I'd happy that I can now announce to the general community the project that I've been working on for the last month or so. It's Podhurl. It's a bit like Bryght, or the previous CivicSpace offering I worked on; a hosted, maintained, stable Drupal service. There are some very major differences however:
My post on the future of Drupal QA is up on the g.d.o QA group:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/9727#comment-30480
Please read it over and comment!
Dries' newly released Usability Testing first results (here) are in, and it does reinforce my previous point that even as we make the code and patch testing better (via unit tests), many other parts of quality have been overlooked for some time, and developers shouldn't be the ones to force it on. (you can read that previous post here)
In fact, between this and some valuable feedback I received from those in #drupal, I've decided to outline a full proposal for moving Drupal's Quality Assurance forward. As Karoly was kind enough to mention, just posting about this on my development blog isn't enough :) . I'm writing that proposal now, and will be posting it in the Quality Assurance group at groups.drupal.org sometime tomorrow.
I should also note that contrary to some feedback I received from #drupal, I do think unit testing is a great thing, and I do think Drupal is doing good, and I do think we're making progress (one of the (very) few downsides of open source communities is that people take criticism very personally, since everyone who works on Drupal does in a way feel it's a bit of them ;) ) I was, in no way, saying that anyone wasn't doing their jobs, just that we hadn't recognized some of these QA areas as even being needed before. Alright, enough apologizing, I'll see you all tomorrow!
(If there is anything you think the proposal should include, give me a heads up)
Community Segmentation, Bad News?
What brings me to this topic is all the excited talk I've been hearing second hand about splitting groups.drupal.org and drupal.org into many separate chunks (documentation.drupal.org, news.drupal.org, groups.drupal.org, downloads.drupal.org, content.contributed.maintained.6.modules.downloads.drupal.org , you see where this is going). What worries me is that in such an implementation it may become too complex to get to key areas or discussions.
The way I see it, there are a couple major roadblocks for making such a system work (here comes the dreaded Robin-list, grab some coffee):
Drupal let the quality boat sail by. Hold on, hear me out :) We're a really focused and strong (and almost too commercial) community, and we really have put our focus on features and output, and we've lacked a lot when it's come to making it all work correctly in every possible case.
That's where quality testing comes in. I've been thinking about Drupal's quality assurance process for a couple years now, but in the last few months it's really come to a head for me. My personal "dam-breaking" moment came when the Batch API in Drupal 6 prevented install, and other tasks depending on the API from running automatically, or in text based browsers, or in browsers were people have been privacy conscious and disabled JS and Meta refresh tags.
Without proper quality trails this will continue to happen. And here's another point I'd like to make:
IT'S NOT THE CODE DEVELOPERS FAULT, OR JOB TO DO THIS KIND OF TESTING.
If we expected every patch to have every possible test performed on it by the developer, or even automatically, we're fooling ourselves. Testing.drupal.org, even though it's going to help; even though it's going to catch errors; won't ever be able to replace human testing. Simpletest and DrupalCHK framework is not going to be the do-all and end-all of our problems, nor should we try to market it as such. We risk people feeling that if we have unit testing, we can skimp on the other Quality bits. Just like how a newbie computer user might think Norton 1998 is still protecting them in 2008.
Here's what we need in order to make future releases of Drupal truly "quality assured":
I'd like to submit a proposal for a future location of Drupalcon. Given that Drupalcon Boston is now going on, it seems like now is the opportune time to "whisper" in the ear of attendees, and to suggest the next location on the east coast.
And that spot is..... (drumroll please :) ): Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada (map)
I've got some good stuff to talk about this time around:
Prettiest Drupal Admin Interface Ever.
Keep up the eye candy :) I've recently had to opportunity to allow some non-tech-savvy people access to a Drupal site I set up for them, and the admin interface needs improvement. In fact, it needs to be able to confine the lesser used options off somewhere out of the way of those who are just managing content and rearranging blocks.
You can make your site available offline!
Some great code came out of Coding in Paradise that will let you specify the pages you want available offline, a 32x32 shortcut icon, and boom you can make your pages available offline with a desktop shortcut via Google Gears. Great for research sites and such. (I want this on api.drupal.org :) )
Cross platform repository management
Anyone that's used SVN probably knows that if by some chance the line endings in a file are changed (eg, someone on Windows opens a Mac file) the revision control system will log every line as changed. But, there is an easy solution!
