The Lullabot Blog

Drupalcon Szeged, Day 2

angie — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:24:19 -0700

Day 2 started out with the Awesome Testing Party, which consisted of a room full of people in pairs learning how to write automated tests. I had hoped for at least 10-20 people there. There were 80+ (!) and together we enjoyed delicious Hungarian pancakes and chocolate. I still have yet to thoroughly review the results, but as of this moment there are 24 of the testing issues bumped, several with patches that need review, and one that even got committed during the session! :)

I didn't make it to the Doc Sprint Planning BoF, but Addi tells me that we had some new faces there, and some great ideas for tasks during the Doc Sprint on Sunday. Should be a lot of fun! :)

Later in the day was the Drupal.org Redesign Panel, where Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt from Mark Boulton Design discussed their strategy and initial findings for the redesign of Drupal.org. It was a fantastic presentation and I think everyone left feeling really excited about things to come. Leisa shared some findings of her initial user research, which included tidbits such as Drupal.org users compensating for the IA problems by navigating the site by typing in URLs manually, which I totally do all the time. ;)

Drupalcon Szeged, Day 1

addi — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:38:08 -0700

Whew. So day 1 of Drupalcon Szeged was a whirlwind of fun. Szeged is a very cool town. Lots of things going on, easy to get around and the weather is awesome! I'm not a good note-taker at all but here are the highlights for my day:

During Dries' State of Drupal presentation, he announced that webchick is the new maintainer for Drupal 7. Of course, Angie rocks and is taking the year by storm. It has been so cool to see her recognized so much for all the amazing things she has done and continues to do. I'm so proud to be not only her co-worker, but also her friend. Inspiring to say to the least.

Right after that I headed off to give my Gentle introduction to Drupal coding presentation (a PDF of the slides is on that page too). This was the first time I'd done this presentation and I got lots of really good feedback from folks who attended. It was quite a bit of fun and I look forward to expanding on intro coding types of presentations in the future.

We had ourselves a tasty lunch and then headed back for the second keynote by Rasmus Lerdorf. He went through some very cool stuff about optimizing PHP code and ran some analysis of various frameworks (like Cake, Code Igniter, etc.) and Drupal. We didn't come out so well in the performance side compared to a lot, but Rasmus acknowledged that it wasn't an apples to apples comparison. The Q&A period afterwards was awesome.

Webchick Named Drupal 7 Maintainer

nate — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 02:55:17 -0700

Each release of Drupal, Dries names one individual to share the responsibility of reviewing and committing code directly to the Drupal core.

During the opening presentation at DrupalCon Szeged (August 27, 2008), Dries named the Drupal 7 Co-maintainer: Angela "webchick" Byron! Lullabot is extremely proud to have Angie as a Lullabot, and we'll be doing everything individually and as a team to help Angie make Drupal 7 the most incredible version yet.

Lullabot at Drupalcon Szeged!

angie — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 03:48:13 -0700

Lullabots Addison Berry, Angela Byron, and Nate Haug are headed up to sunny Szeged this afternoon. As usual, we'll be presenting at a bunch of sessions at Drupalcon, which are detailed down below. Looking forward to meeting you there! :)

Wednesday, August 27

11:00-12:00: Addi will be giving a gentle introduction to Drupal coding for those who are not yet among the super-geeks.
15:00-15:45: Angie will be co-presenting an Introduction to Testing with Charlie Gordon and Florian Loretan to teach people new to automated testing how it works.
16:00-16:45: The day finishes up with Angie and Addi doing the Drupalchix BoF session, where the women of Drupalcon can come and hang out.

Thursday, August 28

09:00-10:30: Come join Angie, Addi, and a whole cabal of Drupal developers for the Awesome Testing Party! Come get some chocolate and learn how to write tests in a hands-on fashion.
11:00-12:00: Addi will be holding a Doc sprint planning session prior to the documentation sprint on Sunday.
15:00-15:45: Addi will be holding a second BoF this afternoon, this time about Videocast-o-Rama to learn how to make screencasts or share your tips and tricks!
16:00-16:45: The day finishes up with Angie, Leslie Hawthorne, Charlie Gordon and friends discussing the DROP program , aimed at getting new contributors involved in the Drupal project.

Friday, August 29

09:00-10:30: The day kicks off with the Summer of Code Showcase, led by Angie. This is a demo of all of the Summer of Code projects from this year from the students and mentors themselves.

Saturday, August 30

09:00-10:30: Angie and Addi will be part of the Drupal Association panel, where Association members will be debriefing the community about various happenings.

Code Sprint (August 31)

Addi will be holding a Documentation Sprint all day long for folks who'd like to help make the documentation even better. There is a list of things to hammer on all day long along with an IRC meetup for folks who couldn't make it to Szeged. Nate and Angie will be running around hacking on random things, too.

Announcing the "Do It With Drupal" Seminar!

jeff — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:21:56 -0700

Lullabot is proud to present its first large-scale event, the Do It With Drupal seminar. This three-day event focuses on teaching examples, techniques, and best practices for building successful Drupal projects. Join us December 10 - 12 at the New Orleans Marriott Hotel, where you'll learn from top experts, both within and outside the Drupal community.

Come to scenic New Orleans
Examine and dissect successful Drupal sites
Discover new site-building strategies
Learn from Drupal's top developers
Hear from community-building experts
Connect with other Drupal professionals
Expand your Drupal knowledge

We're really hoping to make our first large-scale event a success. Join the Facebook event, follow us on Twitter, and help spread the word!

