Lullabot - Drupal Voices

Drupal Voices 84: Chris Heuer on the Future of Social Media and Drupal

info@lullabot.com — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:56:38 +0000

Chris Heuer founded the Social Media Club and came to DrupalCon Paris to talk about "Social + Media: What's Needed Next." Heuer talks about the social media trends that he sees as well as how Drupal plays a part in them. He also shares some of his insights into some of the darker sides of social media, and how to best use the available tools with the highest intentions of social change.

read more »

Drupal Voices 83: Todd Nienkerk on Getting Started with the 960 Grid System

info@lullabot.com — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:38:27 +0000

Todd Nienkerk of Four Kitchens explains the concept of CSS grid systems and gives some tips on how to get started with working with the 960 grid system. He talks a bit about the 960 Grid System Drupal theme as developed by dvessel, who was actually able to get some of his content-first innovations ported back into the 960 framework. He also briefly mentions the 960 Gridder module that sets up a javascript overlay to verify that your design is properly lining up. He talks about the general trends of CSS grids and some specific resources that help with getting started on creating a grid-based design.

Drupal Voices 82: Jacine Rodriguez on the Skinr Module

info@lullabot.com — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:20:54 +0000

Jacine Rodriguez of Gravitek Labs talks about the Skinr module, which is a module that allows a Drupal theme to define a set of reusable and modular CSS styles and makes them available through the user interface. The Skinr module was inspired by the Block Theme, but extended to be more flexible.

The Skinr module is the basis for Top Notch Themes' Fusion theme, which is demonstrated in some videos here. And since the recording of this podcast DrupalCon Paris, TNT has released a new website of Fusion-based themes at: http://fusiondrupalthemes.com

Drupal Voices 81: Laura Scott on Interaction Design

info@lullabot.com — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:48:00 +0000

Laura Scott of PingVision talks a bit about her DrupalCon Paris presentation on Functional Interaction Design in Drupal.

Drupal Voices 80: Yves Chedemois on the History and Future of CCK

info@lullabot.com — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:24:57 +0000

Yves Chedemois (aka "yched") talks about how he became the co-maintainer of the Content Construction Kit (CCK) along with KarenS. He also talks about the early days of CCK, and the co-evolution along with the Views. Yched also talks a bit about his motivation for continuing to work on a project such as CCK, and the challenges of working on it. He also talks about which parts of CCK are included in Drupal 7 as a part of fields in core, the new field storage engine in D7, and which parts of CCK are not included as well as pending tasks such as the challenges of developing the upgrade path to D7.

Drupal Voices 79: Daniel Kudwien and his many Drupal development contributions

info@lullabot.com — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:08:59 +0000

Daniel Kudwien (aka sun on drupal.org and tha_sun on IRC) of Unleashed Mind is a prolific Drupal contributed module author, but also Drupal core developer.

He discusses some of the well-known modules that he helped author and maintain, such as WYSIWYG, Admininstration Menu, Image Assist, Inline, and Demonstration Site.

He's taken it upon himself to make sure a lot of the Drupal 7 APIs have been standardized and cleaned up as much as possible, and also rallied a lot of help on tackling Drupal's oldest standing task of "Node 8," which is allowing users to cancel their own accounts. Sun also gave a heroic effort on helping on many of the different exception patches during the code slush period, and fellow developer chx commenting that he's never seen anyone sprint for Drupal.

Drupal Voices 78: Wolfgang Ziegler on the Rules Module

info@lullabot.com — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:13:41 +0000

Wolfgang Ziegler (aka "fago") talks about the Rules module, and how it can be used by non-programmers to set up a series of events that are executed after certain conditional triggers happen. Fago claims that this is a more robust solution that Drupal's core trigger module functionality.

The Rules module in Drupal 6 is an evolution from the Workflow-NG module in Drupal 5, but renamed to reflect that it can do much more than just workflow.

There was also a Summer of Code project by klausi that integrated into the Rules package as the Rules Forms module.

Fago also talks about the future of Rules and how he plans on improving the APIs so that it's more extensible to add in loops and new features, and to have Features module integration with rules so that it's possible to and re-use rules.

Drupal Voices 77: Doug Green on Lessons from Big Multilingual Drupal sites

info@lullabot.com — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:11:56 +0000

At DrupalCon Paris, Doug Green of CivicActions shared some insights doing big Multilingual sites. He talks about some of the pain points faced with doing the site, and working with the i18n module.