Just add:
[miscellany]to your ~/.subversion/config should do the trick. For more information, and a tool to fix existing line ending issues, go here.
enable-auto-props = yes
[auto-props]
* = svn:eol-style=native
Dwewpal 6 weweased (Elmer Fudd) (original blog post)
Courtsey of Robin Monks, here is the Elmer Fudd press release for Drupal 6.0.
That dewty double cwossing wabbit ... ha ha haa'.
Today in Drupal it's now official, Drupalcon Boston 2008 will be fully taped!
Mark Burdett will be leading the charge, and he is asking for donations via ChipIn to cover the costs of additional needed equipment. If you are going to Drupalcon and would be willing to bring along a camera, supplies, or would just be willing to help out generally, be sure to get in touch with the Drupalcon staff.
Oh, and FeedAPI 1.0 is out! And Drupal association hit a milestone (I'd argue it's Drupalcon's milestone, but, to each his own), 400 registered members for Drupalcon Boston. Given the capacity for the event was 700, it seems they might fall a bit short of expectations :( That said, get over there and register, there is still time!
And, we've learned another fact from chx, good zen music == good patches. Don't believe me? Listen to the great one.
I leave you now with an image of Drupal 6's drag and drop support from CMS Report: 
So, to start off this time I'll make some corrections of my last post based on feedback:
I'm bringing 8 people. Releasing two new modules, a Chinese install profile, giving half a dozen sessions, and helping do graphics and layout for conference materials.
Oh, and updating the mass hosting system that we started our business with and giving it away for free.
$15K or community involvement: you e the judge. Oh, and I wouldn't mind an update to the main post to reflect this :P --Boris Mann
Sounds very cool! I keep thinking of Macromedia when I think of flash and such (I dislike change :P ), it's great to see some alternative uses for Drupal! :)
Both Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex play nicely with Drupal, what with services.module and amfphp.module, and with our pending release of a new module based on SWFAddress, the whole platform is only going to get stronger, with full HTML underlay for non-Flash-users.
If that sounds interesting, check out and vote on our session proposal! --Steven
We are proud to present the third release candidate of Drupal 6.0. We hope that this will be the final release candidate before we can make an official release of Drupal 6.0. Since the second release candidate, we have fixed various issues including JavaScript performance problems, cleaned up menu updates, added several improvements to the update.module, and added a memory requirements check to update.php. We have even added some small usability improvements since RC2.Yippie! Drupal 6 RC3! I was hoping a bit for a final release, but, now it's even closer than ever before, and more bugs will be ironed out, so I can wait a bit longer :)
Daily Drupal Happenings - January 24, 2008
Daily happenings @ Drupal - January 22, 2008
DrupalCamp Wisconsin (a photo of Wisconsin at right) wrapped up last weekend, and Larry at GarfieldTech has the complete writeup of it's success, great job!Fixing bugs is a tireless and usually thankless job, but not today! Here is the list of fixed core bugs in the last 24 hours, and who you can send a starbucks card to :)
Thanks to all those who have worked on bugs, your contributions are important to keep Drupal strong! If you're not actively contributing to Drupal now, why not stop by the Patch Queue?
After quite some time of inactivity, I'm trying to kick myself into the belated new-year's resolution of keeping this blog updated with some of the latest activity in Drupal development :)
Drupalcon
There is a lot of buzz building up around Drupalcon Boston 2008, March 3-6. This is actually the closest a Drupalcon has ever been to me that I can recall (within driving distance, yay!). It's going to be a $215k event, hopefully paid for by attendance fees ($195, which I was initially appalled at, but I now see the necessity) and Corporate sponsorships.
I have been on a see-saw of deciding whether I'll be able to attend. I've even planned a session, so I'm hoping to make it this year!
Also on a related note, most of the CiviCRM team are currently planning world domination at their meetup in India.
Drupal Planet Feed Marketing
It seems somewhere along the line drupal.org/planet got popular. According to some stats by Kieran, over 16k people are using planet and it's RSS feed, that's a lot of community!
Bloggers who have feeds in the Planet syndication are encouraged to subscribe to the Drupal Marketing group. The goal being to gain grass roots promotion for Drupal events in future.
Elections Aftermath
The results of the Drupal Association Elections are in! Some great new people are at the Association, all the best from drupalfiles.info!
The Last 24hrs in Issues
As always, the issue queue at Drupal.org is buzzing with activity. Some of the more interesting issues in the past day are:
