Planet Drupal

We're excited to announce that Growing Venture Solutions and Drupal Scout have been acquired by Acquia. As a leading provider of cloud and support services for Drupal, it was clear that Acquia provides a unique complement of infrastructure and scalability to Drupal Scout. Following discussions about how best to work together, we decided to join the Acquia team. As a result, several GVS brands and the core GVS team are now part of Acquia. We are really excited for this opportunity.

Plans for GVS brands

In addition to the expert Drupal consulting, security training, security review services that we'll be taking to Acquia, GVS has several spinoff brands, many—but not all—of which are now part of Acquia.

• Mastering Drupal: screencasts and e-books for learning Drupal. The Mastering Drupal brand and content are a great complement to the existing Acquia Library and Acquia training
• UseCOD.com: Branding for the Conference Organizing Distribution. COD will remain a community distribution, and Ezra plans to continue as the project's maintainer. Moving the brand lets us put more marketing muscle behind it for increasing adoption of the platform and Drupal. We've got more details about the future of COD on that site's blog.

In contrast to those projects/brands:

• Certified to Rock will remain an independent project. We are working to establish a broad team of Drupal community members to manage the service. The current CTR team will continue to play a big role in the project. If you are interested in helping to run CTR, read more about the CTR groupie program.

Plans for GVS team

The core GVS team will be joining Acquia.

I was on the "Ecosystem" track session selection team for Drupalcon London, which motivated me to finally do some more analysis on the traditional pre-selection session voting. Specifically, I wanted to compare the votes a session receives against the evaluations submitted after the conference.

By the way, if you have the opportunity, I highly suggest going to a Drupalcon; they are always great events.

Here are some conclusions based on analysis of the evaluation and voting data from DrupalCon Chicago:

• Voting was not a useful predictor of high quality sessions!
• The pre-selected sessions did not fare better in terms of evaluation than the other sessions (though they may have served a secondary goal of getting attendees to sign up earlier).
• We should re-evaluate how we do panels. They tend to get lower scores in the evaluation.
• The number of evaluations submitted increased 10% compared to San Francisco, which seems great (Larry Garfield theorizes it is related to the mobile app, I think there are a lot of factors involved)

Is voting a good way to judge conference session submissions?

Drupalcon has historically used a voting and committee system for session selection that is pretty common. This is also the default workflow for sites based on the Conference Organizing Distribution.

Typical system:

1. Users register on the site
2. They propose sessions (and usually there is a session submission cutoff date before voting)
3. Voting begins: people (sometimes registered users, sometimes limited to attendees) can vote on their favorite sessions
4. During steps 2 and 3, a session selection committee is encouraging submissions and contacting the session proposers to improve their session descriptions

We're excited to announce that COD Beta1 has been released and is loaded with great new features, including:

• Enhanced conference administration menu
• Automated sponsorship sales
• Birds of a Feather scheduling tool
• Automated speaker confirmation and contact
• More granular control over the event registration workflow
• Ability to collect profile information for free events
• Session editing for multiple speakers
• Improved attendee check-in
• Better Ubercart reporting for purchased registrations
• Integration with RegOnline and Etouches

You can read more about these features on UseCOD.com.

Drupal is growing in complexity and growing simply in sheer numbers. We need more tools to help people manage the information overload and find the best voices in our community quickly. We should build dynamic tools to empower community members to join in and share their voices (if those voices are valuable) rather than walled gardens that keep people out. I believe voting, richer profiles, and the hot content are steps to help enable that vision. That said, the implementation has to match the community values. Below I've laid out the story of how some improvements to Groups.Drupal.org were made, provide data behind some of those improvements, and ask some questions so we can keep refining them.

At Drupalcon San Francisco there was a sprint for groups.drupal.org features where Josh Koenig and Brian Gilbert helped out add some new features. In particular we added voting on nodes & comments and we added a "hot" page which incorporates several elements to determine which content on the site is interesting in the last week.

I wanted to look back on the past year to think about these changes and whether or not they are an improvement.

Hot Content: G.d.o is a differentiated piece of $#!@$&

Drupalcamp Colorado 2011, co-hosted with Commerce Camp, is shaping up to be another amazing event.

