Planet Drupal

Start:  2013-06-24 09:00 - 2013-06-30 19:00 Europe/Dublin Sprint

Drupal Dev Days Dublin is ideally timed to be at the very last minute when developers can still come together and make API changes to Drupal 8 core as per the current timeline.

The event is looking for sponsors, awaiting session submissions and people to register (only €25 for a standard ticket).

This is also a first of a kind event where extended sprinting is built into the planning. The generous folks at DIT (Dublin Institute of Technology) are providing space for the sprints the whole week before the event as well as the sessions. There are already Multilingual, Views and Field API/Entity API sprints proposed. Do you want to lead a sprint on Mobile, Performance or some other favorite topic or join existing sprints? Sign up for the event (on the site) and for the sprints (in the sheet linked below).

Practical details

Dates

24th (Mon) to 28th (Fri) of June 2013 (may also continue all the way to 30th of June depending on space and interest, parallel to sessions).

Times

We start each day at 9am and plan to wind down sprinting at 7pm to go for food. Exact schedules depend on teams, hunger, etc.

Location

Dublin Institute of Technology; DIT Aungier Street, Dublin 2 (only a few minutes walk from Stephen's Green).

Sign up, join the fun #node-296483 .picture, #node-296483 h3 { display: none; } #node-296483 .field-type-datestamp { margin: 0 0 2em 0; } #node-296483 dl { margin-bottom: 1em; } #node-296483 dd { margin-top: 0.5em; } #node-296483 h3.content { display: block; }

The Search API ranges module allows you to easily create a search API page with a range facet. For example, you could create a search page where users can filter products based on price, by simply selecting a price range from a facet.

The Commerce Kickstart distribution uses this module for price filtering on their product search page. If you want to see the facet in action go to the Commerce Kickstart demo site and you should see the Price facet in the left sidebar.

This is the fourth part in our series on how to build a question and answers website using drupal. In this tutorial, we would be looking at how we can allow users vote up or down on the question and answer content type. We will also be creating functionality that allows users to be rewarded with points for different activities/tasks they carry out on the question and answer site. Users who created a question are also able to choose the best answer to their question, or what you call the accepted answer.

Upon downloading the answers user points using the drush command line and installing it, you will discover it also installs a lot of other dependency modules such as rules, rates, best answer, submitted by, entity and voting.

Once installed, you will discover most of the configurations have been done for us. There is already a default widget setup that allows user voting on both the questions and answers content type. The rates and userpoints have also been pre-configured using the rules module. So that once an event takes place, an action follows. 

In other to be able to follow this tutorial properly here is a link to the first three parts part1, part2, part3

About a week ago our fundraising campaign on indiegogo finished with a total of 11'567$ raised from a total of 49 sponsors. The public count doesn't include a donation that we got from Acquia on the day the campaign closed that couldn't be transferred anymore through IndieGoGo because of authorization issues with Paypal.

I would like to thank our sponsors, all the people that believed in us and the project and who became a backer. Your vote of confidence was crucial to show the world just how much potential this project has. You were there for us right at the start, we won't forget.

At Florida DrupalCamp 2013, I presented a session that demonstrated how to utilize the Feeds, Feeds Tamper, Address field, Geofield, and other modules to create a fully-functional website for searching for Farmers Markets anywhere in the United States. While the session's intent was to inspire people as to what Drupal can do in a very short amount of time, this blog post will focus on the details of the process.

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Have you ever thought that Drupal's markup is bad and could be better? I'm sure you did. And now thanks to the Twig Initiative we are starting to move in that direction. Introducing the Dream markup!

#dreammarkup

One of the goals of the Twig and Mobile Initiatives is to improve the markup in core. Though most of initiative participants are currently involved in converting templates to Twig, but we still can start working on markup for the completed templates or make markup suggestions.

