Drupal Italia il riferimento italiano per Drupal

Mar 19: Seattle Drupal March Meeting at Smashing Ideas

-- Please help getting the word out by reposting this for various programmer-but-not-Drupal lists groups etc.

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Start:  2010-05-15 23:55 UTC Organizers:  chachasikes

This summer, I am offering/organizing a hands-on open source developer class, for beginning developers.

Seeking
* student participants
* mentors
* additional project coordinators in other cities, if there is interest

Students
The class is intended for people with some experience building websites, who are ready to take the plunge and learn some of the most essential skills necessary to participate in open source development. We are likely to cover topics such as version control, making patches, working with ticketing systems, programming, using code standards, using drush.

Mentors
If you know some of the skills necessary to participate in open source development, you can be a mentor. You don't have to be an expert in all of open source, just aspects of it. I am looking to cobble together as many mentors as possible to support the program, but mentors who would be willing to stick with the program all summer are ideal. We will share back with the Drupal community some of our curriculum & what we learned in case others want to try this model of learning.

The Project
We will work on a 'garden blogging platform' (think 'basecamp for your garden.') This will be an installation of Drupal (like Open Atrium) but designed for the needs of gardeners. Ideally, this can be an ongoing program, providing lots of fun projects to learn Drupal development with (and help plants at the same time!)
This summer, we will work with 'geo-located gardens and plants.' I would also like to offer a winter session, which would focus more on calendar systems (ex. making seed germination times show up on the calendar.) I am about 90% sure we will work with Drupal 7. As project coordinator, I will provide a clear specification for what we will work on in the class, taking into account the interests of students and mentors, and other factors.

Twin Cities
If I could find 2-3 students who also live in the twin cities, as well as 2-3 mentors from the Twin Cities, that would be amazing. We will work with local community gardeners and I think it would be fun to test out mapping in real gardens here at home. After all, it will be summer!

The class is free, but requires at least 2-8 hours per week time commitment, between July 1 and September 1, 2010. As such, this class might not be for everyone.

The application deadline is May 15, 2010

Application instructions and full, updated, details can be found here:
http://www.chachaville.com/content/hot-and-dirty-drupal-developer-summer...

Feel free to contact me with questions.

About me
Drupal development is what I do everyday at Gorton Studios. I also have taught web design and interactivity at Ex'pression (a digital art college is Emeryville, CA) so I do have experience running courses for students. In the last few months I have started to learn about how project-based learning is used by professors in colleges, and it is very successful. This is the same thing I did in my web design classes, and so I know that it works. My students would probably put me more on the 'ass-kicker' side of teachers (but they learned a lot and gave me good ratings.) So, bear that in mind. But it will be summer, so we will scale back and try to do a project that involves being outside.
I also like plants a lot, though I am the world's worst gardener, except that I have a knack for roses. I really like learning about native plants. I am very interested in citizen science and civic participation, and that is why I have chosen this project for the summer class. I worked in science museums for 6 years, so I am interested to bring what I know about informal science learning to local community gardens and neighborhoods. Last year I worked on a blog localbiology.org - which at some point became unsustainable, so now I am trying a different tactic. :)
I started with open source/Drupal two years ago, but started working with websites in 1995. It has taken a lot of time/frustration to learn the open source skills, and I am eager to share what I know with others especially those who will also be inclined to share what they learn with others.

Training AttachmentSize drupal-corn.png57.71 KB Drupal Kata

Start:  2010-04-17 12:00 - 2010-04-22 12:00 UTC Organizers:  jim0203 User group meeting

Drupalversity seems to be building quite a bit of momentum, so it would be good to hold a BoF session at DrupalconSF so we can discuss how we're going to get it started. I don't know when or where the BoF will take place, but we can work that out later.

For details on what Drupalversity is, see the blurb below. It was written with n00bs in mind but it should be clear in there that there is work that can be done by Drupalistas from lots of different backgrounds and with various skillsets and levels of experience.

There is a g.d.o discussion about Drupalversity here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/42236. It gets a bit off-topic in places but there's some good stuff in there.
The wiki page where preliminary work on Drupalversity has been done is here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/49778.
A foundation of Drupalversity is that contributing will be straightforward. To that end, there's an article on how almost anyone can contribute at http://groups.drupal.org/node/50463.

