GVS is now part of Acquia.

Recent Blog Posts

Paying for the plumbing - How can we get better distribution of the costs of open source?

Submitted by Greg on Fri, 2009-09-04 09:42

I just attended a very interesting session at Drupalcon Paris called Paying for the plumbing. It's a panel involving Allie Micka (Advantage Labs), Angie Byron (Lullabot), Karen Stevenson (Lullabot and recently a freelancer), Tiffany Farriss (Palantir relatively new to Drupal but a long lived company), Eric Gunderson (Development Seed).

Some choice quotes on coordination and business of open source

After some introductions and Allie saying that she didn't want to hear the same old tired platitudes (which was a brilliant start to the session) we got into some discussion with the panel and the audience. Here are a few quotes and paraphrases of what people had to say.

Tiffany Farriss of Palantir gave the perspective that we should

Budget in 10% to every project for "patching."

I assume "patching" means communicating with the module maintainer and re-rolling the patch and making it awesome.

Which is a decent point, we do need to kind of just do this as part of our normal business, but that doesn't pay for the big things nor the "plumbing" but just for incremental improvements.

Further, Tiffany said:

Require all your code to be GPL and tell clients you're going to release it and announce it as best you can.

Which is a great point. Drupal.org requires all code hosted there to be licensed GPL Version 2 and later and if your client claims it isn't then there can be big problems for all involved.

Benjamin from Agaric Design Collective said:

We need better coordination tools.

Which is pretty true, and we have a decent tool at Projects Needing Financing. This points out what I think is the real problem of the whole collaboration idea: coordination.

The only way coordination on a feature works for us is when 2 of our customers want the same thing and we do all the work.

New Growing Venture Solutions Offices

Submitted by Greg on Tue, 2009-08-25 09:58

The Growing Venture Solutions offices are on the 2nd floor of the Bolt Factory building at 2nd & Kalamath in Denver.

In hCard format, the address is:

209 Kalamath Street Unit 25

Denver, CO, 80223

United States

Of course you can find it on Google maps.

Getting to the GVS Office

The Bolt Factory is topped by a 7-story red metal tower visible from the highway and Santa Fe/Kalamath. The building is on the northwest corner of W. 2nd Ave. and Kalamath St. which puts it in between the 11th and Osage light rail station and the Alameda light rail station. Either station is served by all of the light rail lines. Bus service is best via Alameda, or Broadway. From the corner of 2nd and Kalamath, the entrance to the building is a half block north on the ramp that fronts the building. From that entrance take the elevator or stairs and cross the second floor plaza toward the back northwest corner. We're in Unit 25, the door is under the stairs to the third floor.

Parking

There is street parking on Kalamath or 2nd or Lipan.

Pictures

Panorama of the western half of the office

Usability Testing of Ubercart and Uc_signup

Submitted by evelyn on Wed, 2009-08-05 19:08

Ezra Glidesgame has been writing a module to integrate the Signup module for managing event registration with the Ubercart e-commerce module: Signup integration for Ubercart (short name: uc_signup). The uc_signup registration process was designed to support a wide variety of use cases (one user potentially signing up multiple other users for different events, in different quantities) while still being easy to use. We wanted to see what users thought of the preliminary uc_signup registration process, so in June we ran a small usability test here at the Growing Venture Solutions office. The test revealed several subtle and interesting findings that applied to the uc_signup module, the Ubercart checkout process, and specific aspects of the client site's configuration.

First, some background on the project

AUSSIE provides professional development in the field of K-12 education. One of their services is to offer workshops around the country, with registration done through their website. Uc_signup is being written to give AUSSIE more control of the look and administration of their sign-up process, and internalize their events management, which is currently being hosted by Eventbrite. The improved Aussie site is scheduled to launch in August.

