Drupal Related Items

Watching "Media Element - Drupal 7 Audio & Video" by @mustardseedinc: http://t.co/0PgFlqho

Watching "Media Element - Drupal 7 Audio & Video" by @mustardseedinc: http://t.co/0PgFlqho

Drupal.org is great to maintain a solid number of issues but all of us trying to wrangle a huge number of issues need way better tools to have overviews of what is going on and how is work structured. We need to be able to help new people join in quick, let them have an overview of current tasks and also on the place of tasks in a bigger picture. So we need to have the bigger picture documented with the possibility for people to dive in on demand and we need to keep it always up to date and relevant.

The Drupal.org issue queue is great to see a status of issues, but it is not good at all in maintaining relations and especially bad at providing support for hierarchy and in-context structural information. All we get is basically a list of issues like this one: http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?issue_tags=D8MI

Recap of predecessors

Different people got to different approaches to these problems. Here are some previous solutions that Jacine and I looked at and tried and the reasons I think they did not work the way I wanted them to work for me and people working with me.

1. Documentation pages. Jacine did a superb work in the HTML5 initiative collecting tasks into documentation pages with explanation on how can one contribute. One such page can be seen at http://drupal.org/node/1183606. This is great for getting some overview of the tasks at hand, but there is not a lot of metainformation on the issues and it needs manual editing to keep up to date. It cannot be dynamic in itself to show current tasks. Regardless, the documentation tree for the initiative (starting at http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/drupal-core/html5) works well for the people working on it as far as I've heard. I was just looking for a more dynamic solution.

2. Issue trees. I started to make up an issue tree for the Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative back in August (in preparation of the London code sprint), so there would be an overview of the perts of the initiative. Turned out there are so many levels required that META-issues needed a META-META issue (http://drupal.org/node/1260534). Many people don't know what's a meta issue, let alone meta-meta. Also, again, the hierarchy (up-down) requires manual maintenance, and gradually got outdated as work focused on patches instead of maintaining the whole structure.

2a. Issue tree visualization. To make the issue tree more friendly for people I talked to some of my great Hungarian Drupaler pals who went on and created the Issue tree module to visualize the tree represented by the data from above. See http://drupal.org/project/issue_tree. Unfortunately this did not get much support for deployment on drupal.org and the topic pages efforts are in full force to propose something much bigger and better (http://groups.drupal.org/node/144584) so this has fallen through the cracks.

3. Mindmap. So given the issue tree did not have a chance for deployment and I wanted to provide an overview of the initiative, the initiative mindmap was born (and posted on the META-META issue at http://drupal.org/node/1260534). This was also plagued by the data disconnect. When tasks changed the map needed to be updated. Current tasks were only marked here, not on the issues themselves, so I need to manually keep a list of current issues updated elsewhere. This was/is a more up to date version of the structure compared to the issue tree, but is/was still lot of work to update and lacking features like pulling out current tasks or helping people find tasks that need testing or are easier to do.

Enter the Rocketship!

So in frustration of not having a good overview on all tasks even myself and not being able to sleep due to that frustration, the ambitiously labeled "codename rocketship" was born. Experience for yourself at http://hojtsy.hu/d8mi.

Basically rocketship comes from the idea that we need structure and higher level organization for huge sets of issues while at the same time be able to have an overview of both metadata on the issues and current state. It is a combination of all things I liked about the HTML5 book solution with a lot more automation based on metadata exclusively pulled from drupal.org. The initiative hub consist of a hierarchic book at its core, where each book page can have a taxonomy term name specified. If a term is specified, the issue nodes tagged with that term are pulled and sorted into 6 groups based on their status. For the first version I lumped "active" and "needs work" for example under a "To do" label, and did some more complex mangling to sort backport issues into a group as well (i.e. issues that were worked on for Drupal 8 before but are being worked on for Drupal 7 or 6 now).

Pulling issues based on taxonomy terms lets us create a page for example, that does the same sorted overview for current focus issues (D8MI and sprint tag at once, again an idea lifted from Jacine): http://hojtsy.hu/d8mi/current-top-priority-tasks

Then based on "lower level" tags we can dive into only the issues that deal with converting to "langcode" from "language" in schemas and APIs at http://hojtsy.hu/d8mi/migrate-schemas-and-apis-langcode for example.

We can also tag things for different areas, so they show up in different areas of the structure tree in their respective place.