Other references mentioned:

Drupal Voices 76: George DeMet talks about Foreign Affairs on Drupal

info@lullabot.com — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:42:24 +0000

NOTE: This Drupal Voices podcast was recorded at DrupalCon Paris back in September of 2009. Now that our latest training video on Drupal Module Development is out the door, then I should have more time to put out the remaining Drupal Voices interviews.

George DeMet is the founder and co-owner of Palantir.net. At DrupalCon Paris, DeMet led a panel discussion talking about converting Foreign Affairs magazine over to Drupal. DeMet touches on some of the highlights of functionality for the site and the Palantir team that built it. Palantir also took the time to write up a very comprehensive case study over on Drupal.org back in August that goes into a lot more detail. Finally, DeMet talks about how they transitioned from a regular development shop that produced their own CMS to working much more closely with Drupal.

Drupal Voices 75: Bevan Rudge on Civic Actions and Drupal in New Zealand

info@lullabot.com — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:33:16 +0000

Bevan Rudge has been a Drupal developer and engineer at Civic Actions and talks about the structure of Civic Actions and challenges and benefits of being spread out across many different time zones. Bevan also talks about the Drupal scene in New Zealand.

Download Audio

Drupal Voices 74: Katherine Druckman on Managing the Linux Journal Website

info@lullabot.com — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:30:03 +0000

Katherine Druckman is the sole "webmistress" for the Linux Journal's Drupal site. She talks about the evolution of managing the site, including recently incorporating version control and starting to build out more and more features as their needs grow.

Some of the modules that she mentions are Views Bulk Operations to help manage a streamlined workflow, Twitter & Activity for beefing up the user profiles, Flag for bookmarking content.

Finally, she talks about some of the motivations for coming to events like Drupalcon and Do It With Drupal, and compares and contrasts the difference between the two.

Download Audio

Drupal Voices 73: Liza Sabater on Drupal Site Building and Power Blogging

info@lullabot.com — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:12:39 +0000

Liza Sabater is a Drupal Site Builder and active blogger who runs both Culture Kitchen and The Daily Gotham. She talks about being a non-module developing, site builder and the role of technical adviser to non-technical clients. And she also talks about why she chose Drupal for her blogging platform and some of her favorite modules including:

Download Audio

Drupal Voices 72: Simon Hobbs on the Evolution of his Drupal shop

info@lullabot.com — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:59:17 +0000

Simon Hobbs (aka "sime") talks about the evolution of his Drupal shop Em Space based in Melbourne, Australia. Specifically, he talks about the shifts in job descriptions and challenges of running a small Drupal development shop. He also talks about the most crucial time of any Drupal project, which he sees as the beginning while the information architecture and module selection decisions are happening. He also talks about some of the crossroads that he's facing of where to focus the energy and growth of his company.

Drupal Voices 71: Joeri Poesen on DrupalCon Paris & the French Drupal scene

info@lullabot.com — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:40:46 +0000

Joeri Poesen of AF83 was one of the organizers of DrupalCon Paris, and talks about the process of organizing the conference in coordination with the French Drupal Association.

Joeri talks about the French Drupal community and some of the sites being launched in France by AF83 and some of the other French Drupal companies.

He mentions that some of AF83's contributions include a lot of the core work that Damien Tournoud (aka "DamZ") has been doing, as well as some of the latest Übercart work that has been going on. Back in October Ryan Szrama announced the Ubercore Initiative, which is a combination of Ubercart, Drupal 7 and the influence of #Smallcore, and tagged with D7UC.

Damien has also been involved with this effort as one of the editors and AF83 is also one of the sponsoring companies for the effort due to some of the e-commerce work that they're involved with.

Joeri also talks about the importance of multi-lingual functionality and the i18n suite of modules.

Download Audio

Drupal Voices 70: Jeff Eaton on Token in core

info@lullabot.com — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:44:32 +0000

Jeff Eaton talks about the third most popular contributed module in Drupal: the Token module.

Jeff talks about the architectural changes necessary in order for Token to be committed and included into Drupal 7. A lot of the changes will also eventually be backported to the token 2.0 version for Drupal 6.

There's also a pending User Interface issue for token in core that needs some help from someone with some javascript skills and initiative to get a UI into core before December 1st.

The original motivation for token in core was to have pathauto in core, but this did not get in before the API freeze, but the token functionality that made it into D7 will make pathauto's job much cleaner in contrib.

