Drupal.org – local, consulting, mapping, events groups, group about sharing practices (community group) – people who are running online communities. How to deal with spammers, TOS advice. Fairly focused discussion. Putting plans out and asking for feedback. Same in the forums. A vast wild and wooley place. Thousands of threads.
· Encouragement for direct F2F Meetups like this. One coming up in NY tomorrow.
· Drupal conferences – Amsterdam 45 people. 3 months later in Vancouver had 300 people over 3 days. 85% Drupal. Exponential community group.
· It is specializing. If there are 18 people interested in widgets, that group forms. There is an education group (higher ed at university level CMS and k-12)
· Fairly technical developers mailing list. IRC chat channel.
· What are the goals, what do you want to accomplish and what do you want to spend to get there. Rather than what are the basic costs. Some value the community. ROI.
· Can get started with a 10 month shared hosting account, got to a Linux group and have them help you install and go from there. In general, not just Drupal, but websites in general think about $1500 to get started, more modest $3-5K.
· You can start out at finding some college kid who knows the LAMP stack, install with Civicspace installer and get a site that looks decent with a standard theme, no fancy nodes display (which is changing – view, contemp) and go from there to a $75K site. You could be doing $5K sites for small local sites on your own or work with IA, graphic designer, etc and mount a huge project. http://www.aclutv.org, http://www.airamerica.com (radio). Money, time and resources. If you have an internal team willing to come to a Drupal camp and learn developy stuff. Comfortable understanding to know how t install these tools, bridge the gap between the tech and the community of users. Lullabot provides internal training. From training and useage all the way to creating modules
· No website takes less than 4 months is general advice, but people get them up in a month. Every site – take responsibility for content, goals, never tell a developer “just get it done” – nothing good will come of that. Before you approach someone think about goals, think about end result, what you want to accomplish, think about your content. Take the innerworkings we see here and think about the taxonomy, what is the structure of my content. Having those things in mind will save you a month off of those 4. If you really have your content and goals together. Start with good organization.
· Find a good guide. Tech expertise alone not useful without vision, scalability. Find them via groups who is responsible, involved and interested and less likely to scam you. Developer relationship. It has to be a collaborative process. Not just someone to throw things at. Work with. Who will be around when you are ready to go to the next level.
· Are there hosting companies offering a basic Drupal? That’s how Bryght started. Can go to Bruyght .com for Drupal 4.6. You get a site set up and ready to go. Keep security patches, back port some new features. I.e. simpler version. 4.7 isn’t available yet. Have to upgrade modules, etc. so trail a bit behind the recent releases. Appropriate if you don’t need access to the command line. 30 day free trial. Many shared hosting account have 1 click installer. Puts you in the realm of needing to apply security patches. In our system we take care of that. Good starting point. Then move up to $50 buck a month for dedicated server hosting.
· Clients are interested in ASP. Drupal community as a whole is trying to work on. When you are in the admin interface have a security announcement feed. Then something like an automated security update program. Community is working towards.
· If you are at enterprise level that want to pay someone, Spikesource makes a verified stack of Drupal available (full LAMP stack) – they work with resellers. $5K USD a year. Compared to the cost of sysadmin, it is chase. www.advomatic.com
· Hosted service like Brygyt, you get hosting plus stuff you’d have to pay a consultant for. With security fixes you don’t have to panic. Consider that in your costs of ongoing maintenance or a nasty bug situation.
· For less skilled, have a host with Cpanel, which has PHP admin already in. Get access to the guts other than the Drupal part of it.
· Make sure if you are the client side is that they understand that having a website is a commitment. If their core mission is not to understand technology, they may need others to deal with it but they DO need to understand it.
· Can you take all the community mess out of it and just be CMS? Yes
· Whole session on non technical contributions people can make to Drupal, tomorrow at 1:30
· How do you know if a module is stable? You should have a test site to test off of your production server. Starting to look at rating, numbers of downloads, stats about what people are actually using compared to downloads. Sometimes developers will disclose their knowledge about stability, some don’t
· What about conflicts between modules? Haven’t seen a ton of that.
· http://www.darcynorman.net at University of Calgary. They have chosen Drupal. Darcy is their internal advocate. That’s the next thing. Next thing built in set of modules and configurations that are sharable and reproducible. So in affect communities create their own distros like Civicspace.
· Want recipes and modules. It’s a session. Can also match up people – talk to that evil other room (the developers side of the event. Not evil, just from Mars)
· What about Ajax. What is it? What does it do? Also Jquery thing or is that overkill. What that decision might mean moving forward. AJAX is is an acronym. Asynchronous Javascript A XML. Javascript for interactive uses where you can do functions that used to mean having to reload or go to another page can now happen on the page while the app goes and gets stuff from the server. Free tagging, when you start ty[ing in dr, do a match for all tags with DR, then you have a drop down to pick from. Much desired. Fewer clicks, interact in the page in an application way.
· From a user point of view things can happen in the background rather than full page refresh. On lower bandwidth it feels like a richer experience when implemented well.
· It’s purpose isn’t for lowering bandwidth requirements but it can make actions more useable. Example: live search results.
· AJAX is now in the core of Drupal. Ruby on Rails is another example. End users don’t pick AJAX or Ruby, but it impacts end user experiences. Instant filtering, add-ons that create web applications rather than another static page. Reduce some of the clicking. Things can update in the background that can show you new stuff.
· The next version of Drupal will have a library of AJAX functions built in. If you have used Flickr, you click to edit description without having to go into edit mode. Just drop into edit mode.
· Low level AJAX introductory. Used to be called dynamic HTML. Big benefits – rich library of Ajax effects, go to dojo and other AJAX sites. See how applications are. Real in practice – features. Some of the benefits beyond buzz word. Developer communities building frameworks so less wheel reinvention. JSQuery. Dojo for building full browser based application rather than in the desktop.; JSQuery is base thing to add basic functionality most useful for a CMS framework and individual users choose something like Dojo for full on intense applications. Talk to Steve McKenzie leading the AJAX charge. Creator of JSQuery library will Skype into one of the sessions to talk more about this.
· What are the experiences using older systems using newer Drupal. Drupal selective about what goes in – people in Thailand who get their email once a week via a wireless portable access point. Pay attention – it has to work on old stuff, even if it is not as nice. That is a principle for anything in the core has that as a baseline. Mac IE 5 hasn’t been updated in years. There are better systems available, but people are still using it so have to also educate folks to use newer tools.
· Yahoo’s new email, basecamp, other AJAX examples, Google suggest. Yahoo has a developer UI library.
· Interested in some case stories. What you want to do or have done.
· Inoculate people you are working at for an iterative creation that does include some failure along the way. www.progressiveu.org
· Helping people through the mindshift
· Interested in hearing how you get buy ins and champions and buy in for this sort of stuff. Big thing A lot of people deploying at departmental level. EPA as clients. Spikesource CivicActions – credible vendors in an old fashioned sense is available. There is also the need to help people move towards bootstrapping. Clients are less enthusiastic about bootstrapping. Defectivebydesign – adding three new modules a week to DRM campaign. Other clients where we can’t launch until perfection is reached.
· http://www.spikesource.com/
· Local ISP Riseup here in Seattle is talking about a $10 Drupal hosting account. Have a community colo facility downtown.