Then when looking at let's say the base language issues (http://hojtsy.hu/d8mi/base-language-features), you can see I color coded the critical and major issues as well as the current focus issues. I also took liberty to mark the "Needs tests" tag with a distinctive color, so people looking to be able to help with that can spot those easily. I can imagine a couple other key tags can get colors, but we should got go absolutely overboard in that. An issue board with rainbow effects is not really useful.

Technology background

The feature works with a local cache of all issues tagged with D8MI with all the information scraped from Drupal.org (given no API available) and stored in local nodes. While that is not a great long term solution, I'm focused on improving Drupal 8's multilingual capabilities, so I tried to get to good results fast. The local cache of issues is updated every hour, so drupal.org should not be hammered at all. Similar issue status overviews are likely possible on drupal.org, I'd love to work on that given resources, however that is probably not going to happen with me personally for another 1.5 years or so given my focus on Drupal 8.

Drupal 8 Initiatives(author unknown)

Drupal.org is great to maintain a solid number of issues but all of us trying to wrangle a huge number of issues need way better tools to have overviews of what is going on and how is work structured. We need to be able to help new people join in quick, let them have an overview of current tasks and also on the place of tasks in a bigger picture. So we need to have the bigger picture documented with the possibility for people to dive in on demand and we need to keep it always up to date and relevant.

The Drupal.org issue queue is great to see a status of issues, but it is not good at all in maintaining relations and especially bad at providing support for hierarchy and in-context structural information. All we get is basically a list of issues like this one: http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?issue_tags=D8MI

Recap of predecessors

Different people got to different approaches to these problems. Here are some previous solutions that Jacine and I looked at and tried and the reasons I think they did not work the way I wanted them to work for me and people working with me.

1. Documentation pages. Jacine did a superb work in the HTML5 initiative collecting tasks into documentation pages with explanation on how can one contribute. One such page can be seen at http://drupal.org/node/1183606. This is great for getting some overview of the tasks at hand, but there is not a lot of metainformation on the issues and it needs manual editing to keep up to date. It cannot be dynamic in itself to show current tasks. Regardless, the documentation tree for the initiative (starting at http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/drupal-core/html5) works well for the people working on it as far as I've heard. I was just looking for a more dynamic solution.

2. Issue trees. I started to make up an issue tree for the Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative back in August (in preparation of the London code sprint), so there would be an overview of the perts of the initiative. Turned out there are so many levels required that META-issues needed a META-META issue (http://drupal.org/node/1260534). Many people don't know what's a meta issue, let alone meta-meta. Also, again, the hierarchy (up-down) requires manual maintenance, and gradually got outdated as work focused on patches instead of maintaining the whole structure.

2a. Issue tree visualization. To make the issue tree more friendly for people I talked to some of my great Hungarian Drupaler pals who went on and created the Issue tree module to visualize the tree represented by the data from above. See http://drupal.org/project/issue_tree. Unfortunately this did not get much support for deployment on drupal.org and the topic pages efforts are in full force to propose something much bigger and better (http://groups.drupal.org/node/144584) so this has fallen through the cracks.

3. Mindmap. So given the issue tree did not have a chance for deployment and I wanted to provide an overview of the initiative, the initiative mindmap was born (and posted on the META-META issue at http://drupal.org/node/1260534). This was also plagued by the data disconnect. When tasks changed the map needed to be updated. Current tasks were only marked here, not on the issues themselves, so I need to manually keep a list of current issues updated elsewhere. This was/is a more up to date version of the structure compared to the issue tree, but is/was still lot of work to update and lacking features like pulling out current tasks or helping people find tasks that need testing or are easier to do.

Enter the Rocketship!

So in frustration of not having a good overview on all tasks even myself and not being able to sleep due to that frustration, the ambitiously labeled "codename rocketship" was born. Experience for yourself at http://hojtsy.hu/d8mi.

Basically rocketship comes from the idea that we need structure and higher level organization for huge sets of issues while at the same time be able to have an overview of both metadata on the issues and current state. It is a combination of all things I liked about the HTML5 book solution with a lot more automation based on metadata exclusively pulled from drupal.org. The initiative hub consist of a hierarchic book at its core, where each book page can have a taxonomy term name specified. If a term is specified, the issue nodes tagged with that term are pulled and sorted into 6 groups based on their status. For the first version I lumped "active" and "needs work" for example under a "To do" label, and did some more complex mangling to sort backport issues into a group as well (i.e. issues that were worked on for Drupal 8 before but are being worked on for Drupal 7 or 6 now).