Download Audio

Drupal Voices 69: Karoly "chx" Negyesi on his Drupal core work

info@lullabot.com — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:36:23 +0000

Károly Négyesi, better known as "chx", talks about some of his motivations and work that he's done on Drupal core. At the time of this publishing, Károly has participated in over 169 pages worth of Drupal issues over the past five and a half years -- including his work on the Form API, menu system, filter_xss and much more.

Károly is also the development team lead at Now Public, and this interview was conducted the day after Examiner.com acquired Now Public.

Károly also talks about his invovlement with the #D7CX movement to get Views 3 ported to Drupal 7, which since this interview there has been a Drupal 7 Contributed Modules Sprint and a week ago an initial CVS commit of Views 3 for Drupal 7.

Download Audio

Drupal Voices 68: Jeff Miccolis and Alex Barth on Open Atrium and the Features Module

info@lullabot.com — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:38:53 +0000

Jeff Miccolis and Alex Barth talk about the latest work on their Open Atrium distribution, and the Features module.

Development Seed has been on the cutting edge of dealing with making deployment of module configurations easier from different development environments, and there was a lot of buzz about the Features module and exportable configurations at DrupalCon Paris. Alex and Jeff led a popular Birds of a Feather session on the topic, and Alex talks a bit about what was covered.

A lot has happened since DrupalCon DC where there were a number of deployment discussions about different solutions ranging from Context & Spaces modules, Patterns module and the Deploy module. This write-up "Deployment and migration: hot at DrupalCon DC" gives the most comprehensive overview of the different options that were discussed at the time.

As Young Hahn concluded, the missing gap that needed filling was pushing for modules to make their configurations exportable, which is what has been happening a lot more especially with the help of the Chaos tool suite (aka CTools). So keep an eye out for more modules providing exportable configurations, more features, and eventually more products and easier ways of making Drupal distributions.

Download Audio

Drupal Voices 67: Eric Gundersen on Mapping, Open Source in Government, and Features

info@lullabot.com — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:51:37 +0000

Eric Gundersen is the President of Development Seed, which Eric describes as a hybrid between a International Development organization and an IT shop -- quite a unique combination.

Development Seed is at the heart and center of the Washington, D.C. Drupal community, and a crucial player in helping bring Drupal into the United States Government. Eric talks about discussions that he's had with Aneesh Chopra, the Chief Technology Officer of the United States, as well as Vivek Kundra, the Chief Information Officer of the United States.

At DrupalCon Paris, Eric had mentioned that there were representatives from the White House and a number of other Government agencies that were coming to the DC Drupal meetups that DevSeed hosted, which we saw the fruits of with the big news over the weekend with WhiteHouse.gov going Drupal. Eric was also a key player in coordinating some Lullabot on-site training at the Department of Commerce earlier this month.

Development Seed has also earned a reputation within the Drupal community as putting out some of the most innovative and cutting edge work in the realm of Drupal Distributions and Products -- specifically with Aegir & Drush, the Features module & Feature servers, Context & Spaces, Open Atrium distribution and most recently the Managing News distribution.

Eric also talks about some of the Mapping and visualization work that he's been doing with the Location, Geo, Open Layers, Mapstraction and Data modules along with using tile data sources of Open Street Map and CloudMade. Six months ago, Eric would have recommended using Nice Map along with a WMS server, but now he would recommend using these other modules.

For more information on the WhiteHouse.gov move to Drupal and who was involved with that, be sure to check out these posts:

Personal Democracy Forum's TechPresident on WhiteHouse.gov Goes Drupal
Tim O'Reilly's Thoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal
Slashdot thread on White House Website Switches To Open Source
Dries Buytaert's post on Whitehouse.gov using Drupal
Ping Vision's Laura Scott asks if WhiteHouse.gov goes Drupal: can open source lead to open government?

Download Audio

Drupal Voices 66: Jimmy Berry on the Drupal Test Framework

info@lullabot.com — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 03:46:07 +0000

Jimmy Berry (aka boombatower) is the Drupal 7 Testing Subsystem Maintainer and maintainer of testing.drupal.org. Testing has become an integral part of the core Drupal development process as Drupal 7 has adopted a test-driven development model, which Dries explains here.

So Jimmy has picked up the testing torch for Drupal, and talks about his involvement with the SimpleTest framework and helping getting it into Drupal core, how that's changed the core development process, and what it could mean if also applied to contributed modules as well.

Download Audio

Drupal Voices 65: Konstantin Kafer on Optimizing Javascript and CSS

info@lullabot.com — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:09:59 +0000

Konstantin Käfer (aka kkafer) gives an overview of his Drupalcon Paris talk on optimizing the front-end Javascript and CSS -- including some YSlow tips.

