dojo 2.0

Ok, so after this past Sunday's coffeetalk about the future of the dojo, we came up with a bunch of ideas. Ideas are great but doing something about them is even better! Thanks to Senpai we now have a Dojo project on drupal.org where we can keep better track of what we are doing. So, let's use it!

Here is the plan: we need to gather a feature list for the next version of drupaldojo.com. If you have an idea or a must have feature for the site, please check out the Dojo issue queue. If you don't see your idea there, please add it.

We are setting a deadline of January 12, 2008 for all website feature requests, so if you want to see it on the drupaldojo.com site, get over there and write it down! We will have a coffeetalk on Sunday, January 13, 2008 to go through the feature requests for the site and evaluate them.

UPDATE: Note that there is another post about the bigger picture, of which this Jan 12 deadline is just one piece.

For one of my clients, I'm currently implementing the Salesforce API. Salesforce is a industry-leading CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool, basically a massively powerful addressbook and scheduler. While reading documentation to get their SOAP client working, I came across this tutorial page:

Developing on Salesforce Using PHP(requires an account on that site).

While the actual content was a little remedial for my purposes, I was struck that this is a great model to emulate. They are generating pretty high quality video documentation from live events, and apparently taking the time to break the video up into sections, and tie it together with a table of contents, all managed through their flash video widget.

Another really interesting example is what the NYTimes is doing with their coverage of the US Presidential debates:

NYT GOP Debate Video Archive

This interlinking of both section topics and specific trascript points is amazing. I'm sure it was a lot of work to set up, but it's without a doubt a great way to present the information.

When I think of Drupal Dojo 2.0, the first thing I think of is better organization, branding, etc, but beyond that these are the kinds of technological improvement that I think are really exciting, and would be great to pioneer within the open source world.

On an impulse I just proposed a Drupal Dojo 2.0 planning session for the Bay Area Drupal Camp in November.

For the past five months, I've been mostly idle in #drupal-dojo and absent from the group. It's not that I don't love you all, but rather that I've been busy with life and running a business, and haven't had much extra energy in my batteries at the end of the day. However, with Drupal 6 on the horizon, and the continuing crunch around talent and documentation (not to mention the fact that we're about to hit 1000 members in this group), I want to get "back in the game" so to speak.

Since BAD camp is a natural rally-point for me, I've proposed a session there. However, I'm well aware that not everyone can make it to Berkeley for that, so let's talk about it here too. What would you like to see from a Drupal Dojo 2.0?