Pulling issues based on taxonomy terms lets us create a page for example, that does the same sorted overview for current focus issues (D8MI and sprint tag at once, again an idea lifted from Jacine): http://hojtsy.hu/d8mi/current-top-priority-tasks

Then based on "lower level" tags we can dive into only the issues that deal with converting to "langcode" from "language" in schemas and APIs at http://hojtsy.hu/d8mi/migrate-schemas-and-apis-langcode for example.

We can also tag things for different areas, so they show up in different areas of the structure tree in their respective place.

Then when looking at let's say the base language issues (http://hojtsy.hu/d8mi/base-language-features), you can see I color coded the critical and major issues as well as the current focus issues. I also took liberty to mark the "Needs tests" tag with a distinctive color, so people looking to be able to help with that can spot those easily. I can imagine a couple other key tags can get colors, but we should got go absolutely overboard in that. An issue board with rainbow effects is not really useful.

Technology background

The feature works with a local cache of all issues tagged with D8MI with all the information scraped from Drupal.org (given no API available) and stored in local nodes. While that is not a great long term solution, I'm focused on improving Drupal 8's multilingual capabilities, so I tried to get to good results fast. The local cache of issues is updated every hour, so drupal.org should not be hammered at all. Similar issue status overviews are likely possible on drupal.org, I'd love to work on that given resources, however that is probably not going to happen with me personally for another 1.5 years or so given my focus on Drupal 8.

Drupal 8 Initiatives(author unknown)

This screencast covers the following topics:

• Rearranging the node edit form with Panels.
• Some words about how the render arrays in Drupal 7 makes this possible.

5m Publication date  January 27, 2012 - 6:00am (author unknown)

This screencast covers the following topics:

• Rearranging the node edit form with Panels.
• Some words about how the render arrays in Drupal 7 makes this possible.

5m Publication date  January 27, 2012 - 6:00am (author unknown)

A good introductory #video on how to transform a design into a #Drupal Themes http://t.co/s1mDZK9f

A good introductory #video on how to transform a design into a #Drupal Themes http://t.co/s1mDZK9f

It’s only been a few weeks since the Palantir team returned from DrupalCon London, but already we’re starting to gear up for DrupalCon Denver, which will be held from March 19-23, 2012. The theme of this year’s conference is “Collaborative Publishing for Every Device”, which fits in perfectly with much of the work that we’ve been doing over the past year and a half.

John Albin Wilkins and Dave Reid have already been confirmed as two of the conference’s featured speakers; a number of other Palantiri have also proposed sessions across a variety of tracks. As a sponsor of DrupalCon Denver, we’ll also be participating in Day Stage sessions and have a presence on the exhibit hall floor.

We encourage you to take a look at these proposals and provide your feedback before November 14 both in the “Rate This Proposal” section and in the comments section. While ratings only make up a small part of the DrupalCon session selection process, it’s important for track chairs and conference organizers to hear from the community when making their decisions:

Business and Strategy

Managing Drupal Development Teams
In this session, Ken Rickard will cover strategies for keeping development teams engaged, effective and efficient.

Lessons Learned: Open Source Contributions - A Case Study of Workbench
Using the development of Workbench as a case study, Colleen Carroll and Robin Barre will talk about how to make open source contributions in a way that focuses on business strategy, sustainability, and community involvement.

Nonprofit, Government & Education

Mystery Case Study: Preserving a Legacy and Inspiring Social Change
This case study session will take you behind-the-scenes of an ambitious Drupal project to preserve the legacy of one of the most significant historical figures of the 20th Century and help inspire non-violent social change and equality around the world.

Site Building

Customizing Workbench
Bec White and Steve Persch will conduct this hands-on demonstration of Workbench and its capabilities, covering both basic installation and configuration tasks as well as more advanced customization options.

Mobile

Managing Mobile Design Projects
This session will explore the different ways of approaching mobile design projects by walking through the process behind designing and developing various real-life mobile apps and responsive design websites.

Coding and Development

The Tools of the Trade-Off
Larry Garfield will examine the relationships between some of the main aspects of software architecture, such as Performance, Scalability, Learnability, Modularity, and Testability, and how to strike a balance between them.

The New Drupal Framework
Larry Garfield and Node One’s Greg Dunlap will talk about the core initiatives they’ve been working on for Drupal 8, and some of the upcoming changes that will fundamentally change the way that the framework operates.

