Elsewhere

We're pleased to announce Drupal Face to Face, our joint initiative with the Drupal Association to promote Drupalcon and Drupal Association membership. The purpose of the project is to capture the exuberance and authenticity of the Drupal community and invite others to join. We expect to bring Drupal Face to Face to Prague and other large or important Drupal events as an ongoing project. We hope you'll participate.

Drupal Face to Face is:

Episode Number:  140 Post Topics:  Drupal Taxonomy Contrib Drupal Commerce Drupal 7 Drupal Planet

In this episode we continue learning about Drupal Commerce and begin learning how to set up Drupal Commerce Product Attributes.

In this episode you will learn:

• How to set up Drupal taxonomy vocabularies and taxonomy terms to use as product attributes.
• How to add Taxonomy term reference fields to Product types to create Drupal Commerce product attributes.

DDoD Video: 

I previously wrote a post with some calculations about the power supplied to laptops from a car battery [1]. A comment on the post suggested that I might have made a mistake in testing the Voltage because leaving the door open (and thus the internal lights on) will cause a Voltage drop.

So I’ve done some more tests:

Test Voltage battery terminals 12.69 front power socket with doors closed 12.64 front power socket with doors open OR ignition switch on 12.37 cigarette lighter socket with ignition switch on 12.32 front power socket with doors closed and headlights on 11.96 front power socket with engine running 14.38 front power socket with engine running and headlights on 14.29

In my previous tests I recorded 12.85V inside my car (from the front power socket which although having the same connector as a cigarette lighter isn’t designed for lighting cigarettes) and 13.02V from the battery terminals – a 0.17V difference. In my tests today I was unable to reproduce that but I think that my biggest mistake was to take the reading too quickly. Today I noticed that it took up to a minute for the Voltage to stabilise after opening a door (the Voltage dips after any current draw and takes time to recover) so a quick reading isn’t going to be accurate.

My car is a Kia Carnival which has two sockets in the front for power and for actually lighting cigarettes. The one for lighting cigarettes has a slightly lower Voltage and only works when the ignition is turned on. The car also has a power socket in the boot (the trunk for US readers) which delivers the same Voltage as the power socket in the front.

Also one thing to note is that today is a reasonably cold day (16.5C outside right now) and my car hasn’t been driven since last night so the battery would be quite cold (maybe 12C or less). My previous measurements were taken in summer so the battery would have been a lot warmer and therefore working more effectively.

Conclusion

The Voltage drop from turning on the internal lights surprised me, I had expected that a car battery which is designed to supply high current wouldn’t be affected by such things. Certainly not to give a 2% Voltage drop! The Voltage difference from reading inside the car and at the battery terminals might be partly due to the apparent lead coating on the terminals, I pushed the probes of my multimeter beneath the surface of the metal and got a really good connection.

The 14% Voltage increase when the engine was running was also a surprise. It seems to me that if you are running a power hungry device (such as a laptop) it would be a good idea to disconnect it when the engine is turned off. A 14% higher voltage will give a 14% lower current if the PSU is efficient and therefore less problems with heat in the wiring and less risk of blowing a fuse.

Also it’s a good idea to be more methodical about performing tests than I was before my last post. There are lots of other tests I could run (such as testing after the engine has been running for a while) but at the moment I don’t have enough interest in this topic to do more tests. Please leave a comment if there’s something interesting that you think I missed.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/01/24/power-supplies-wires/

Related posts:

1. Power Supplies and Wires For some time I’ve been wondering how the wire size...
2. paper about ZCAV This paper by Rodney Van Meter about ZCAV (Zoned Constant...
3. Perpetual Motion It seems that many blog posts related to fuel use...

A new theming engine, Twig, is coming along with Drupal 8's adoption of the Symfony framework. And it's downright magical.

Instead of having theme functions that have to be overridden, everything becomes an (easy to read, easy to modify) template. Instead of having to figure out render arrays, themers can use consistent template variables. And instead of having insecure output, Twig sanitizes everything by default.

