Three months ago, I posted a request for people to take over some of my modules, so I can concentrate on supporting the set I am actively developing and using better, and the other modules get proper maintenance going forward from other fine folks in the community. Nearly all of the modules found their maintainers, but I am still searching for a new maintainer for filebrowser module.
This module provides an FTP-like file browsing interface. I developed this for drupal.hu, where we used to have a custom Subversion backed Drupal interface translation repository, this module providing the file browsing interface on top of it. It has highly customizable output already, but has issues which would push it farther away from being an FTP-like browser, and more like a media asset browser.
Let me know, if you are interested. I'd rather orphan the module in a month if nobody is interested in keeping it up. I don't like "pretending" to be a maintainer, when I am not doing actual maintenance on the module.
At DrupalCon Barcelona, I decided to volunteer to fix the "event organization and promotion problem" around Drupal. We had a great "next DrupalCon" BoF where we discussed a lot of bigger and smaller details, and it was decided that we should retain this knowledge. Robert Garrigos announced the BoF initially to hand over the knowledge they learned while organizing the event, so we needed to find a permanent place to write up these notes.
This was also a good opportunity for me to step a bit ahead from the "internationalization and localization guy" stereotype. Now that we are growing the Drupal system to support local and international communities of all sorts, we should improve our infrastructure to help our own communities grow and promote themselfs. That is the next step for world domination, I thought.
I am back home again from DrupalCon Barcelona 2007. I must say that it was a very exciting event. It was fantastic to meet people with whom I last met in person in 2005 in Antwerp (on the first famous meet-in-person developer meeting which was in a hotel basement). The Drupal community grew a lot since then. Dries mentions that last years Brussels conference had 150 people while this years Barcelona event had 450, which means the conference is three times bigger.
FrOSCon was a great conference. Lots of interesting people, lots of new information shared and discussions participated in. Although I did not have time to process and upload the photos yet, I found Bonn, Cologne and Sankt Augustin to be perfect places to stay in.
One of the best things about the conference was that all our sessions were recorded, so you can not only download my slides, you can also see me having my first mistakes with presenting on a Mac. After all, I am a recent convert, and I still use the Mac and my Ubuntu side by side. Pushing aside the issues caused by the first time I presented with a Mac, I think I did a fairly good job of giving an overview of all the hard work of people who contributed a huge amount of their work to make Drupal 6 work better in different languages.
With the support of the Drupal Association, I traveled to Bonn this Thursday and played the tourist around the city that day. I have been to Cologne yesterday (have seen fantastic sights in both cities), and we ended the day with a nice dinner with people here for the conference and guys from the local user group. See some of Morten's pictures which are already up.
We also ended up at our hotel for some night drinks, and I actually met with some of the nice people I know well from the PHP community (from my previous deeper involvement with the PHP project). It turned out that I switched from the Drupal guys table to the eZ Publish table (lots of people staying in the same hotel). All-in all everybody is very nice, we mixed up quite well.
The conference is also going well, although there are lots of German talks, which some of us can't understand unfortunately. But this means we are progressing with core patches in the meantime, so if you have some pet issues, be sure to continue work on them.
Again, thanks for the Drupal Association for sponsoring the event, I would not be able to make it without their support! And special thanks to Robert Douglass, who had a very good sense of flawlessly organizing the Drupal presence so far.
To cater to the needs of multilanguage websites, Drupal and other content management systems should take into account the different uses of these sites and the unique content and interfaces they provide. For example, a search site where content will not be translated might need different languages in its interface, while a personal blog where posts are entered in different languages might need many different features.
Although Drupal itself provides a central CVS repository for the Drupal core code and contributed projects management, it is well known that people use other tools for their own purposes. There were several ocassions, when private Subversion repositories were used to develop new core functionality (such as Forms API or the multilanguage changes coming up in Drupal 6). Some people also like using BZR to manage their own changes easily.
A very detailed introduction hit my web browser today though, explaining how can you manage and even upgrade your Drupal installation (including contributed modules) using Git, even keeping local modifications.
Development Seed is one of the (as far as I see) lesser known Drupal solution providers, who mainly concentrate on intranets, mobile stuff, aggregation and all kinds of good causes to use Drupal for. They are working with smart people of whom some are well known in the community.
We just had our 200th registrant signing up for DrupalCon Barcelona. This is great news, and I'm sure a lot of other people are planning on joining us as well.
Yes, that 200th registrant was me. I was struggling with my bank for more then a month to get my cards (including a virtual MasterCard, which allows me to pay online as securely as possible finally). Then I was away for a week on holiday, so just as I am back, I noticed I can be the 200th registrant which was a good spot to catch :)
Last November, I started off Drupal.hu/English with the intention that more Hungarian contributors will join and share their experience with fellow English speaking Drupalers through that channel. As a matter of fact, people like to keep working around their own homes, so there was only one post from Tamás Amon apart from my continued posts. It was just time to acknowledge that the English Drupal.hu blog was carrying my thoughts, documenting my work and ideas, so it was evident to move it out of that place and make it my own blog (which I never had one myself before).