About our Usability Participants

We recruited 4 participants having the following profile characteristics:

Two men and two women between the ages of 29-36
All with general office experience and good computer proficiency
All use the internet daily, with a range of 3 to 40 hours per week
Internet purchasing comfort level: comfortable to strongly prefer
Three of the participants had previously signed up online for classes or workshops

The Drupal Themer's Book - Review of Front End Drupal

Submitted by Greg on Sun, 2009-07-12 11:52

I just finished reading Front End Drupal (buy on Amazon, companion site) and wanted to share some of my favorite points, some parts that could be enhanced, and some ideas I have for ways to expand it in a future edition. I've known Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Käfer for some time now through the Drupal community and respected their work. So, I was quite interested to see how they would do in book medium: it's some impressive work. In my experience training and writing books, one of the hardest things is picking the right audience for the book and then making sure that your book has support for people above and below the level of your ideal audience. You need sidebars to help explain details on advanced topics and good section titles so that advanced people know when to stop skimming over the things they know and start reading again.

This photo shows a nice screenshot, some helper explanation text, and my next read in the background.

Favorite Parts of Front End Drupal

There are several general things and several specific things that I liked about this book:

They cover not only "Front End Drupal" but also some best practices for Web design and information architecture in general.
Mixed among the details of template files and overrides is solid advice about how to configure Drupal's core and several contributed modules so that a reader who is new to Drupal will learn much more than just theming.

Drupalcamp Colorado 2009 Videos - View of the Camp and People Present

Submitted by Greg on Fri, 2009-07-03 10:13

The folks at SDRNews.com sent Kara Karsten to Drupalcamp Colorado to take video interviews with different folks at the event.

It's a lot of great footage and I hope you'll take the time to watch them.

History of Drupalcamp Colorado

Interview with Greg Knaddison about Growing Venture Solutions and the Camp

Ryan Szrama of Commerce Guys and Ubercart project

Commerce Guys and Ubercart

Chris Fassnacht of TopNotchThemes

TopNotchThemes is a GVS Support Client.

Aaron Winborn of Advomatic Talking About Media in Drupal

Aaron Winborn

Brad Bowman of Aten Design Group Talking About Drupalcamp Colorado

Aten Design Group

Jon Stacey, Google Summer of Code Student and Media Fan

Designing the site: CrackingDrupal.com - How to build a "speaking" navigation

Submitted by evelyn on Tue, 2009-06-23 22:27

Hello - I'm Evelyn and I have recently joined GVS as a designer and usability tester. I have been working as a freelancer for the past seven years, and now that my daughter is entering 1st grade I am excited to be spending more face time with grown-ups!

My first task as a designer with GVS was to design a site for Greg's book: "Cracking Drupal". This was also my first real-world experience theming for Drupal and with some help, it was pretty simple.

I began by chatting with Greg about what he wanted the site to do and how it should look. I also gave him a simple design worksheet to complete with questions such as "Who is your target audience?" and "How do you want people to describe your site?" (If I could ask only one question, this last one would be it.) Greg wanted the site to draw on the cover of the book, and wanted it to be elegant, streamlined and easy to navigate.

Book Cover: As a starting point it was an obvious choice to take the book cover and modify it into the header and footer. I pulled the color palette from the cover as well, and added a burnt orange accent to offset the strong blues and blacks. In general I try to avoid black text on white, so the body copy and some headers are actually a dark blue.

Elegant: I always strive for elegance. By elegance I don't mean just "tasteful, refined or dignified" (Oxford American Dictionary.) For me, elegance in web design is integral to good usability. Even grungy, busy sites, when done well, can be described as elegant. So for Cracking Drupal that meant a clear hierarchy and harmonious color scheme taken from the book.

Drupalcamp Colorado and Ubercamp June 27th and 28th 2009 - Registration & Session Submission Are Open

Submitted by Greg on Thu, 2009-05-21 16:16

I'm not much for boasting, but I will be honest: Drupalcamp Colorado is going to be amazing. You should do everything you can to attend.

Last year we had nearly 100 people together for DrupalCamp. This year the event is combined with an Ubercamp to gaurantee it will rock your socks off. We have space for nearly 400 people, so we hopefully won't have to cap registrations like last year. Did I mention you should come?

What the Heck is a Drupalcamp anyway?

There's some healthy debate in the community about the purpose of Drupalcamp, especially as Drupalcon becomes a bigger and more "corporate" event. One of the goals with Drupalcamp Colorado is to help provide a bit of a middle ground between the grassroots, loosely organized camps and the ultra-organized, corporate Drupalcon. Partially because the "mountain west" is so spread out and far from other places, this camp tends to be a regional event pulling in people from nearby states. We've structured it with up to 3 simultaneous tracks and plenty of space for Birds of a Feather gatherings to support everyone from new-user to hard-core designers/developers.