Konstantin also talks a bit about his Support File Cache module that allows additional front-end optimizations by allowing you to control the bundling of CSS and Javascript files.

He also talks a bit about the Front-End Drupal that he co-wrote with Emma Jane Hogbin.

Finally, Konstantin talks a bit about some of his favorite changes in Drupal 7.

Download Audio

Drupal Voices 64: Narayan Newton on Drupal.org Performance and Scalability

info@lullabot.com — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:52:05 +0000

Narayan Newton is a database administrator who has been a long-time member of the Drupal.org infrastructure team since the time that he was a student at Oregon State University's Open Source Lab. OSUOSL hosts a number of open source projects, but they had never seen the type of explosive growth that Drupal has had, and Narayan has observed this growth up close as the servers were melting down.

Narayan gives a little behind-the-scenes history of the scaling challenges of Drupal.org and describes the current server configuration with Varnish reverse-proxy caching, as well as some of the other tools that he uses in order to trace down performance bottlenecks.

Narayan works with Tag1 Consulting and is becoming a co-maintainer of the Pressflow Drupal distribution.

Download Audio

Drupal Voices 63: David Strauss on Performance, Scalability, and Pressflow Drupal Distribution

info@lullabot.com — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 04:52:43 +0000

David Strauss from Four Kitchens talks about the special patched version of Drupal that he has been maintaining that runs the Drupal.org website. Drupal.org is the hub of activity for the Drupal community, and probably the most active community that is powered by the Drupal software.

There are a number of performance and scalability patches that were written specifically for Drupal.org, which have since gotten committed to Drupal 7, and that have also been backported to Drupal 6. David is maintaining that set of patches in a performance optimized version of Drupal 6 in what is called Pressflow.

David talks more about the features of Pressflow Drupal in the podcast and how the Drupal that runs Drupal.org actually has more in common with Pressflow Drupal than "regular" Drupal that most people download.

Download Audio

Drupal Voices 62: Adrian Rossouw on Aegir, Drush and the future of Drupal Distributions

info@lullabot.com — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:01:14 +0000

Adrian Rossouw has been a long-time contributor to the Drupal project and even claims the Drupal.org user id of 1337. He was a co-founder of Bryght, and helped develop the Hostmaster system for deploying sites. That has since evolved into the Aegir system as well as the command-line toolkit of drush.

These are some of the components behind Adrian's vision and the larger Smallcore movement to make Drupal distributions work easier and more widely used in the Drupal community. Adrian also talks about the future of Drupal distributions and what it means in Drupal 7 to have installation profiles be treated as modules that came out a series of issues linked from the following issue: Fix some conceptual problems with install profiles and make them actually usable

Adrian also talks about how this will tie into apt-get and how piecing together Drupal websites is moving towards the same ways that people manage Linux distributions.

Drupal Voices 61: Peter Wolanin on Apache Solr & Acquia Search Service

info@lullabot.com — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:31:58 +0000

Peter Wolanin talks about the Apache Solr Search Integration module, and his involvement with polishing and finishing it along with Jacob Singh from what Robert Douglass started.

Apache Solr has been picking up steam this past year with it's faceted search features, and getting a lot more exposure with being deployed on the module search on Drupal.org.

Peter talks about the mechanics of how Apache Solr works, and how it's based up on the Apache Lucene text search engine library, which is a lot more optimized for search than SQL. Peter was working on Apace Solr integration as a part of the Acquia Search service, which is geared toward people who do not want to deal with setting up and maintaining a dedicated server for search.

Finally, Peter also talks a bit about some of the exciting things on the horizon in the future with Views integration and search integration with other modules.

For more information:

Download Audio

read more »

Drupal Voices 60: Emma Jane Hogbin on Theming and Bazaar version control

info@lullabot.com — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:32:07 +0000

Emma Jane Hogbin is a co-author of Front End Drupal, which covers Drupal's theming system. She talks about that process, and how Lullabot's Using Drupal affected the evolution of Front End Drupal. She also talks about the process of learning Drupal's theming system and some of the exciting changes that have happened since she started with Drupal in 2002/2003. (Also see Addi's popular article "My Aha! Moments in Drupal theming"

Emma Jane is also a user of the Bazaar version control system and talks about the importance of the community of support when deciding upon which version control system to go with.

Emma Jane will also be presenting at the Do It with Drupal conference in New Orleans this December.

Download Audio