Drop me (jim0203) a line if you've got any questions. Otherwise, here's the blurb:

Thanks to the fantastic work that has been done by the Drupal community, there is now a huge amount of excellent documentation available that people can use to learn Drupal. There is, however, a problem with how this documentation is organised. It can be excellent for solving problems reactively: for example, it's great for answering questions like "how do I build a view" or "how do I add images to my CCK content type". But there is currently no system of organisation that allows people to learn proactively. Proactive learning is what happens in most university classrooms across the world. Students don't have any pressing problems to solve, but they want to build up an arsenal of techniques that will be useful to them someday.

The Drupalversity project aims to provide this proactive organisation of Drupal training materials. The project will provide very few pieces of documentation itself. Instead, it will organise existing documentation into courses: structural documents that a student can use to progress in their learning of Drupal. Courses and categorised into streams. There are three main streams: site building and administration, theming, and development; in addition to these there is a foundation stream, Beginning Drupal.

Drupal newbies can help with the project immediately. In fact, unlike other Drupal projects, newbies can provide unique insights that more experienced Drupalistas are not able to provide. As new Drupal users learn Drupal, they will find certain resources useful, and others less useful. They get stuck at certain points, and experience specific "eureka" moments when something is explained to them which makes everything immediately clear. By noting down the pathways along which they are learning Drupal, new Drupal users provide a framework which Drupalversity courses can be matched to. Even more simply, these users can note down any useful resources they find on the internet, so these resources can be worked into future courses.

Courses can then be written by more experienced Drupalistas. These courses are then used by other Drupal newbies, who can, in effect, review the courses so that they can be reworked. In this sense, Drupalversity can never be finished: it is an organic, ever-changing project. Secondly, it is non-hierarchical and does not suffer from the problems inherent in what educator and education theorist Paulo Freire termed "banking education".

Documentation Team

Best of Publib Current Topics and Archives Video coming soon This edition of  Best of Publib covers

Anatomy
All successful web ventures do three things very well: 1) they drive lots of new people to visit their websites, 2) the websites themselves are great (offers a “unique” reason for visitors to keep coming back) and 3) a way to make money from visitors of the websites.

How are the tools that can help
Here are the types of tools you can use to help your website do these things well.

Popular open source scripts
These are the open source scripts I would recommend you try for each tool category.

All these scripts are robust, downloable for free, and written in PHP/MySQL which can be integrated into your one cohesive Web 2.0 venture. I guess that’s where freelancers like me come in. (sorry for the plug…gotta take care of business side of things too )

Let me know what you think of my breakdown of keys to web 2.0 success and my choice of tools and scripts. Comments welcome.

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Some of the newer technologies like cloud computing are talked up and raved about. But there is very little information or practical examples of how the technology is used. This scenario will explain the uses of :

• SaaS (Software as a service)
• SOA
• Web services
• Cloud Computing

The Software

Dj HackySack has been taking Spotify music lists from some clients and mixing them into compilations and setting them as background tracks to photo slide shows.
Graphical presentations of weddings, parties and graduations are set to music and clients are lining up. She’s been making big bucks for over a year now but the once small service is becoming time consuming, taking away time from her DJ activities.

Software as a service

Dj HackySack wants to take the service online. Customers will be able to upload their music lists and photos. The service will find the right music tracks online from Spotify and load them into a JavaFX application so the client can mix and fade them into a sound track. During playback they can stop the music at any time and place a photo.  After they are finished the whole thing is wrapped up into a mp4 file. The customer pays online and downloads the file.

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DevelopmentSeed posted a photo:

At this panel as SXSW, Eric shared ideas on open source business models and revealed what we're thinking for an Open Atrium Partners Program. More details on that at developmentseed.org/blog/2010/mar/13/ideas-open-atrium-pa....

Some ideas recapped from the SXSW presentation on open source business models

Yesterday while speaking on the SXSX panel Selling Your Milk When the Cow is Free, I talked about some of our plans on making Open Atrium development sustainable and for the first time publicly shared ideas on what an Open Atrium Partners Program would look like, in addition to plans for commercial support to follow. In this post I'll recap that and go into more detail on what we are seeing in a Partners Program and get feedback.

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All about the best cms on this earth "Drupal", community site to discuss, share, and for support. Write your own blogs about drupal, ask questions in forums, look for jobs, get your answers for drupal related questions. Come, contribute towards drupal and make it the best cms on earth.

Drupal Dojo

The first quarterly (hopefully ) Drupal meetup for the Albany, NY group took place last Saturday. Seven people from the upstate New York area attended and there was a lot of really good discussion about Drupal. Here's a summary of some of the things that we discussed.