If you've ever worked on a WordPress or Tumblr theme, the approach will feel pretty similar. Here's what it looks like:

And oh by the way, it's well-documented — no small point in the Drupal community!

Sound too good to be true? Well, it almost might be, because a lot has to happen in order to get this into Drupal 8. There's a Twig-focused sprint happening right after Drupalcon, so if you think this is great, come pitch in! Because if things don't get done, Twig will be held until Drupal 9. No Drupal themer, veteran or newbie, kitten or human, wants that to happen.

I spoke to Jen Lampton (with a contribution from Fabian Franz) about how Twig will result in happier veteran Drupal themers, happier new Drupal themers, and happier Drupal kittens. Be sure to show up for their featured Drupalcon session (along with Drupal CSS innovator John Albin Wilkins), “Using Twig: The new template engine in Drupal 8,” on Wednesday at 3:45 PM.

IB: What's one thing you're most excited about with Twig?

JL: Replacing the template engine with something completely different means that we get to take a good hard look at absolutely everything in the current theme system, so we can do a clean sweep.

FF: What I love the most about Twig is the syntax, and how it cleverly makes it possible to lazy-render things. The possibilities of having an interpreted language are endless.

IB: Can theme developers start converting/creating their themes now?

JL: No! If you have the time to start converting your own themes, then please, please, please use the time to help us make the theme system what you want it to be — instead. There will be time to convert your themes later, but Drupal itself can only be monumentally improved right now.

IB: Will frontend developers and themers coming from other CMSes — like WordPress — find Twig easier to use?

JL: Yes. Front end developers coming from everywhere will find Twig easier to use. For starters, Twig looks a lot more like HTML, so if you don't know PHP you'll still be right at home. For people who do know PHP and don't know Twig, there will be a learning curve, but it's far far FAR less steep than learning about what Drupal had done to PHPTemplate.

IB: Twig sounds great! What can people do to help make sure it happens for Drupal 8?

JL: There are four main areas where we need help right now, as outlined in our Twig TODO wiki.

1. Help us test all the patches.
2. Help us fix issues with the patches.
3. Help us improve the markup in core (after being converted to Twig).
4. Help us clean up the rest of the theme system.

If people are interested in any one of these four areas, they can come to the sprint immediately following DrupalCon and get some hands-on help making Drupal better. We need all the hands we can get since we are up against some major deadlines, so please please please come help us!

Join Rootwork on Twitter, Facebook and SlideShare.

Learn about Rootwork's services for nonprofits and social change.

I’ve been part of many conference calls for work and found them seriously lacking. Firstly there’s a lack of control over the call, so when someone does something stupid like putting an unmuted phone handset near a noise source there’s no way to discover who did it and disconnect them.

Another problem is that of noise on the line when some people don’t mute their phones, which is related to the lack of control as it’s impossible to determine who isn’t muting their phone.

Possibly the biggest problem is how to determine who gets to speak next. When group discussions take place in person non-verbal methods are used to determine who gets to speak next. With a regular phone call (two people) something like the CSMACD algorithm for network packets works well. But when there are 8+ people involved it becomes time consuming to resolve issues of who speaks next even when there are no debates. This is more difficult for multinational calls which can have a signal round trip time of 700ms or more.

I think that we need a VOIP based conference call system for smart phones to manage this. I think that an ideal system would be based on the push to talk concept with software control that only allows one phone to transmit at a time. If someone else is speaking and you want to say something then you would push a button to indicate your desire but your microphone wouldn’t go live while the other person was speaking. The person speaking would be notified of your request and one of the following things would happen:

• You are added to the queue of people wishing to speak. When the other person finished speaking the next person in the queue gets a turn.
• You are added to the queue and the moderator of the call chooses who gets to speak next. This isn’t what I’d prefer but would probably be desired by managers for corporate calls.
• You get to interrupt the person who’s speaking. This may not be ideal but is similar to what currently happens.

Did I miss any obvious ways for the system to react to a talk request?

Is there any free software to do something like this? A quick search of the Google Play store didn’t find anything that seems to match.