Principles

Drupal 8 dream markup should be based on two principles. First - we should push current markup to the line where front-end developers from other platforms won't feel any pain(or at least less) on moving to Drupal and also reduce this crazy hierarchy of thousands of all the elements in DOM structure. Second principle is base on the new CSS Architecture. We want to reduce common css pitfalls and also reduce the weight of CSS selectors with one shot. To achieve this we are using SMACSS principles(more known as BEM) in naming convention. For example from #sidebar ul.menu li > a to .menu__link

Time limits

There is no chance to edit the markup after code freeze for Drupal 8. Theme makers want to be sure that markup of core is stable and they can create solid themes. In future changing one markup element or class name can lead to code change in all existing themes.

Getting involved

If you have any ideas how to improve the markup, or want to join and help on working on existing issues - be sure to visit the Meta for Dream Markup. On the meta issue page you can find all the principles, related issues to work on and steps to get involved.

Language English Tags: DrupalDevelopmentCheck this option to include this post in Planet Drupal aggregator: planet

Spoiler alert: yes, we think it will be.

In our first post of this series: Help! I’m Drowning in Social Collaboration Software! we discussed how the social collaboration software landscape is a dynamic, confusing, and rapidly changing space that is hard to navigate, but full of promising tools. In our second post, Are We Asking Too Much of Collaboration Software? we discussed that success with social collaboration software requires organizations to focus on their business challenges and truly know the problem(s) they’re trying to solve in order to choose the right tool for the job. In this final post, we will address why we believe open source can the disruptive force for the space.

From our experience with social collaboration software, which recently includes rebuilding Open Atrium, we believe that open source offers a different and compelling value to this market, introducing the elements that are most fundamental to success: flexibility, extensibility, and community to a market dominated by proprietary solutions devoid of these factors.

Social media is changing fast. That’s fine in our personal lives (ooh! twitter! now tumblr!) But in the context of social business software, we have to invest for a longer term in tools that have concrete gains that relate to our business goals. Historically the most compelling business cases for IT tools were achieved when you can prove an increase in revenue or in the ability to market to customers. The problem with social collaboration software so far is that its best chance of success lies in our ability to use these tools to 1) reduce cost, 2) achieve greater productivity, or 3) leverage insights for competitive advantage. This has kept the intranet and social collaboration software in the “world of corporate IT” where saving costs and improving efficiency are all people are expecting to gain from it. Still, if these advantages can be achieved, the cost is well worth the effort. The trouble is believing the hype that we can achieve our wildest dreams and falling into common traps.

It is time for social collaboration to break out of these perceived weaknesses in its business case and prove it can have a measurable business benefit to the organization.

Consider the trends in the web content management system (WCMS) space over the last 5 years. Commercial and proprietary vendors have fallen victim to a widespread movement towards open source solutions like Drupal, WordPress. This massive landscape change has made open source the dominant choice for organizations in their WCMS because the proprietary vendors no longer had solutions worth carrying the price tag. Why would the same trend not prevail in social collaboration software where the environment has the same (or better) characteristics that make it prime for open source?

There are five reasons we think open source solutions can help organizations find the “right tool for the job” in social collaboration software while avoiding many of the traps we see in the space.

1. The return on investment is better. This software is generally a big investment for an organization. When you can keep costs down with a growing and competitive talent pool, avoid licensing and maintenance fees, and see your software improve through free community contribution, you’re going to see a higher ROI.

2. Open source is (surprise!) more flexible. We promise, you don’t know everything you need your social collaboration software to do or be capable of. Nobody does. Because those needs are changing. Open source allows you to use it, study it, and change it. That’s important, and can mean the difference between useful and outdated.

3. Their way is not your way. Vendors have good ideas, but they aren’t your ideas. You might benefit from best practices but ultimately that is a choice between what CAN be done and what your users need. Targeting the opportunities and pain points of your own organization is where the solution will start to feel genuine.