Design and User Experience

Recovering Print Designers: Making the Transition from Print to Web
Michael Mesker and Patrick Grady will talk about how print designers can effectively translate their skills to the Web, and the opportunities offered by the medium.

The majority of selected sessions will be announced in early December, and the final schedule will be posted in late January. We’ll be posting more about our DrupalCon Denver plans in the coming months; in the meantime, we hope you’ll consider buying a ticket and seeing us there!

Image courtesy of the Drupal Association. Some rights reserved.

(author unknown)

It’s only been a few weeks since the Palantir team returned from DrupalCon London, but already we’re starting to gear up for DrupalCon Denver, which will be held from March 19-23, 2012. The theme of this year’s conference is “Collaborative Publishing for Every Device”, which fits in perfectly with much of the work that we’ve been doing over the past year and a half.

John Albin Wilkins and Dave Reid have already been confirmed as two of the conference’s featured speakers; a number of other Palantiri have also proposed sessions across a variety of tracks. As a sponsor of DrupalCon Denver, we’ll also be participating in Day Stage sessions and have a presence on the exhibit hall floor.

We encourage you to take a look at these proposals and provide your feedback before November 14 both in the “Rate This Proposal” section and in the comments section. While ratings only make up a small part of the DrupalCon session selection process, it’s important for track chairs and conference organizers to hear from the community when making their decisions:

Business and Strategy

Managing Drupal Development Teams
In this session, Ken Rickard will cover strategies for keeping development teams engaged, effective and efficient.

Lessons Learned: Open Source Contributions - A Case Study of Workbench
Using the development of Workbench as a case study, Colleen Carroll and Robin Barre will talk about how to make open source contributions in a way that focuses on business strategy, sustainability, and community involvement.

Nonprofit, Government & Education

Mystery Case Study: Preserving a Legacy and Inspiring Social Change
This case study session will take you behind-the-scenes of an ambitious Drupal project to preserve the legacy of one of the most significant historical figures of the 20th Century and help inspire non-violent social change and equality around the world.

Site Building

Customizing Workbench
Bec White and Steve Persch will conduct this hands-on demonstration of Workbench and its capabilities, covering both basic installation and configuration tasks as well as more advanced customization options.

Mobile

Managing Mobile Design Projects
This session will explore the different ways of approaching mobile design projects by walking through the process behind designing and developing various real-life mobile apps and responsive design websites.

Coding and Development

The Tools of the Trade-Off
Larry Garfield will examine the relationships between some of the main aspects of software architecture, such as Performance, Scalability, Learnability, Modularity, and Testability, and how to strike a balance between them.

The New Drupal Framework
Larry Garfield and Node One’s Greg Dunlap will talk about the core initiatives they’ve been working on for Drupal 8, and some of the upcoming changes that will fundamentally change the way that the framework operates.

Design and User Experience

Recovering Print Designers: Making the Transition from Print to Web
Michael Mesker and Patrick Grady will talk about how print designers can effectively translate their skills to the Web, and the opportunities offered by the medium.

The majority of selected sessions will be announced in early December, and the final schedule will be posted in late January. We’ll be posting more about our DrupalCon Denver plans in the coming months; in the meantime, we hope you’ll consider buying a ticket and seeing us there!

Image courtesy of the Drupal Association. Some rights reserved.

(author unknown)

A quick and simple guide to get Drupal 7 and Apache Solr version 3.4 or higher running on your local development machine! For the ones that have been resistant in trying out Apache Solr. This is your chance! If you are running an OSX or Unix machine you could be running Apache Solr in 5 minutes.
Follow these simple steps and you will become a Solr Master very soon!
This guide has been made for unix and mac users. Windows users can probably use the same guide except for the example folders. If you are using Search API most of these steps are applicable to that project as well.

1. Download the Apache Solr 7.x-1.x-dev module from the Apachesolr module and place it in your drupal folder for contributed modules. Typically this is sites/all/contrib
2. Enable ApacheSolr and ApacheSolr Search modules in admin/build/modules
3. Download Apache Solr http://apache.megamobile.be//lucene/solr/3.4.0/apache-solr-3.4.0.zip
4. Unpack it somewhere outside your drupal installation and outside your web root/folder. Suggestion would be ~/Servers/apache-solr-3.4
5. Go to sites/all/contrib/apachesolr/solr-conf and copy all files to ~/Servers/apache-solr-3.4/example/solr/conf
6. In ~/Servers/apache-solr-3.4/example/solr/conf you can remove schema.xml and rename schema-solr3x.xml to schema.xml
7. Open your command prompt and do cd ~/Servers/apache-solr-3.4/example
8. Type the following command to start the Apache Solr service java -jar start.jar
9. Test your solr server admin interface by visiting http://localhost:8983/solr/admin
10. Go to admin/config/search/apachesolr/settings And click on edit. Verify if the url http://localhost:8983/solr/ is correctly entered and click ok
11. If you want Facets you should download Facet API and enable it. When this is done you can go to admin/config/search/apachesolr/facets and enable the facets you'd want
12. Security