Related posts:

1. Globalisation and Phone Calls I just watched an interesting TED talk by Pankaj Ghemawat...
2. Phone Calls and Other Distractions Harald Welte has written about the distraction of phone calls...
3. Talking Fast My previous post about my LCA mini-conf talk received an...

It is common knowledge that Drupal 8 contains Views module, thanks to the work from the Views in Drupal Core (VDC) initiative.

Our contribution to the VDC initiative was working on abstracting Views UI's modal pattern into a generic modal API in core.

Recently one of the coolest pieces of this API was committed to core.

You can now load any content in a modal simply by adding a class and an attribute to any link.

Sound cool? Read on to learn more.

Due to popular demand I moved debian apt and python-apt from bzr to git today. Moving was pretty painless:

$ git init $ bzr fast-export --export-marks=marks.bzr -b debian/sid /path/to/debian-sid | git fast-import --export-marks=marks.git

And then a fast-import for the debian-wheezy and debian-experimental branches too. Then a

$ git gc --aggressive

(thanks to Guillem Jover for pointing this out) and that was it.

The branches are available at:

• http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=apt/apt.git
• http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=apt/python-apt.git.

It’s that time of year again—time for DrupalCon. Aten Design Group is headed to Portland and proud to sponsor what is expected to be the largest DrupalCon ever.

Our team is once again involved in many ways, including speaking, content selection and sponsoring after hours events. We’re also bringing our latest event-themed sketchbook and brand new "Work That Matters" posters hot off the press, so don’t forget to come by the Aten booth (#235) to pick some up for yourself.

Start off the week by having fun, meeting interesting people and doing some good at the DoGooders Happy Hour on Monday at 4 PM. We will be getting together with other Drupal community members to benefit one of the community's long-time contributors, Aaron Winborn who has been battling late stage ALS.

After a Tuesday full of sessions, the Opening Reception at 5:30 PM is a perfect time to get a sketchbook and poster at the Aten booth. Then head over to the Women in Drupal Reception at 6 PM, which we are thrilled to support.

On Wednesday at 1 PM, check out Karyn, Scott and the rest of their panel present Making Drupal Meetups & Events Rock in room C123 (Trellon). Then stick around for our lightning talk at 4:15 PM on the Day Stage, Planning and Executing Multiple Projects for Maximum Efficiency and Amazing Results. Justin and I promise to keep it short and sweet.

We've got sessions lined up for Thursday too. Ken will be presenting Design Smarter, Not Harder at 1 PM in OR 203 (Palantir) directly folowed by John and Garrett’s session, Dapper Drupal - Custom Tailored Themes at 2:15 PM in OR 201 (Phase2).

In true DrupalCon fashion, we’ll be sprinting, sprinting, sprinting on Friday. Karyn and others will be mentoring people new to contribution sprints, so everyone can come join the fun.

** UPDATED ** We're going to live broadcast everything so those who are unable to join in person can still join virtually! Keep tabs on the #pmofs IRC chan and ask your questions (moderated by Don Vandemark) and we'll post the link to view here asap wednesday morning portland time.

Now also posted on Drupalcon Portland website!

 

The PMoF's Are Happening!

Thank you to everyone who helped us put this together, to the DA (*cough* Holly *cough* Steph) for the fabulous A-V equiped room they're snagging for us, to my fellow PM's for your feedback and ideas and to our presenters who generously offered to show up and do their thang!

Below is the official schedule set for Wednesday 22nd! All those looking for some awesome Project Management content are welcome to join us but it'll be first come first served regarding spots!
 

Wednesday May 22nd Room B110 - Forum One Communications 
starting after the keynote and coffee break!

 

09:00am Keynote Karen McGrane: Thriving in a world of change: Future-friendly content with Drupal 10:15am Coffee Break in Hall C + D 10:45am The Science of Guessing: Drupal Estimation Techniques from Project Managers
Speakers: Chris Strahl, Jakob Person and Shannon Vettes 12:15pm Fixed-Bid FAILAPALOOZA: Benchmark discussion of failures and solutions 01:00pm How to incrementally integrate QA into Agile
Speakers: Everett Zufelt and Akshay Barve 02:00pm Watergile Pros & Con, A Round Table Discussion 03:00pm Walking Break 03:15pm Agile + Drupal the Four Kitchens Way
Speaker: Todd Nienkerk 04:15pm Agile Workshop & Estimation Techniques: Teaching your team to do agile

Can't wait to see you guys there, start spreading the word!

