Jonathan Hedstrom's blog

  • Drupalcon Chicago: Snowman, Small Core and Butler

    Mar 15, 2011

    Drupalcon Chicago introduced the core developer track (Core Conversations) as a parallel track to the normal, broader tracks. Because of this, and a series of compelling BOFs, I spent comparatively little time in the main session halls during the conference. Below I cover some of the topics and discussions that got me excited about Drupal 8 and the direction of our community.

    Butler

    There was a core conversation about Butler, but unfortunately, there is no video (oddly, no video from Copenhagen either), or slides from what I can find. The initiative was also mentioned by Dries during his keynote presentation as one of the goals for Drupal 8. The overarching idea is for core to provide a unified context system, coupled with a better plugin system. This will allow, among other things, better rendering of non-HTML pages, faster rendering for HTML (eg, small portions of a page can be rendered), and allow for better web-services support. The project can be followed on Drupal Groups, and there is code available for Drupal 7 in contrib.

    Snowman

    The idea behind Snowman is to build something with Drupal core that does something. Whether the goal is a gateway drug, an on-ramp to contrib, or a canary for determining what can be axed from Drupal core, depends on who (and when) you talk to. Nonetheless, I think the idea is a good one. During the core conversation, it was mentioned that this could be dangerous, because something can always be built better using contrib. So if Drupal is packaged as the definitive Foodie Club site, for example, it could potentially do damage to Drupal's image since it wouldn't be as polished as a site that took advantage of contrib. The proposed solution to this concern would be to direct the new user, via content in the installation profile, towards groups or categories of modules that could quickly be used to further enhance the site.

    Small core, and Drupal as a framework

    My favorite session was a discussion between Moshe, Eaton and Irakli, moderated by Eric Gundersen. While the video isn't too exciting (no slides, but the audio is good), the discussion is fantastic. Moshe explained that his vision for Drupal core would be to follow something similar to the Ubuntu project, where core itself might be hidden away for developers ('drop' perhaps), and the Drupal.org homepage would direct users to any number of flavors (distributions with a purpose). These distributions would be free to move at an independent pace from core, always targeting the latest stable release. Related to this, Eaton explains his then-named Tsunami initiative (since renamed Snowman, and explained above) as a sort of canary that could be used to define what constitutes the core of Drupal.

    Portland invades Chicago, and other favorites

    With over 30 Portlanders in Chicago for the conference, this represented more than 1% of the total conference attendees. Additionally, during the git phase next presentation, 5 out of the 11 people thanked on-stage hail from Portland and the surrounding area. The Portland Drupal community is indeed flourishing!

    Eaton comparing Drupal to platypodes and broader ecosystems was one of the best sessions I made it to, and is well worth watching if you missed it.

  • Drupalcon Copenhagen wrap-up

    Sep 06, 2010

    Drupalcon Copenhagen group photo

    I've recently returned from an amazing time at Drupalcon Copenhagen, and wanted to highlight some of my favorite sessions, events, and departing thoughts (this also serves as preparation for the impossible task of summarizing such an epic and comprehensive conference in 15 minutes for this week's Portland Drupal group). While I can't cover them all, the complete list of videos from Drupalcon Copenhagen can be found here.

    Jeremy Keith and the Design of HTML 5

    Jeremy Keith, not only touched on the core functionality and concepts of HTML 5, but also spent a great deal of time focusing on the history and reasoning behind the design.

    Organic Groups in Drupal 7

    This session sets a new bar for presentations, not just at Drupalcons, but for conference presentations in general. Amitai Burstein managed to map the complexities of international relations to the new flexibility of groups in Drupal 7, in a witty and hilarious manner.

    UPDATE: Amitaibu has an alternate version of the presentation video that shows his introduction a bit better.

    Mapping with OpenLayers

    If you haven't been following the development of this Drupal mapping solution, this session is a good place to catch up. The presentation did an excellent job of detailing the creation of complex maps, that are based on views and are fully exportable.