4. A “glue approach” is better for the growing feature set. The feature list alone of any of the “catch-all” platform products begs an important question: “can these guys really be good at ALL this stuff?” The answer: probably not. An open source solution that can integrate with existing “specialty” solutions lets your organization choose from the specialists who do what they do best, rather than trying to choose a monolithic solution that is a catch all.

5. The market is changing. Innovation matters. Social collaboration software is, probably more than almost any other organizational tool you use, subject to the rapidly changing landscape of social media, sharing, and collaboration trends. The features the “big guys” are working on today may be outdated by the time they’re released and the features your organization needs may not be ready or even considered.

Drupal and other open source solutions offer an answer to these traps by giving you a platform you can extend and customize without fear of lock-in. In the past years, the open source community — and particularly the Drupal community — has sought to fill the market’s needs with open source alternatives to the proprietary social collaboration solutions that exist now.

A host of modules and distributions exist to address this market now. Modules that perform specific functions like Workbench, Organic Groups, and Messaging API provide functionality like workflow management, notifications, messaging, and group management to those starting from Drupal Core.

At Phase2, we are tackling the problem with Open Atrium (now available in Alpha!) Where we hope to make a flexible integration solutions that works with other popular systems.

Many other Drupal distributions like Commons, Totem, and RedHen CRM address the need from more of a “platform” perspective, providing a starting point for a variety of social solutions with multiple pieces of functionality designed to connect teams, manage projects, allow for messaging and notifications, enable “friending” and following, and create wikis, portals, document management, and community forums.

You should not be shocked that a company whose motto is “open source. open minds.” would be pushing for an open source approach to collaboration software. But the reasons why open source matters here are compelling.

The needs are changing, the features are growing, and the market is confusing because no one can expect to understand (much less constantly make purchasing decisions) in the changing face of this space. With open source, you don’t have to, knowing that the talent pool, the reuse of best practices, the flexibility, and the innovation will keep up where a single proprietary solution falls short.

In essence, social collaboration software is moving at the speed of open source.

This screencast steps through a little known technique that uses iframes to allow for secure cross-domain communication, using the Entity iframe module.  The screencast shows how this technique can be used to allow for iframed content who's parent embedding the iframe is able to react to changes in the height of the content of the iframe.  In short: you get responsive iframed content.  If you don't care about how this works and instead want to see it in action, skip to the video below, otherwise keep reading.

Last week the DA hosted its first webinar, featuring Kevin O’Leary, Spark UX Lead, and Jesse Beach, Senior Front End Engineer. Our topic was Drupal 8 and Spark for Responsive Design. We spent a great hour reviewing the features of the D8 Spark distribution and the powerful features that it puts in the hands of content editors, wherever they may be. As a person that used to hand code web sites, the idea that I can edit a site from my phone still fills me with awe.

Personal blog tags: webinars

On April 19th-20th, I attended DrupalCamp São Paulo 2013. The event, which was born from the ashes of the cancelled DrupalCon São Paulo, was held on IME-USP (University of São Paulo), and had around 250 people from the whole country, and some from Argentina, Peru and Uruguay.

During 35 talks, a wide variety of topics were followed closely by interested developers, business people and students, from Sales to Technical, E-commerce to Mobile. A growing community!

Propeople was one of the sponsors, and I also represented the company in a talk about Feeds and data migration, in a room full of people giving me questions. We had a nice time talking about massaging data and the usual problems we face when working with migrations.

On the second day, a remarkable session performed the task of founding the Brazilian Drupal Association. The new organization, inspired by the Drupal Association, was created to answer a growing demand for Drupal promotion in Brazil and Latin America. The association will promote regular events around the country for that purpose, and much more.

This community has many-many challenges, such as making Drupal more visible in Brazilian market and attracting more sales/business people to conferences. However, there are clear signs of a increasing, more mature, community.

 

 

 

Pictures source.

Language English Tags: DrupalEventsCheck this option to include this post in Planet Drupal aggregator: planet

At this month's Central Denver meetup, I didn't have an introductions question prepared as I normally do, so I just asked the first question I thought of: what's your favorite color? That turned out to be more interesting than I expected, a close race between green and blue, with blue narrowly squeaking out a victory at the last minute.

This was the first month we did collaborative notes on Google Docs, an idea I stole from the South Denver meetup. Though we didn't have a lot of participation this time, I still like the idea of everyone being able to both contribute to notes and follow along in text to supplement the spoken presentation. It's very much in line with how we collaborate on everything else in the Drupal community.

We had two presentations. The first, from Dave Bailey, was about Drupal project planning. He talked through his approach to making Drupal projects successful, and also things to avoid that tend to make projects unsuccessful. Everyone has a slightly different process, and it was really interesting to see both the overlap and the differences in someone else's process. Dave posted his slides online if you're interested and missed it.

After that, we enjoyed a demo of drush from Ryan Kois. Drush is one of those tools that everyone recommends, but if you've never seen it in action it can be difficult to understand why it's so useful. Ryan went through the install process, helpfully (if unintentionally) demonstrating nearly everything that can possibly go wrong when installing drush. He then went through a list of handy tasks drush can help with, from the basics of cache clearing and enabling modules to more advanced features like using site aliases for database and file syncs. Ryan also mentioned a blog post where he went into more detail on site aliases.

Between project planning and drush, we ended up with a well-rounded summary of what's involved in making a Drupal site, minus the actual site. After the drush demo, someone made the mistake of asking Ryan about his shell configurations, a topic he can easily talk about for several hours. Fortunately, he was able to limit his answer to several minutes, after which many of us headed down the road for a bit more socializing at Interstate Kitchen and Bar.

Drupal offers a few standard ways of displaying all content: the shortened teaser view is often used on listing pages, and the full default view is always used when visitors hit a node's canonical URL. Customizing the output of these view modes is easy, and modules that display content usually let site builders choose which view mode should be used when outputing them. Unfortunately, Drupal core can't help if you need more than the basics -- say, a 'summary' view mode for nodes, or and 'author info' view mode user accounts.

Everyone seems to need more and better Drupal talent. There are too many instances where projects are delayed, or even turned away or lost because we can't find the people with the proficiency to do the work. Even though high demand for Drupal is a relatively good problem, it is still one that begs for a solution. There's a plethora of training programs (including through DrupalEasy) out there for the self-motivated, tech savvy, Drupal-aware. The issue is, even with the mass of training available and promoted through the community, we still can't fill the gap, especially for the community's long term needs. This dilemma exists for the same reason that we face awareness challenges of the Drupal CMS overall; there is no sizable list of behemoth companies with huge marketing budgets or focused, funded, grand scale efforts to raise awareness outside of the community.

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In this drupal video tutorial, I show you how to create an event registration system. To do so, we rely on the Pay Per Node module. This tutorial will walk you through how to set up Drupal and Ubercart to get the basic functionality going. In the next tutorial, I show you how to make the system a little more user friendly to customers and administrators.

How to Create Event Registrations with Drupal 7 and Ubercart - Advanced Ubercart Sites #8Drupal Planet: Drupal PlanetVideo: Drupal 7UbercartPay Per Node

More about Holly

• Now that we know a little bit about your background and where you’re from, tell us a little bit about what you do now.
• What is your position in the association? What do you do there?
• How long have you been in this position?

DrupalCon

• Exactly four weeks from today, we’ll be finishing up the conference!
• If you’re planning on attending, but haven’t got your tickets yet, the price goes up from $500 to $550 on Friday at midnight!
• Free transit pass!

• iOS app - http://saforian.com/CaseStudies/Drupalcon/ (Download here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/atdrupalcon/id636398190?mt=8)

• What was your experience like at DrupalCon Sydney?