Drupal for Educators

One member of the group was interested in using Drupal in an education setting. There was a discussion of whether or not Joomla or Drupal would best meet this person's needs. It's not surprising that we all felt Drupal was a great choice. That said I think it's important to be able to clearly and concisely make the value proposition for Drupal vs. other platforms such as Joomla and WordPress. Like anything else if we want Drupal to grow in a competitive environment then we need to know how to sell Drupal.

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Every once in a while I get hate mail.  But I will call it “information from the uninformed”. This particular information had to do with PHP indentation and coding style. I frequently use a particular style of indentation because I think it is the best for readability. But Drupal uses another standard.  Which one is better? There are others, which one is the best of the five?

The Purpose

Coding styles have particular purposes.  Many of them have to do with code editors and documentation software. But in general you will always want a code style used to:

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Museums and cultural institutions make up a large part of Palantir's business. We like working with them because we support their mission and they tend to have fun, twisted problems to solve. They like working with us because we tend to have fun solving twisted problems.

And we both like it because Palantir uses the industry-leading Drupal Web content management platform, and Drupal rocks for museums. In fact, it rocks so much that we'll be giving a workshop on Drupal at the Museums and the Web conference in Denver April 13-17th.

by German Villacreces

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In this post, I am going to guide you through the process of installing Drupal on a Linux box. I believe the best distribution for Drupal to be Ubuntu Server, the main reason for this is because we are going to use the Drupal Acquia Stack Installer, and its for Ubuntu, they recommend it. The Acquia Stack Installer is a package that includes Apache, MySQL and PHP all optimized for Drupal.

We are going to do everything from scratch so you need to have two things to start:

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I use Apache Solr for search on several projects, including a few using Drupal. Solr has built in support for replication and load balancing, unfortunately the load balancing is done on the client side and works best when using a persistent connection, which doesn't make a lot of sense for php based webapps. In the case of Drupal, there has been a long discussion on a patch in the issue queue to enable Solr's native load balancing, but things seem to have stalled.

In one instance I have Solr replicating from the master to a slave, with the plan to add additional slaves if the load justifies it. In order to get Drupal to write to the master and read from either node I needed a proxy or load balancer. In my case the best lightweight http load balancer that would easily run on the web heads was haproxy. I could have run varnish in front of solr and had it do the load balancing but that seemed like overkill at this stage.

Now when an update request hits haproxy it directs it to the master, but for reads it balances the requests between the 2 nodes. To get this setup running on ubuntu 9.10 with haproxy 1.3.18, I used the following /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg on each of the web heads:

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Selecting a content management system that meets your organization’s website needs is crucial.  Moreover, identifying key functionalities and features that will support your web services needs is an important step in the selection process.  Deciding factors for choosing one CMS versus another is vastly different from one company to the next. Intrinsically, Web managers should factor in and seriously consider cost, scalability, database management, design flexibility, control and of course, ease of use. CMSes and Web design software like Ektron, Drupal, Dreamweaver, Joomla, or Microsoft SharePoint– all of which have received awards and accolades for their emerging technology and Web 2.0 functionalities. Most Web managers and administrators are probably familiar with the aforementioned platforms, but I have to say not all Web content management systems are created equal and that is where Contensive comes in.

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DevelopmentSeed posted a photo:

We only have one way to sell Milk right now, and it ain't scaling, but we have plans :)

Eric is talking on a SXSW panel about Open Atrium and open source business modules. Details at developmentseed.org/blog/2010/mar/12/sxsw-selling-your-mi....

Looking at Open Atrium in the light of open source business models

This afternoon I am speaking on the SXSW panel Selling Your Milk When the Cow is Free about what it has been like to make the transition to selling products with Open Atrium.

We only have one way to sell milk right now, and it ain't scaling, but we have plans :)

On the panel, I'll talk about the bootstrapping process we undertook when Open Atrium first launched last July. I'll share how we communicated about the work we wanted to be doing in a way that let us book a set of clients that had similar needs, which allowed us to pool resources to build a good foundation for Open Atrium.

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And the answer to yesterday's "Eye grow Drupal" question is: Druplipets. Hundreds of cute little Druplipets, your friendly Druplicon chia pet. Druplipet is the newest member of the Acquia and Drupal Gardens family and will be making appearances at industry events this year. It is making its first appearance at SXSW along with a fun contest. Needless to say, Drupal chia pets are fun and powerful stuff!

bertboerland posted a photo:

I think I have spend about 300 mail right now and more then 100 hours for the Dutch DrupalJam. Love comes back to you...

or so I was told :-(

best thing: Bart Feenstra made at least as many hours as I did