Planet Drupal

Yesterday was the Denver Drupal User Group Meetup. In the holiday spirit, we decided to do something a bit different - DrupalGames. It all started with a conversation in our local IRC channel, #drupal-colorado. After some discussions about possible rules and game play, we decided on taking some inspiration from the Food Network's Chopped TV show.

The evening started the same as always, with beer and pizza provided by Aten Design Group. We had attendees introduce themselves by name and drupal.org user id. We took this information to create the teams - spreading out the veterans and those who joined drupal.org last week equally. We ended up with 5 teams each with 4-5 team members.

Drupal-games rules

• Each team was assigned three random modules from a hand-selected list of about 20.
• Teams were then given a little over an hour to find a creative way of combining those modules into a functioning site.
• You are allowed to download any additional modules, but the three selected modules must be the focal point of the site.

At the end of the hour, teams presented their creations to the group. Most teams ended up writing a few lines of custom code. It was really quite amazing to see how each team combined the three modules creatively.

Did you see, the Chicago DrupalCon website launched!? After conducting an open RFP process the Drupal Association hired us to build the site, with Palantir.net handling theming and content. It's been fun working on this project since it's so important to the community to create a solid, reusable platform for future conferences. We're working towards that with Drupal's Conference Organizing Distribution (or COD).

We want to give the Drupal community some insight into how the site was built, why some decisions were made, and get your feedback on which features should be moved back into COD.

What is Conference Organizing Distribution (COD)?

COD is an install profile and set of modules and features that make it easy to build robust conference websites. COD is currently in Alpha2, and already provides features such as:

• Rich session submission workflow
• Themeable schedule grid
• Personal session schedules
• A system for collecting sponsor information and displaying it on the site
• A smooth registration and checkout workflow

Several DrupalCamp sites have been built on COD, as well as a non-Drupal conference. usecod.com has COD news, list of sites built on COD and the the entire downloadable COD package.

DrupalCon Chicago uses many of the features from the COD Support suite of modules, and building upon those features made it easier for the teams to focus on the features and design that makes the Chicago2011 site unique, rather than starting by re-building the same features as other conference sites.

Monday, October 18, 2010 was a historic day for Drupal when the updated code and Bluecheese theme were launched on Drupal.org. The Redesign project began a couple years ago, and its success always depended on the dedication of active volunteers.

I got involved with the redesign when I volunteered to "help with QA" in June 2009. I must have shown some initiative or something, because by September 2009 I was assisting Kieran Lal with project management duties, and Chris Strahl pitched in to help us in early 2010.

My sincere appreciation goes out to everyone who made this launch happen, particularly the infrastructure team, our awesome contract team, the Bluecheese contributors, and my fellow project managers, Kieran and Chris.

Not Your Typical Project

What does it mean to be a project manager on a major volunteer-driven site redesign?

First of all, this was not your typical project, or project management gig. When there's no pay, no budget, no schedule, it means very little can be controlled but everything still has to get done!

I look back at the project and think of it terms of phases. In Phase 1, we were relying entirely on volunteer implementers, infrastructure folks and others. Those were difficult times. There were lows. We were doing the best we could to move things forward but without the technical leadership we needed ("Please, just tell me how this should be done!").

In Phase 2, the Drupal Association decided to fund a significant amount of money to clear the blockers and get the redesigned site live. Not long after this, I joined GVS (June 2010), and one of our company benefits is that time spent on normal work tasks creates 20% paid time to work on Drupal community tasks and/or training. At one point, my "available community time" was negative 107 hours. Thankfully, my awesome teammates allowed this.

This year's European Drupal conference has sadly come and gone. Ezra Gildesgame, Ben Jeavons, Lisa Rex and Carl Weidemann were in Copenhagen representing Growing Venture Solutions. Here are a few of our highlights. Links to the videos will be added when they are available.

Theme Preprocess Functions

Carl presented Theme Preprocess Functions: an Introduction, where he showed a packed room how to bring and flexibility into the hands of the themer. Preprocess functions are a key component of Drupal theming and when first learned, open up a whole new world of possibility. Carl received some positive feedback on the session and hopes to continue to give it at future conferences, adapting it to stay current with future versions of Drupal.

COD (Conference Organizing Distribution)

Ezra (our COD ringleader) and Ben co-presented Building Conference & Event Websites in Drupal with COD, with Lisa there to lend support. COD is a Drupal distrubution for building event websites.

Drupalcamp Atlanta recently launched their new site for the 2010 Camp. I reviewed some of their features and found it to be a solid site. As the GVS team increases our focus on selling events with Drupal, I wanted to hear more about the backend of the site. So, I got in touch with Brent Ratliff who was the lead developer on the site, to find out how the site was built.