• What are you excited about most for DrupalCon Portland?
• Other events - Where can people find out about the events
  • Trivia night
  • Photo scavenger hunt

Portland

• Where is the best place to eat?
  • pinterest.com/drupalcon
• Where is the best place to drink?
  • Coffee - Stumptown
  • Alibi - Alcohol (Also Karaoke)
  • Upright? - Breweries
• What should those of us who haven’t been before, make sure to do?

If this is what stalking feels like, I pity every women who went through this and much worse -- and in my case, it was fairly mild -- but still very disturbing. So, someone posts an article to the Drupal Planet, encouraging new(er) contributors to not be afraid to approach better known Drupal developers at DrupalCon. That's good... but as usual, the intent and the words used didn't quite match up and what do I know, I am coding quietly in the Drupal room at Linuxfest Northwest when someone walks in wearing a T-shirt with the words "Where is chx so I can shake his hand?" I literally crawled under the table. Do not do this. Do not ever, ever do this. It's cruel, it's disturbing -- it's stalking. To clarify: I am more than OK with someone approaching me at any conference. Wearing a T-shirt like this is not OK, however.

Ps. Later when said person tried to continue this with similar actions and I made quite clear I do not think this is a good joke and I feel uncomfortable, no apology followed nor did the cruel jokes stop.

Smart Trim is a cool module that adds a new formatting option for a Drupal 7 text field. This option provides a more configurable trim setting for teasers and other view modes where you’d like a text field to be automatically shortened.

(Sorry for spamming Drupal Planet with this, but a few people on IRC were saying it might be a good idea for people to get a wider heads-up, given the number of Drupal community hats I wear.)

In a week, we're heading down to Minnesota to pick up our new addition to the family, and so starting May 6 I'll be on maternity leave for 3 months, until ~August 1 (thank you, Acquia!!).

Here's an outline of how that may or may not affect you, and who to talk to instead:

• For Drupal core commits, the wonderful Alex Pott has been brought on board, and is doing a great job of mowing down RTBC patches. I'm sure I'll still be poking around in the queues myself from time to time, as well, as goodness only knows what Drupal 8 could turn into by August. :D
• For more "meta" D8 stuff, as well as general Drupal community-related topics not covered below, reach out to the fabulous xjm, who is holding down the fort on that side of things.
• On the Spark engineering management side of things, the lovely Gábor Hojtsy is holding the reins.
• For Drupal Association stuff, the marvelous Donna Benjamin will handle Secretarial duties during board meetings, and Tatiana has been doing a great job keeping the community appraised on d.o upgrade process.
• On the Drupal[.org] governance side of things, I still have some outstanding todos, which I'm going to try and finish up this week. Dries is the main point of contact about this going forward.
• On Google Summer of Code-related matters, Cary Gordon is leading a BoF discussion at DrupalCon Portland on how to better gear up for next year.
• Speaking of DrupalCon Portland, I unfortunately won't be attending, so please have double the fun for me, ok? :D

Whew! I think that's everything. :) See you all on the other side of parenthood! EEEEE!

Tags: drupaladoption

This is third part of our series on how to create a question and answer website in Drupal. In this tutorial, we would be looking at how we can allow members of the community tag questions they have asked. To achieve this, we would be using the community tags module. The community tags module allows members of community site to tag contents and also track who tagged what and when. In this tutorial we created a vocabulary called tags, and created a new field on the question content type with term refernce using the tags vocabulary we created. Once that was done we then enabled community tagging on the question content type. 

Here is the link to part 1 and part 2 of this series  

In this video tutorial, I introduce you to the Drupal 7 Module Filter module. This module provides us with a nice administration layout for our website's module page. Relying on some ajax, you can easily find, enable and disable the modules on your site. This is definitely a must have if you have a robust site with plenty of modules installed.

Cool Drupal 7 Modules: Module FilterDrupal Planet: Drupal PlanetVideo: Drupal 7Module FilterCool Modules