Tags: project managementagileDrupalConportlandPlanet Drupal

The PMoF's Are Happening!

Thank you to everyone who helped us put this together, to the DA (*cough* Holly *cough* Steph) for the fabulous A-V equiped room they're snagging for us, to my fellow PM's for your feedback and ideas and to our presenters who generously offered to show up and do their thang!

Below is the official schedule set for Wednesday 22nd! All those looking for some awesome Project Management content are welcome to join us but it'll be first come first served regarding spots!
 

Wednesday May 22nd Room B110 - Forum One Communications 
starting after the keynote and coffee break!

9am-10:15am     Keynote with Karen McGrane

10:15-10:45am   Coffee Break

10:45-11:45am   Session      The Science of Guessing
                                                       Chris Strahl, Jakob Person and Shannon Vettes

12:15-1:00pm     BoF              Fixed-Bid FAILAPALOOZA: 
                                                       benchmark discussion of failures and solutions!

1:00-2:00pm       Session       How to incrementally integrate QA into Agile 
                                                        Everett Zufelt and Akshay Barve

2:00-3:00pm       BoF               Watergile Pros & Cons
                                                        Round Table Discussion

3:00-3:15pm        BREAK TIME Y'ALL!!!!!!!
 

3:15-4:15pm       Session         Agile + Drupal the Four Kitchens Way
                                                       Todd Nienkerk

4:15-5:00pm        BoF               Agile Workshop & Estimation Techniques
                                                       Teaching your team to do agile

 

Can't wait to see you guys there, start spreading the word!

Tags: project managementagileDrupalConportlandPlanet Drupal

It can be tough sometimes for web developers. That beautiful/exciting/inspiring new site that’s almost ready to launch looks great and works well in all browsers… except for Internet Explorer.  Menus don’t align properly, rounded corners disappear, images don’t quite fit the same… It’s a continual challenge to help IE fit in with the big boys Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

Dear all,

DebConf13 sponsorship application date extended

As communicated through the debconf-announce@lists.debconf.org mailing list, the deadline to apply for DebConf13 sponsorship has been extended to the end of this week, May 19th.

If you intend to attend DebConf13 in August and would like to apply for sponsored registration, now is the time to register in Penta! After this deadline you will no longer be able to apply for sponsored food, accomodation or travel. Please refer to the announcement and to the registration documentation for details. Please contact us on the debconf-discuss mailing list if you have any questions.

DebConf12 final report

The DebConf team is also happy to announce the release of the DebConf12 Final Report. It’s a 39-page document which gives the reader an idea about the conference as a whole. It includes descriptions of talks, DebCamp and Debian Day activities, personal impressions, attendee and budgeting numbers, the work of various teams, social events and so on. If you attended Debconf12, the report may refresh some of your memories and bring you closer to the organization team work. If not, it will certainly encourage you to be part of future Debian events.

We thank the Universidad Centroamericana, the Government of Nicaragua, Google and all other DebConf12 sponsors for their support that made the event possible.

The DebConf team

The idea for this series of posts started at lunch one day when I made an off-hand comment about reading Hex numbers and making fast changes in my CSS file. I am somewhat new to developing for Drupal, but amid all the new information and terminology was something familiar, colour-space*. A sword that I understood how to put to use in elegant arcs within the rest of the coding I was learning.

read more

Prepaid ticket holders, sponsors with unredeemed coupon codes, and any unregistered person looking to not pay the onsite price to attend DrupalCon have just over 24 hours to register before online registration closes this Friday, May 17 at 5:00pm PDT.

I saw this tweet flashing by in my stream today:

What immediately caught my eye was Drupaleros, the Spanish word for Drupal User. Its such a great word and just sounds great.