Come learn Views tricks from its author, Earl Miles. Learn about CCK from maintainer Karen Stevenson, or Organic Groups from its creator, Moshe Weitzman. But of course, there's more to building a successful Drupal site than just understanding Drupal's inner workings. And Do It With Drupal focuses on this area, too. Learn about building and nourishing an online community from Flickr's community manager, Heather Champ. Learn about information architecture and usability from Razorfish founder, Karen McGrane. Learn about managing a successful Drupal project from Nicole Lind, project manager for Fast Company and Lifetime Television. And our speaker list continues to grow.

Our sessions will assume very little knowledge of Drupal (so it's perfect for those new to Drupal, or companies currently evaluating Drupal as a solution), but they will still have a lot to offer for those experienced with Drupal who want to learn more about the techniques that the pros are using to execute their projects. Come and ask your questions! Additionally, we'll have lots of social opportunities for attendees and speakers to connect, network, and generally hang out.

Registration for Do It With Drupal ~~opens on Tuesday~~ is open and the first 100 registrants get a big discount off the normal rates.

Go to http://www.doitwithdrupal.com for complete information about the event.

We look forward to seeing you in New Orleans!

Angela Byron wins the Best Contributor award at OSCON

matt — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:27:43 -0700

photo by James Duncan Davidson

On Tuesday night at OSCON, Lullabot's Angie Byron was inducted into the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Hall of Fame for Best Contributor. It's great to see Angie's contributions be recognized not just within the Drupal community, but the larger mindshare of the Open Source community as well. When Leslie Hawthorn, Google's OS Team Manager, stood at the podium to introduce the award, she said: "The recipient of this award is always a source of inspiration". And she is right. If you've ever uttered the words "How do I contribute?" to Angie, you see a wave of excitement come over her as she moves in a little closer, cracks open her laptop and before you know it you're writing your first patch, your first documentation, your first simpletest. It goes on and on.

Angie is a Best Contributor because she inspires countless others to take that jump into Drupal when the first step is otherwise feeling too scary to take. Congrats Angie, you totally deserve it.

Understanding Drupal DVDs are now shipping

kentbye — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:17:57 -0700

The Understanding Drupal DVDs are pressed and we have received them at our shipping facility! All pre-ordered DVDs have been shipped out and should be arriving this week. You can choose between a DVD, a High-Definition digital download, or the "Grab 'em both" option, which gives you both the immediacy of the HD download and a physical DVD that you can use to introduce Drupal to clients, friends, and family. You can order your copy today from the Lullabot store.

Understanding Drupal is designed to serve as a fundamental foundation to people new to Drupal by providing an introduction to Drupal's concepts, capabilities and terminology. It's the first video in the Lullabot Learning Series. Future tutorials will cover topics such as Administering Drupal, and intensives on the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views modules, Theming, Drupal APIs, and more.

And for those of you have yet to acquire a Lullabot t-shirt, we're also selling shirts in the store. Pick one up and wear it while you watch your DVD. The DVD will make you smart. The t-shirt will make you sexy!

A new Drupal theme, and a peek at Drupal Jumpstart...

eaton — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:06:59 -0700

With the release candidates of CCK and Views now available for Drupal 6, the assorted 'Bots are busy updating several chapters of the upcoming Drupal Jumpstart book with the UI and subtle functionality changes in Drupal 6. I'm currently putting the finishing touches on Chapter 8 -- it will walk readers through building a product reviews web site. Along the way, we've decided to use a different contrib theme for each chapter's sample site, to provide some visual flare and help readers quickly spot which site is which when thumbing through screenshots in the book.

For the Product Reviews chapter, I stumbled across an awesome new Drupal 6 theme named Nitobe. It was designed by Shannon Lucas of Four Kitchens Studios, and it's a clean, attractive theme with a lot of potential for customization. Among other things, it offers quick-and-easy selection of custom banner images at the top of the blog. While the release of the Garland theme with Drupal 5 brought us color customization, not many themes have made it easy for users to pick custom header images without doing their own CSS tweaks. Now I want to use it on all of my random sites...

Dooce: 20K+ Comments in 24hrs, Drupal Doesn't Break a Sweat

jeff — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 06:26:50 -0700

Yesterday, I heard from my friend Jon Armstrong about some nervousness he was having about Dooce, the site he maintains for his wife Heather. This incredibly popular blog migrated to Drupal recently and when I ran into Jon at South By Southwest, he was very happy with the move. However, on Monday, Heather announced that she was giving away a coveted Wii Fit, and that people could "enter" as many times as they would like simply by commenting on the post.

Bang! The starting gun went off. Later that day Jon posted Drupal is RAD to his blog about how impressed he was with Drupal: "In an hour, there have been over 1,200 comments." But word kept spreading around the internet about the Wii Fit giveaway and the speed of comments was growing exponentially. They're running on a single web server and haven't really "tricked out" their box with any special performance tuning or anything.

However, he wasn't going to be able to sleep with one eye open watching his server load and he messaged me on Twitter. Of course, confident in my Drupal sites, I was fast asleep.

Lullabot is #1 for Drupal Visitors

jeff — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:58:50 -0700

Google Trends recently added a new feature to allow users to see other sites frequented by visitors to a given site. Of course the first thing that we did was to go and see where Drupal.org visitors like to go. We were excited to find that Lullabot.com is the number-one "also visited" site for Drupal visitors.

We have certainly made an effort to provide as much useful Drupal information as possible here and it's great to know that people see us as an ongoing resource. Stats like this really gear us on to continue to publish new articles, videos, and our regular Drupal podcast. We've got a lot of exciting things on the horizon, so we hope that you'll keep coming back.

Thanks for visiting!