Adding Signups and Payment to an Event Site: UC Signup

In 2009, the site was a standard build relying mostly on Views and content types. For 2010 they needed all of the features from the previous year but also needed to charge an entry fee for the event, for individual sponsorships, as well as the ability to submit and vote on sessions. The Atlanta Drupal Users Group decided to base their 2010 site on the acclaimed 2009 Drupalcamp LA site that was released as a zip file. The LA code, updated with new module releases, handled the voting, some nice Views, helpful theme functions, context, and some of the "attendee logic," but not the e-commerce portion. Brent was familiar with using the UC Node Checkout module for building an event site, but ultimately decided to go with the Ubercart Signup integration module along with Rules and custom hooks to handle workflow. UC_Signup allows them to collect profile information from users during checkout and helps keep track of attendees using the Signup module. They also grant roles to users based on which products they have purchased.

We are driving ourselves crazy, folks. Choosing modules is really hard. And it's only getting harder on enterprise Drupal sites (and enterprise just means big teams and with big sites with big requirements).

A recent conversation on twitter started by Drupal rock star Katherine Bailey shows how module selection on a big site can drive you crazy:

So, today I'm going to lay out some ideas I've found for reducing the madness: choosing good modules both as an individual and as a member of an enterprise Drupal site. Of course the enterprise practices build on the set of guidelines for an individual site builder. I'd love to get feedback on other techniques people have used for module selection in big team, big site, enterprise environments.

Earlier this year we supported the IxDA in launching a new version of their IxDA.org site. One of the many interesting new features of this site is the ability to sort content by "hotness". The goal of this tool is to create a list of interesting content on the site. Their analytics show them that most people who are involved in the site visit it at least twice a month. So, they wanted a system to highlight content over the last two to three weeks. Enter the radioactivity module.

Radioactivity Module for Drupal

The Radioactivity module works on the concept of adding energy to a piece of content which then "decays" (or diminishes) with a particular half-life. The exact behavior is up to the site administrator, but on IxDA.org we originally set it up with values roughly similar to:

• Posting content adds a lot of energy so that the hotness favors recent items.
• Commenting on a post adds some energy
• Voting up adds a bit of energy, voting down subtracts some energy
• Favoriting a post adds some energy as well

We've got a few other elements that affect energy to help offset any potential gaming.

We set the half-life for decay to 15 days. So, if a piece of content gets posted and 3 comments and 2 vote ups and 1 favorite with 100 views on the first day it will have about 500 units of energy. If it gets no new energy, it would decay down to 250 units of energy after 15 days, and then down to 125 after 30 days and so on. Eventually the energy and decay are really small and for efficiency the module simply deletes all records with less than 2 units of energy.

Carl, Ezra, Lisa, and I will be at DrupalCon Copenhagen later this month. We're giving a handful of sessions and running a training. So, if you're in Copenhagen on August 23rd and interested in getting security training, for identifying and fixing common security risks on your site, join us! Check out Security: Process, code & hands-on training to signup.

Our Sessions at Drupalcon

• The Future of Drupal.org
• Theme Preprocess Functions: an Introduction
• On the Importance of Done: Drupal & Scrum at the Economist
• Views: The Key to the Drupal Castle
• Drupal Security - Configuration & Process

Drupal Security Paper update

Last week we published a minor update to the Drupal Security Paper, a report on the state of Drupal security and how it addresses security risks and concerns. We expanded some of the Security Advisory analysis data and made a few minor corrections. If you have not read it, now is a great time to take a few minutes and give it a read.

Last week at DrupalCon SF we released the Drupal Security White Paper on drupalsecurityreport.org. The paper has been under development for the last several months and we worked hard to complete it in time for DrupalCon.

Addressing ongoing questions about Drupal security, the paper analyzes the Security Team's Security Advisories and discusses how Drupal 6 and 7 address common and critical security risks, including those of the OWASP Top Ten.

We couldn't have done it without the help of our sponsors, including Cydeck and Examiner.com among others, and without the help of our reviewers. Thank you!

If you're evaluating Drupal for use on your site, this report is for you. Or, if you're just curious to know more about Drupal and how it addresses security risks please give it a read.

We've got a few exciting announcements here at Drupalcon. Two of those are related to a new site we launched yesterday, CertifiedToRock.com.

Woven Druplicon Hats

We got some beautiful hand-made, wool Druplicon hats from Peru with the help of my good friend Fernando Garcia (develcuy) and the artisans that his lovely wife Nancy works with. Now we're ready to give these hats away - for free - but of course there's a catch ;)

Certification for Drupal with CertifiedToRock.com

We've built a super simple (and yet, we think, still valid) certification for Drupal users based on their involvement with the Drupal project. It's located at CertifiedtoRock.com where you can enter a drupal.org username and see the corresponding certification level of that individual. Learn more about CertifiedToRock.

If you want a hat, tweet a link to your score with @certifiedtorock and we'll hook you up if your score is 6 or higher. After noon on Wednesday we'll be giving out hats to anyone with a score of 5 or higher.