In 2010 we had 312 people registered, delicious breakfast and lunches, 2 parties, all for less than $50 in attendance fee. For 2011, we have all that and more. You may consider registering before reading the rest...but if you still need to be convinced:

Drupal Camp Colorado: An Amazing Value in 2011

Session submission is closed and session selection is under way, but BOFs will be managed online in the lovely Conference Organizing Distribution based BOF manager which was used for Drupalcon Chicago and is being enhanced as it makes it's way into COD.

And the sessions accepted are looking amazing. There's a good mix of the best-of Drupalcon Chicago combined with what will certainly become favorites at Drupalcon London.

The content team has made sure that we cover all skill levels this year. Some particularly new user friendly options include:

• Pre-camp training on Friday the 10th from Lullabot and Chapter 3 will give you a 1 day trip forward a few levels in your Drupal journey.

Do you know the exact state of the content in your large Drupal site? Thinking of revamping, redesigning or upgrading your site? If you answered 'no!' to the first question or 'yes!' to the second question, it's time for content audit.

In this blog post, I cover the what, why, who, when, where and how's of content audits. I've conducted a few small content audits, and I'm leading a much bigger one, on Drupal.org.

What the heck is a content audit?

The idea behind a content inventory is to determine what content you have and where it lives (the quantitative survey). The content audit is qualitative, where you assess whether it's any good or not, and what needs to change to improve it.

Traditionally, content inventories are compiled manually, one page of your site at a time, in some sort of spreadsheet. The content inventory should also include PDFs, images, videos, and utility pages such as checkout and log in pages. Content should be inventoried regardless of whether it's hosted on your site or externally. If it's seen or heard within in your content, it needs to be held accountable.

Sites with 5000+ nodes could be auditing using a sampling of nodes that represent each content type, but what if you miss some glaring errors? In those instances, you could provide a small link to all site visitors who can flag the page as needing work (this can be done easily enough in Drupal, using a variety of approaches).

Dave Terry from Drupal development shop Mediacurrent spoke to GVS about Mediacurrent's latest Conference Organizing Distribution site implementation for the Pegaworld 2011 conference. You can read the whole interview at UseCod.com.

A routine branding exercise went awry early Friday in Brooklyn when Growing Venture Solutions performed a "mind map" exercise to aid in the creation of logos for two of their flagship products, the Scout hosted sercurity review service and COD, the Conference Organizing Distribution for Drupal.

"Connecting to the unintellectualized, visceral, gut responses we get from each logo helps us maximize branding potential so that we can produce marketing collateral that's sure to engage members of our target market segments, helping them to connect to each brand at an emotional level, which results in increased conversions" said social media expert Robert H. McJellyPants. He added, "Tachyon converter beam subspace electron resonance tuning."

Unfortunately, while exercise participants were discussing their friendly, communal associations with schools of smiling fish in the COD logo, as well as some of the more stern, defensive associations evoked by the Scout owl logo, the owl took flight and picked up the fish, instantly crushing the fish's vital internal organs with its beak.

Illustration by Carl Wiedemann.

Needless to say, participants were horrified at the sudden attack by the owl but impressed by its swift, decisive action in the face of what the owl saw as a potential security risk to its personal website, SupercuteCatsWearingWigsandSmallDressesTailoredEspciallyforCatsNoThisisnotajoke.com/website.

GVS has had a busy December and great start to 2011!

NYC and Denver Drupal 7 release parties

The NYC Drupal 7 Launch Party, hosted by Growing Venture Solutions, Treehouse Agency, and ThinkDrop took place on January 7, 2011.

We were delighted at the turnout and enthusiasm for Drupal 7!

Happy crowd!

The speakers were Rob Purdie (Economist), Todd Ricker (New York Stock Exchange) and Thomas Turnbull (Zagat). The organizers were Lisa Rex, Claudina Sarahe, Ezra Gildesgame, Amy Cham and Ben Jeavons.

Here's the scenario: Someone semi-familiar with Drupal is building a site. They need to find a module to meet one of the site's requirements. Since there are over 5000 modules for Drupal 6, it must exist, right?

Let's assume they don't know who to ask, so they start researching. To evaluate contributed Drupal modules, the first resource they will use is the module's project node on Drupal.org.

Most important elements of Drupal project pages

What are site builders looking for when evaluating a module? I asked Drupallers via Twitter what they look at specifically and got the following: