OpenSourcery

1400 Drupalers on the stairs - photo by Chrys

Having been back from Drupalcon DC for over a week now, I've had a chance to distill a few of my favorite sessions. Below is a list of my favorites, with video and links to more videos. Of course, all the videos are available on Archive.org, thanks to the wonderful work done by the videographers during the conference who worked tirelessly to capture 98 hours (and counting) of footage.

Why I Hate Drupal

James Walker (walkah) promised to take a good, hard look at everything that's wrong with Drupal. Of course all this was a little hard to take at 9:00am on a Friday, but this session nailed some very important points about the drupal way and why it isn't always the best way.

 All videos for this presentation available on Archive.org

A Paradigm for Reusable Drupal Features

The good folks at Development Seed have been developing the idea of Context and Spaces for some time. One very nice thing that falls out of all that work is a way to programatically package and reuse feature sets in Drupal. The session covered the fairly basic idea of a blog, but the potential for this idea is huge, and will have lasting effects on the way we develop Drupal applications.

All videos for this presentation available on Archive.org

More than search; how Apache Solr changes the way you build websites

You may have noticed that search works again on Drupal.org. Thanks to Apache Solr, and Acquia's new search service, any Drupal site can quickly have functional search that doesn't need to be hidden away in the footer, or camaflouged into the theme so nobody actually uses it.

All videos for this presentation available on Archive.org

Practical Semantic Web and Why You Should Care

The semantic web is already here. The W3C made RDFa an XHTML recommendation back in October. Any Drupal site can now be made into a semantic document, and with Drupal 7, this will be even easier. It's a fascinating and down-to-earth tour of the present and future of the semantic web by Boris Mann.

No embedded video available, but all videos for this presentation available on Archive.org

The 2nd day is nearing an end here at Drupalcon DC, and it's been amazing, as was expected. So far, there have been several very cool sessions, and even impromptu demos of up and coming modules.

Filefield in Core

While attending the Future of Files and Media in Drupal 7 presentation by Drewish and reviewing the FilesApi Wishlist for D7, I'm going to take part in attempting to get the concept of a Filefield module into core for Drupal 7. This would go a long ways towards simplifying the job contrib module authors have when they want to deal with media (although, even without this, D7 already looks to be drastically better given that hook_file_* patch was committed some time ago). There are of course other critical improvements in that list, so ideally, many people will pick up file handling improvement efforts during the upcoming code sprint.

Context & Spaces

I have to say, after banging my head against various install profiles and update scripts, the ideas presented in A Paradigm for Reusable Drupal Features was a breath of fresh air. The context and spaces modules have come a very long way since Szeged.

Charting and Graphing for Views

I missed this presentation, due to an unfortunate name of the presentation, but I caught up with Irakli and chatted about this exciting new integration of the powerful Views module with the idea of charts and graphs as display types. The key modules (although still in heavy development) will be invaluable for the upcoming Solar4rSchools overhaul:

• Views Group By
• Views Charts
• Charts and Graphs

Finally, I got a very cool preview of an up-and-coming grid builder module by Roger López. The idea is that a user can drag out, and re-arrange regions in a dynamic user-interface. Once they have a nice potential layout for a page, the module will generate the necessary page.tpl.php file, and corresponding .info files to have a theme based on the dynamically created layout. This is very exciting stuff.

That's all I have time for now, although I'll try provide at least a few more updates as the sessions proceed.

The session I was most excited to see at this conference happened to be on the very first day, "Training: Boosting our raw capacity to provide Drupal training". It turns out, as OpenSourcery Training and Quality Assurance, I was drawn to pow wow with the presenters after we ran over time.

Barry Madore, Sean Effel, Lee Hunter, and Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg each gave a short talk, followed by panel Q&A, around the different styles of training they employ and their varied methods for improving the trainings through feedback. The training perspectives varied from speakers dealing with training drupal users every single day, to training a drupal development and sales team in how to work well with the drupal community. I will focus more here on the end-user.

One of the more potentially obvious take-aways from the talk was something I've seen folks miss the mark on: know your audience. When we start building tools to be used to understand the product the end-user has, we can lose sight of the user's goals. What is most important to the user of the software is nearly never the shiny piece of code, or a loving explanation of why it is fantastic. The exact function of the code or application may also be missing the mark of what a user really wants to know. They want to know how to use the system everyday. Your users really don't want to know how they can hack the code, but how they can interface with it without fear.

That which we are thinking about as software devs has already been invented and re-invented by teachers. The art is assessing knowledge, and then creating education and curriculum from that assessment. What we need is practice as educators, and the same education principles apply to drupal as apply to any other classroom. How much do they know? What else do they need to know? What might need to be un-learned? Are there different learners in the same group? Those questions get you close to having an assessment on which to found your curriculum.

Again, looking to the educators on curriculum, we should start by covering the concepts in the best logical order. That might not be in numerical sequence, but probably by associated concepts. One of the best parts of creating a plan like this is the exposition of concepts. This can increase confidence in knowing the right answer before a user would need to push a button. The last piece is, of course, cementing the lesson. Repetition is excellent to get you used to a new pattern of thought. Having 2 shorter trainings with time between is more effective than having a single day long training.

My hope is to bring fearlessness to software users through education. With the right tools, the hardest problems look easy. What is the worst we could do, break it? That'd be sweet!