Registration and Session Submission Are Open

We just opened the camp site for registrations and session submissions. We've got a strong showing of Ubercart session proposals, which makes sense given that this is also an Ubercamp. Session submission is open for about the next 3 weeks. Then we'll have some time for voting, and the final list of sessions will be announced about 2 weeks before the camp itself. Already there is a solid list of compelling sessions from some great presenters.

Create Templates for Quick, Thoughtful Comments using MyWords for Firefox

Submitted by Greg on Mon, 2009-05-11 20:34

I've been involved in a handful of issues on drupal.org. According to a search for issues where I participated, it's about 3,300 issues. That's a lot of typing. A lot of that typing was on duplicate issues where I probably wrote variations on the same words. Unfortunately when I'm feeling rushed through issues I can be a little less friendly to people than is ideal. Fortunately there's a little tool that can help make this less tedious and provide more thoughtful messages to the people who submit these bugs.

MyWords for Firefox

So, you install the MyWords plugin for Firefox, do a little configuration, and you're off!

Here's a quick screencast of how to use and configure the plugin.

Increased Productivity with MyWords for Firefox from Greg Knaddison on Vimeo.

My thanks to Sun for recommending the add-on!

2 comments

GVS Sponsors Drupalcamps in Central America, South America - The Road to Drupalcon South America

Submitted by Greg on Fri, 2009-04-17 17:20

This past spring there was Drupalcon DC, a truly amazing event by all counts. As we debated sponsoring Drupalcon we decided to go a different route: sponsoring the many camps that we hoped would happen in Central and South America this year. It was clear from the DrupalCon South America BOF held in DC that there was a lot of interest from South America to organize Camps as well.

So, given a need and a desire to help grow the community, we've made some great initial contributions towards 4 camps. If there are any other camps in the area that people are trying to plan this year please let us know so we can support your camp.

Drupalcamp Brazil, Drupalcamp Centroamerica

For the Drupalcamp Centroamerica Felix Delattre (xamanu) decided to use the money to provide scholarships to cover transportation and attendance costs for people from around Central America. We are happy that the money will help 2 people attend the camp who otherwise would not be able to: Eduardo Garcia and Isaak Ordoñez. Felix did something right: in it's first year the camp is over 100 attendees.

Modes for Comment Threading For High Interaction Sites

Submitted by Greg on Thu, 2009-04-16 14:13

What are the ways to organize comments on sites that have lots of comments, and threaded comments, and intense debate? How do you deal with the volume of comments?

For some work on the Economist we reviewed a couple of current formats that feel cutting edge to us - after all, if you're the online host of the "severe contest" you'd better have a good way of presenting some of the viewpoints in the contest.

Gawker - Preview, but hide the replies

Gawker has threaded comments and hides the replies inside of a little info bubble. The bubble has a +/- toggle that lets you dive into each thread. The bubble shows the number of replies inside of it and gives you the names of some of the people who participate in the thread. It would be great if it could show names of people based on karma, or my friends or some other relevancy rank.

Slashdot - Tag and Vote on comments, Hide

Slashdot.org has been doing comments and online reputation longer than almost anyone else. They have a system of karma and users above a certain karma get to vote on comments and categorize them as "Insightful," "Funny" or other descriptive terms. They then hide comments below a certain threshold by default and let visitors see comments below a threshold if they want.

Digg - Vote on comments, Alternate layouts

Digg also has voting on comments and then will hide comments with a low ranking by default. It then can show comments threaded, by oldest/newest, by most popular or most controversial. In the default threaded view Digg also will show "6 replies, best has 18 diggs" to give you an indication of the level of quality of the conversation inside of a thread.

GVS projects

Hyperlocal News Installation profile

The Hyperlocal News installation profile is an "internal project" for some of the folks at GVS. Profiles are ways to bundle together Drupal, some contributed modules, and the configuration necessary to make the site actually do something cool. Users are presented with an wizard that sets up...