    Careful because Solr comes unprotected. If you'd like to run Solr in a more permanent basis I would recommend to run it on Tomcat as described in my other guide http://www.nickveenhof.be/blog/setting-drupal-6-apache-solr-tomcat-6-and... and put an IP-filter in front of it.

Source original pdf : http://drupal.org/node/1332144

nick.veenhof

A quick and simple guide to get Drupal 7 and Apache Solr version 3.4 or higher running on your local development machine! For the ones that have been resistant in trying out Apache Solr. This is your chance! If you are running an OSX or Unix machine you could be running Apache Solr in 5 minutes.
Follow these simple steps and you will become a Solr Master very soon!
This guide has been made for unix and mac users. Windows users can probably use the same guide except for the example folders. If you are using Search API most of these steps are applicable to that project as well.

1. Download the Apache Solr 7.x-1.x-dev module from the Apachesolr module and place it in your drupal folder for contributed modules. Typically this is sites/all/contrib
2. Enable ApacheSolr and ApacheSolr Search modules in admin/build/modules
3. Download Apache Solr http://apache.megamobile.be//lucene/solr/3.4.0/apache-solr-3.4.0.zip
4. Unpack it somewhere outside your drupal installation and outside your web root/folder. Suggestion would be ~/Servers/apache-solr-3.4
5. Go to sites/all/contrib/apachesolr/solr-conf and copy all files to ~/Servers/apache-solr-3.4/example/solr/conf
6. In ~/Servers/apache-solr-3.4/example/solr/conf you can remove schema.xml and rename schema-solr3x.xml to schema.xml
7. Open your command prompt and do cd ~/Servers/apache-solr-3.4/example
8. Type the following command to start the Apache Solr service java -jar start.jar
9. Test your solr server admin interface by visiting http://localhost:8983/solr/admin
10. Go to admin/config/search/apachesolr/settings And click on edit. Verify if the url http://localhost:8983/solr/ is correctly entered and click ok
11. If you want Facets you should download Facet API and enable it. When this is done you can go to admin/config/search/apachesolr/facets and enable the facets you'd want
12. Security

    Careful because Solr comes unprotected. If you'd like to run Solr in a more permanent basis I would recommend to run it on Tomcat as described in my other guide http://www.nickveenhof.be/blog/setting-drupal-6-apache-solr-tomcat-6-and... and put an IP-filter in front of it.

Source original pdf : http://drupal.org/node/1332144

nick.veenhof

Start:  2011-11-15 23:55 UTC Drupalcamp or Regional Summit Organizers:  jalama dougvann chriswgross mradcliffe nrambeck

The deadline to sign-up for Drupal Camp Ohio is coming fast. Tuesday, November 15th is the last day to sign-up and guarantee a spot. You can sign-up on the web site at http://drupalcampohio.org/register.

Also, the submission the deadline for submitting a session proposal is Monday, November 20th. Don't be shy about submitting a session, anything from a case study to talking about using your favorite module.

The event itself will take place Saturday December 3rd in the 4H Building on the The Ohio State University Campus.

Look forward to seeing you there!

--Drupal Camp Ohio Team

Kentuckyjalama

Start:  2011-11-15 23:55 UTC Drupalcamp or Regional Summit Organizers:  jalama dougvann chriswgross mradcliffe nrambeck

The deadline to sign-up for Drupal Camp Ohio is coming fast. Tuesday, November 15th is the last day to sign-up and guarantee a spot. You can sign-up on the web site at http://drupalcampohio.org/register.

Also, the submission the deadline for submitting a session proposal is Monday, November 20th. Don't be shy about submitting a session, anything from a case study to talking about using your favorite module.

The event itself will take place Saturday December 3rd in the 4H Building on the The Ohio State University Campus.

Look forward to seeing you there!

--Drupal Camp Ohio Team

Kentuckyjalama