Drupal

Drupalcamps are growing like mushrooms around this region of Europe. While we've had one day Drupal conferences in Hungary for several years now, the Czechs joined the ranks last year and now Slovaks and Romanians will enjoy a gathering of like-minden drupalers this year. The next event coming up is Drupalcamp Bratislava on Feb 27th and 28th, 2010.

As it turns out, the honored Jakub Suchy will not be able to present at this Drupalcamp about Drupal security, so I was approached to step in. I was more than happy to participate and continue spreading awareness of security best practices. I hope to pack a good amount of tips for site maintainers and module/theme developers at the same time.

As it currently looks like, Drupalcamp Bratislava is full, but you can still sign up for the waiting list in case not all registered attendees will be able to come.

If you can't make it to Bratislava, or you are looking to attend a full-English-speaking event, Drupalcamp Romania comes up in the summer - June 5th and 6th, 2010.

Last year DrupalCon Szeged 2008 introduced a few new technologies for helping people find out where things are happening both in terms of on-site conference activities and extracurricular fun. We've introduced a digital whiteboard which was using fixed size Drupal node displays set up in a wiki form, so everyone could edit any whiteboard item. This was helpful for people checking in from hotel rooms for announcements and also on-site because the building was so huge (see below) that running to the whiteboard every so often was not an option.

Photo by tactus from Flickr

Even after 1.5 years, people keep asking about certain things on the website, so I decided to start off with the whiteboard and explain how we did it. Sharing the exact solution we used to do would not cut it though, since we used Drupal 5 and some custom code based formatting, which would not be up to today's standards. So I recreated the whiteboard using the latest Acquia Drupal codebase instead, merely configuring some content types, permissions and a view.

For this starter recipe I used Drupal core and Views only from the Acquia Drupal package, so you can also repeat with just these modules only.

When we talk about video streaming, many people still think of expensive hardware, dedicated uplink capacity and a complicated server side video encoder. However, nowadays video cameras in mobile phones and online streaming services can solve most of the problems for us if we sacrifice a bit on video quality. Drupalcamp Prague was just over this past weekend, and while I was busy presenting two sessions, demoing Acquia Gardens in a third one and speaking of contributing to Drupal in a fourth one, István Palócz was trying to ensure live streaming of the conference will be online.

In practice, the only hardware he used was a Nokia E51 mobile phone. Although it was attached (glued) to a laptop as seen in the picture, the laptop only served as an immediate camera stand. The phone was indeed plugged in almost the whole time to avoid the battery becoming empty, but the streaming was done solely using the phone hardware. Features used to stream were built-in wifi support in the phone, so the streaming can use the event's wifi service to stream the video and the Ustream broadcasting application available for some Nokia and Android phones. Though there is an iPhone app available, that does not support broadcasting.

With a capable phone, wifi and a ustream account, István was able to stream almost the whole event. Outages included when he actually needed to grab lunch so did not arrive back on time for the session and when he got a call. Still, those watching the stream were happy to see the sessions live and enjoy some of the program. I'm not highlighing this streaming technology for its stunning quality (although video quality definitely depends on the camera in the phone). You can check some of István's recordings to see the quality. It's the simplicity of the solution that is amazing. Just plug in your supported phone to a power outlet and stream over wireless. Way to share with the Drupal community!

Know of any similarly simple streaming solutions?

Mark Boulton created the new Drupal wordmark as part of the Drupal.org redesign efforts. As highlighted by Jeff Traynor of Raincity Studios, the newly relaunched Drupal.com now uses this new wordmark as identification for Drupal and the wordmark is also destined to land on Drupal.org as part of the redesign (implementation unfortunately still underway).

So why not include the wordmark in shipping software as well? A logical step would be to have it on the installation and update (also known as maintenance screens). The patch for using the new Seven administration theme for installation and updates does just that. Because it is only a first approximation of how this should look, I'd love to get help cleaning it up and polishing things like lining up items, correct font sizes and fixing graphics - so we get a really polished experience for people's first Drupal encounter as well.

Moshe Weitzman recently started the D7CX movement to rally people to get Drupal 7 contributed modules upgraded and released on time for the Drupal 7 release. This would be a great boon to the Drupal 7 release, which shapes up to be a huge improvement over Drupal 6 already. He also suggests a contributed module release manager who can help with (among other things) ensuring that tools are available to help people upgrade.

Me being the guy, who maintains modules important for the translation of Drupal interfaces, such as l10n_client, potx and l10n_server, I looked at this movement from my angle. While my modules are not among the highly popular top 40 modules Moshe highlights, these tools are used to translate them and reach many parts of the globe. So in part on Acquia sponsored time and my free time, I went ahead and ported both the Localization client and Translation template extractor to Drupal 7. Both had their own challenges. The client port is just a direct functionality port, so does not include real string context support yet (a feature new to Drupal 7). The template extractor however got full context support to match what Drupal 7 supports currently. It also got its coder_review integration updated. Both modules now have their 7.x-1.x development snapshots downloadable.

Thanks to these updates, I hope people working on the D7CX movement will not be in the dark about localization API changes and usage limitations of the new API. You can run the template extractor on your code or run the code review from Coder review to get error reports when the localization API was not properly used. While Coder review includes some rules on its own to test for some common errors, only using the actual tool translators use can tell you all the errors you can make while writing your code.

Future plans include backporting the Drupal 7 parsing support from the template extractor to Drupal 6 (which would be easy except a little API change required), so when integrated with the localization server, contexts would be properly stored. Which would require an update to the localization server too. The goal is to have a Localization server system which can be used to translate Drupal 7 core and modules, so translators can work on their part before the release too. Also, the localization client would pass on the context information too to the server, so people can keep using that to translate and share their work right away.

People keen on magic names can just refer to this effort as D7TX, the translator experience ;) Have fun using these tools, and as always report bugs and provide patches please!