Or what do you say about:

We are the Drupaleros!

Awesome isn't it?

Even better, if you know your Spanish it is unisex too.

How about adopting it as the official name for us who are passionate about Drupal?

Lets all be Drupaleros!

Read the full "We are the Drupaleros" post on www.tsvenson.com

To expand and gain a stronger foothold in the VM storage market, Tintri turned to Chapter Three to create a new look and feel for their business. As a team, the two companies built a stronger content structure that spoke more effectively to Tintri’s primary audiences.

The project was a resounding success, resulting in an immediate 30% increase in traffic and a significant uptick in lead generation after just one month.

Chapter Three took us from concept to completion on time and on budget—even though we didn’t have a lot of either. Their process kept the project moving along and still met our iteration expectations. From a site maintenance standpoint, we can now do in a few minutes what used to take hours. We’re ecstatic with our new site and so are our visitors. When I hear from people that have been on the site, their first comment is usually around how easy it is to find what they’re looking for. Great work all around.

- Dave Frederick | Senior Director of Corporate Marketing

 

Identifying the problem, developing the solution

Tintri, a B2B specializing in VM-aware storage, wanted a new website to better solicit business from larger companies. Their existing Wordpress site looked dated, and it was not instilling confidence in larger customers. It also failed to provide enough flexibility for their communication needs. 

We solved Tintri’s problems with a two-pronged approach:

1. Improve the visual presentation of the site
2. Restructure the site to serve up more relevant content

 

Improving the visual design

Tintri wanted its website to convey simplicity and efficiency without unnecessary frills or adornments. The company wanted straightforward and consistent communication. Our team approached the design aesthetic from a variety of perspectives until we found the right fit.

As a rapidly-growing startup, Tintrí needed to have a design that could scale along with the business and support a visionary approach. By creating a full-width design, we could reinforce these company attributes with maximum real estate for strong visual messaging.  

Leveraging Drupal’s strengths for content strategy

Tintri’s technical audience prefers consistency and brevity over jargon and fluff. Understanding that site visitors were coming primarily for information, we built ways to showcase nine different kinds of related content on almost every page. With this approach, visitors can find what they are looking for without hunting around or use the search function. It also allows site administrators to create content once, and leverage it multiple times.

Lullabot has always had a big presence at DrupalCon and next week's event in Portland, OR is no exception. We're teaching 4 classes and presenting 10 sessions. We've got 2 booths in the expo hall. We're having a big party on Tuesday night. And nearly the entire Lullabot team will be in Portland. For the latest updates, please follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.

Here's the breakdown of where we'll be and when:

Back in 2010 I packaged Google’s ipaddr module because I needed a light weight IP address manipulation library that supported both IPv4 and IPv6 and (at the time) python-subnettree was IPv4 only.  Well, ipaddr is all grown up now and included in python3.3 as the ipaddress manipulation module in the standard library.  You can find details, as well as some description of the differences, in PEP 3144.

I just converted one package that I’m upstream for to use either ipaddr (for python2.6/2.7/3.2) or ipaddress instead of some custom code.  It turned out to be pretty easy to make it work with either.  Other than the name, the only difference I ran into was the removal of the common, generic IPAddress and IPNetwork functions that are replaced by ip_address and ip_network.

…
-import ipaddr
+try:
+    import ipaddress
+except ImportError:
+    import ipaddr as ipaddress
…
-    address = ipaddr.IPAddress(ip)
-    if isinstance(address, ipaddr.IPv4Address):
+    try:
+        address = ipaddress.ip_address(ip)
+    except AttributeError:
+        address = ipaddress.IPAddress(ip)
+    if isinstance(address, ipaddress.IPv4Address):
…

Currently, python3-ipaddr has no reverse-dependencies in the archive (python-ipaddr does).  Once python3.2 is dropped from Jessie, I think I’ll drop the python3-ipaddr binary on the assumption people newly coding for python3.3 should use ipaddress.  The python-ipaddr module will stick around for use with python2.7.