    For every site, a .make file

    Find out how using Drush make to build sites encourages developers to contribute back patches, rather than running monolithic and duplicative code repositories. Unfortunately, as of this writing, the video is not available on archive.org. Once it is, it is well worth a watch. In the meantime, Jeff Miccolis has this related blog post.

    Drupal 7 and beyond

    Angie Byron's session provides a nice, friendly overview of some of the major, user-facing changes that Drupal 7 will bring. For a more behind-the-scenes view, Damien Tournoud highlights some of the lesser-known features (video) such as job queues and the fine-grained caching options available. Larry Garfield covers some goals for Drupal 8 (but first, of course, let's get Drupal 7 done).

    Speaking of which, the 2 code sprints (the first after the Core Developer Summit, the second after the conference), saw the critical issue queue drop to 13 at one point, but then, with the additional attention of developers, it bounced back up to around 25, and is currently hovering at 29. There's even a site to see what these numbers might mean for a release date for Drupal 7.

    Awesomesauce

    Thanks to Morten DK and Mikkeller, this Drupalcon had its very own beer, known as Awesomesauce. It was quite delicious, and free most every night at the Foobar.

    Drupalcon Copenhagen Awesomesauce beer by Mikkeller

  • DrupalCon San Francisco, departing thoughts

    Apr 23, 2010

    I have just returned from DrupalCon San Francisco 2010, the largest DrupalCon ever. With over 3000 attending, and $72,000 worth of coffee consumed, it was a very lively event. Thanks to the awesome work of those organizing, nearly all of the sessions now have high quality video available on the DrupalCon site, and on Archive.org. Below are the sessions that really left an impression on me regarding the future direction of Drupal.

    Advanced Drush

    While there is no video for this as of this writing, the highlight here was the sudo drush make-me-a-sandwich moment (as well as the Drush core-cli command).
    Drush: make-me-a-sandwich

    The Heart of Open Atrium: Context, PURL and Spaces

    While we've been using context on most projects for quite some time, the work presented here around the spaces presets has me itching to try integrating them into some upcoming projects.

    Page render drill down in Drupal 7

    The page rendering system in Drupal 7 waits much later in the process to transform structured data into the relevant output format (which is typically HTML). Practically speaking, what this allows for is hook_page_alter, which has access to the contents of the entire page, in a structured array. Two highlights:

    • The block module will no longer be a required module in Drupal 7. Rather, it is simply an optional UI for placing blocks in the page. This means that the Context module in Drupal 7 won't have to implement weird workarounds to steal block placement from the block module (and as such, should work seamlessly with the i18n module).
    • Instead of only having to caching options (page and block level), any part of the page can be cached. Furthermore, by using the query string and qrguments as the cache key, these caching mechanisms can work with content that is under access control.

    PubSubHubbub to the rescue-- Real-time feeds and the future of social networks

    This talk wasn't specific to Drupal (yet anyway), but rather, provides a sort of roadmap to the future of Drupal and the social web. By combining 4 rather new protocols (PubSubHubbub, WebFinger, ActivityStreams and Salmon), Brett Slatkin of Google walks through the potential for realtime feeds being used to contect people like never before.

    It would be very powerful if any Drupal site out there were capable of sharing, in real time, at the level Brett outlines in this talk. The Feeds module is already capable of consuming PubSubHubbub, and support for ActivityStreams have a little momentum. Salmon and WebFinger, as well as publishing to hubs for PubSubHubbub are the pieces that need to be filled in.

    Drupal 7 and the State of Drupal

    At Dries' keynote, he showed a best case scenario (June 2010), a worst case scenario (October 2010), and an ideal scenario (lock the 3000 attendees in until it was released at the conference) for the Drupal 7 release.

    While we already missed the ideal scenario, the progress made on critical bugs at the conference has the community working at a velocity that should come in closer to the best case scenario. Over the course of the week, thanks to the awesome gatherings at the chx coder lounge, the number of critical bugs dropped from 114 to 94 as of this writing.