Drupal

Drupalcamps are growing like mushrooms around this region of Europe. While we've had one day Drupal conferences in Hungary for several years now, the Czechs joined the ranks last year and now Slovaks and Romanians will enjoy a gathering of like-minden drupalers this year. The next event coming up is Drupalcamp Bratislava on Feb 27th and 28th, 2010.

As it turns out, the honored Jakub Suchy will not be able to present at this Drupalcamp about Drupal security, so I was approached to step in. I was more than happy to participate and continue spreading awareness of security best practices. I hope to pack a good amount of tips for site maintainers and module/theme developers at the same time.

As it currently looks like, Drupalcamp Bratislava is full, but you can still sign up for the waiting list in case not all registered attendees will be able to come.

If you can't make it to Bratislava, or you are looking to attend a full-English-speaking event, Drupalcamp Romania comes up in the summer - June 5th and 6th, 2010.

I remember how skeptical I was looking at some presenters traveling around to multiple conferences with "the same" presentation a decade or so ago. Having been a course instructor for years and being a presenter for even longer, it looks completely different now. It's not that the topics you cover under the same looking umbrella can be quite different, you also find much better ways to express whatever you want to tell your audience as you experience feedback.

Of course the best would be to present your story crystal clear from the start, but despite being an enthusiastic follower of Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte, you'll undoubtedly need lots of time anyway to take a relaxed look on your story and distill to the level needed to form a great presentation. I've actually found it quite hard to refine my slides without actually showing/presenting them to an audience. The faces, questions, smiles and sometimes plain staring expressions you get tell you how you'd done and you can derive ways of how can you improve.

Two interesting examples are my slides on Drupal 7 and localize.drupal.org.

Last year DrupalCon Szeged 2008 introduced a few new technologies for helping people find out where things are happening both in terms of on-site conference activities and extracurricular fun. We've introduced a digital whiteboard which was using fixed size Drupal node displays set up in a wiki form, so everyone could edit any whiteboard item. This was helpful for people checking in from hotel rooms for announcements and also on-site because the building was so huge (see below) that running to the whiteboard every so often was not an option.

Photo by tactus from Flickr

Even after 1.5 years, people keep asking about certain things on the website, so I decided to start off with the whiteboard and explain how we did it. Sharing the exact solution we used to do would not cut it though, since we used Drupal 5 and some custom code based formatting, which would not be up to today's standards. So I recreated the whiteboard using the latest Acquia Drupal codebase instead, merely configuring some content types, permissions and a view.

For this starter recipe I used Drupal core and Views only from the Acquia Drupal package, so you can also repeat with just these modules only.

In an attempt to revitalize my blog, I recently switched themes, this time to the cool Magazeen theme and decided to highlight some fresh and inspiring content by cherry-picking tweets. Inspired by Dan Cederholm's Simplebits, where "tweets" were mixed with blog posts way before twitter was started, I decided to aggregate some of my tweets on my site. Let's see how I've done it.

When we talk about video streaming, many people still think of expensive hardware, dedicated uplink capacity and a complicated server side video encoder. However, nowadays video cameras in mobile phones and online streaming services can solve most of the problems for us if we sacrifice a bit on video quality. Drupalcamp Prague was just over this past weekend, and while I was busy presenting two sessions, demoing Acquia Gardens in a third one and speaking of contributing to Drupal in a fourth one, István Palócz was trying to ensure live streaming of the conference will be online.

In practice, the only hardware he used was a Nokia E51 mobile phone. Although it was attached (glued) to a laptop as seen in the picture, the laptop only served as an immediate camera stand. The phone was indeed plugged in almost the whole time to avoid the battery becoming empty, but the streaming was done solely using the phone hardware. Features used to stream were built-in wifi support in the phone, so the streaming can use the event's wifi service to stream the video and the Ustream broadcasting application available for some Nokia and Android phones. Though there is an iPhone app available, that does not support broadcasting.

With a capable phone, wifi and a ustream account, István was able to stream almost the whole event. Outages included when he actually needed to grab lunch so did not arrive back on time for the session and when he got a call. Still, those watching the stream were happy to see the sessions live and enjoy some of the program. I'm not highlighing this streaming technology for its stunning quality (although video quality definitely depends on the camera in the phone). You can check some of István's recordings to see the quality. It's the simplicity of the solution that is amazing. Just plug in your supported phone to a power outlet and stream over wireless. Way to share with the Drupal community!

Know of any similarly simple streaming solutions?

Things been quite quiet lately here on my personal blog. This does not mean that my days were not action packed though. I was quiet due mainly to being busy with working on all the Drupal 7 usability exceptions and blogging directly on the localize.drupal.org news blog.

It is time to share the love and show these to more people around my region. So I'll go to Prague and show what Drupal 7 has on offer and how can people translate Drupal easier then ever before. With two sessions on the schedule, I'll be busy this weekend to show all the awesomeness going on these areas.

The Prague event still has 70 free (as in beer) seats open as of this writing, so it is not late to register! My colleague Robert Douglass will also be there to present sexy search and Acquia. There will be a pretty heavy Hungarian contingent going presenting about Druplash, Services and Amazon EC2 integration plus our Hungarian in honor, Kristof van Tomme presenting knowledge management integration in Open Atrium.

There are plenty reasons to come, so don't miss out!

Mark Boulton created the new Drupal wordmark as part of the Drupal.org redesign efforts. As highlighted by Jeff Traynor of Raincity Studios, the newly relaunched Drupal.com now uses this new wordmark as identification for Drupal and the wordmark is also destined to land on Drupal.org as part of the redesign (implementation unfortunately still underway).

So why not include the wordmark in shipping software as well? A logical step would be to have it on the installation and update (also known as maintenance screens). The patch for using the new Seven administration theme for installation and updates does just that. Because it is only a first approximation of how this should look, I'd love to get help cleaning it up and polishing things like lining up items, correct font sizes and fixing graphics - so we get a really polished experience for people's first Drupal encounter as well.

Finally, the promise of a centralized localization interface for Drupal modules and themes looks to be coming true. I've started work on this project around two years ago under Google Summer of Code sponsorship and was continuing maintenance and improvements ever since. While I was spreading the word on it, not many people signed up to help clean up some possible performance problems, so it did not make into Drupal.org yet.

However, earlier this year I've got reviews from some key people in the infrastructure team, especially Gerhard Killesreiter, who persuaded me that setting this up is more important then it not being perfect yet. Software is evolving matter anyway, and we should improve as we see the problems. So I've started to set up localize.drupal.org. While we work out some of the kinks like single sign-on with drupal.org (one of the promises of the drupal.org redesign which will be delivered here), I thought it would be a good idea to discuss the implications.

Moshe Weitzman recently started the D7CX movement to rally people to get Drupal 7 contributed modules upgraded and released on time for the Drupal 7 release. This would be a great boon to the Drupal 7 release, which shapes up to be a huge improvement over Drupal 6 already. He also suggests a contributed module release manager who can help with (among other things) ensuring that tools are available to help people upgrade.

Those not following the implementation of concepts from http://d7ux.org/ here is a quick summary of the three main areas: