A personal take on Web 2.0 and how it can be used to increase reach, communicate with constituents, and broadcast a message with a heavy focus on the Drupal CMS.

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Drupalcon CPH - Sharpen your Axe

Posted Wed, 2010-09-01 02:02 by matthew

Richard Jones of iKos gave a presentation on simplifying and streamlining the development of Drupal sites. His team observed that they were creating the same basic sites over and over again. To this end, rather than starting from scratch each and every time, the team created basic sites to start from and rapidly built out the basic site for a client in several weeks. This allows the client to start entering data early in the process - which means come theming time, you are working against real client data. This is a plus when you are trying to achieve the results your client is seeking. In the iKos model, design comes last and is somewhat subject to the functionality that has been developed.

iKos set the the goal to reduce Drupal development time by 80% - to radically reduced the repeated effort that the company engaged project after project. They created a model of a site "startpoint" that begins each new client effort.

Drupalcon CPH - Commerce Guys Talk Drupal Commerce

Posted Tue, 2010-08-31 06:33 by matthew

Ryan did a session on the new version of the D7 Commerce Module. He was the original writer of the Ubercart package - a main stay of ecommerce sites in Drupal 6. His self deprecating humour at the beginning of the session was charming as Ubercart was his first segue into many aspects of Drupal and it has become the defacto leader of the pack for Drupal ecommerce sites.

His new offering is looking very slick, making use of fields in core for example, and while Ryan tells us it isn't quite ready for primetime (he's still building out features) it looked pretty good.

Video from this session is below in seven sections. The original first video was only 4 seconds long.

Drupalcon CPH - The Final Session

Posted Mon, 2010-08-30 22:05 by matthew

Many thanks to everyone who made Drupalcon CPH happen. The final session is a suitable (if silly) ending to what was a very productive week for me. Lots of meetings, reconnecting with old friends, and sessions.

The greatest silliness and fun in the session were the Kitten Killers - you can see just that piece of the presentation here (again and again and again).

If you just want to see the final session from beginning to end - I've posted the entire session below. The second to last is the Kitten Killers.

Drupalcon CPH - The Kitten Killers

Posted Mon, 2010-08-30 21:33 by matthew

Have we replaced the Drupal Song? At the end of the final session, the Killers played a new song, "I Can Be Your Module, You Can Be My Theme". It was a fun and silly way to end the main part of the conference and segue into the sprints.

The song was fun and sounds like it would be really easy to sing again and again and again.

Here's hoping it has been placed in the public domain.

Dries' Keynote for Drupalcon CPH - Kerfuffle

Posted Tue, 2010-08-24 09:30 by matthew

Some loved it. Some hated the sex-tape comments. Some were not sure what to make of the Tupperware analogy. All this caused a kerfuffle on Twitter, but the keynote was interesting as ever.

I was amazed by the varied tweets that came across the twitterverse that included:

"I always love the Driesnote. @Dries is a fantastic speaker. #drupalcon"

"It was good that @dries mentioned the need for more women in Drupal but unfortunate he linked it to welcoming non-engineers. #drupalcon"

Drupalcon CPH Here I Come

Posted Sat, 2010-08-21 17:02 by matthew

Well, the trek is finally started. Normally by now I would have written some kind of post talking about finding an apartment in the host city, the process I went through for that and how great a deal it was. This time around, I couldn't beat the prices of the hotels, especially when you double up in a room.

Examiner.com Moves from Preview to Live!

Posted Thu, 2010-08-19 21:40 by matthew

Examiner SprintI started as a contractor with Examiner.com December 1, 2009. Nearly eight months later after an internal release to the company and a public preview of the site - the new look and feel is live - announced by the Examiner.com Blog

Over the last month or so we the team has been sprinting in Denver with remote members traveling to the home office to help get the site ready to launch the public preview. The Team took over Examiner.com's large conference room and starting working in an agile method rapidly knocking out bugs.

Drupalcamp CO - Anatomy of a D7 Sprint

Posted Mon, 2010-07-12 21:25 by matthew

I was talking with Doug Green today a little bit about Drupal releases and he reminded me that Dries' keynote in Barcelona discussed the last push to release Drupal 6. For D7 it has taken two years. Each release, is of course, a community effort and sprints are essential for pushing the Drupal project forward.

Watching the Drupalcamp CO forums, it became clear that there was a desire for a sprint. So, as an addendum to Drupalcamp CO, Examiner.com decided to host a Drupal 7 code sprint at the Examiner offices. The Examiner.com has a great deal invested in the use of Drupal 7 and MongoDB. This has extended to retaining some amazing Drupal talent including several of the top contributors to the Drupal 7 project. Driving towards camp, there were over 60ish critical core bugs preventing D7 from achieving release candidate status. After camp, the number had reduced to about 50 thanks to the chx coder lounge. A significant number of these core bugs affect the examiner project so we wanted to help with them.

Drupalcamp CO - CHX on FAPI

Posted Mon, 2010-07-12 20:14 by matthew

Chx did a session on various field hooks, storage engines, and hooking into entities.

Drupalcamp CO - PCI Compliance

Posted Sun, 2010-07-11 20:00 by matthew

Rachel Makrucki of the Airforce Academy in Colorado Springs shared her experiences in setting up the Academy ecommerce site to comply with PCI compliance. She made her slides available on Google. Video of the session can be found below the main points of the discussion.

--PCI Compliance does not mean you are secure.
--Document everything - if if isn't on paper it never happened
--The Credit Card companies make the rules - they want to make you responsible