Topic: Drupal

In Drupal core, we use issue thresholds to manage technical debt. Both critical (release-blocking) and major (non-release-blocking, high-impact issues) are considered. When we have more open issues than our thresholds, we do not commit new features.

Currently, we have 27 critical bugs, 41 critical tasks, 155 major bugs, and 149 major tasks. This is more than twice our current thresholds for critical issues, and about 50% more than our thresholds for major issues. We need your help to resolve these issues so that we can resume adding new features to Drupal 8. That would be a very exciting place to get to!

There are many ways to help, including not only programming but also updating these issues' summaries, testing the patches, and making sure the patches still apply. I encourage everyone to collaborate on major and critcal issues, and to consider making them a focus at the DrupalCon Portland sprints.

There have been a lot of mentioning that Drupal 8 is using Annotations. In this article I will dive in how Drupal uses them and how to leverage Annotations mechanism yourself.

In brief, annotations are blocks of comments that are parsed and used as a source of information about something. For example in Drupal 8, plugins system Annotations are used to describe plugins. They are alternatives to our TYPE_hook_info hooks and are now widely used.

For example:

<?php
/**
* Defines a default processor implementation.
*
* Creates lightweight records from feed items.
*
* @Plugin(
* id = "aggregator",
* title = @Translation("Default processor"),
* description = @Translation("Creates lightweight records from feed items.")
* )
*/
class DefaultProcessor extends PluginBase implements ProcessorInterface {
}
?>

How does this work technically?

For parsing annotations Drupal uses AnnotationReader class from Doctrine. This class can retrieve annotations from classes, class methods in the following way: <?php
use Doctrine\Common\Annotations\AnnotationReader;
use Doctrine\Common\Annotations\AnnotationRegistry;
use Doctrine\Common\Reflection\StaticReflectionParser;

$object = new CustomClassWithAnnotations();
$annotation_name = 'Drupal\custom_module\Annotation\CustomAnnotation';

$reader = new AnnotationReader();

// Register the namespaces of classes that can be used for annotations.
$annotation_namespaces = array(
'Drupal\custom_module\Annotation' => DRUPAL_ROOT . '/modules/custom_module/lib',
);
AnnotationRegistry::registerAutoloadNamespaces($annotation_namespaces);

$reflection_class = new StaticReflectionClass($object);
$annotation = $reader->getClassAnnotation($reflection_class, $annotation_name);
?>

In the example above $annotation will be an object - instance of class that is registered as annotation. For example in case of:

<?php
/**
* @CustomAnnotation(
* property1 = "value1",
* property2 = “value2”,
* )
class CustomClassWithAnnotations() {
} ?>

AnnotationReader will check if it understands the CustomAnnotation class and instantiates it. In order the reader to understand this annotation, we should register it with AnnotationRegistry.

How do we define the CustomAnnotation class? A good idea would be to inherit it from – Drupal\Component\Annotation\Plugin. It will parse annotation to an array that you can access the "get()" method $definition = $annotation->get();

Defining a new type of annotation can be done in the following way:

<?php
namespace Drupal\custom_module\Annotation;
use Drupal\Component\Annotation\Plugin;
/**
* Defines an CustomAnnotation annotation type.
*
* @Annotation
*/
class CustomAnnotation extends Plugin {
}
?>

Of course you can skip creating a new type of annotation and use @Plugin instead.

In Drupal, the primary usage of annotations is in AnnotatedClassDiscovery, to discover plugins. But we can go further and apply reading annotations from class methods:

<?php
$reflection_method = new \ReflectionMethod('CustomClassWithAnnotations', $method_name);
$annotation = $this->reader->getMethodAnnotation($reflection_method, 'Drupal\custom_module\Annotation\CustomAnnotation');
?>

We can use this for example for validation of arguments or even unit testing our methods (providing a set of arguments and results to test against).

Hope this article made it a bit clearer about annotations. If you need some help on annotations we will be glad to assist you on Facebook or Twitter.

You may also share your thoughts/comments below.

For further reading:
Declarative development using annotations in PHP
Using annotations in PHP with doctrine annotation reader
Use Annotations for plugin discovery

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