As already announced, the Guardian Open Platform has kindly agreed to sponsor OGN13. Torchbox will with their typically good grace be sponsoring the venue and my time, so that leaves Open Platform free to provide some refreshments. After today’s nervous phone conversation, I could do with a drink myself.

Now you can also edit nodes in nodereference fields, while you’re on the page to edit the current node! That means you can be on the edit page for e.g. a publication, but edit the author biography node attached to it by a CCK nodereference field. There’s little edit buttons to the side of nodereference autocompletes which . Also, once you’ve edited the node in the lightbox overlay and it’s closed, any title edits are also changed in situ to help you envisage how the page will look without having to refresh.

I did some of the work—mostly that leading from ɑ-0.2 to ɑ-0.3—during handy gaps between talks at Drupal Camp UK, held at BBC Manchester a couple of weeks ago. I wish I’d caught the wave of blogging about it at the time, as it was tremendous fun. The talks were all of a very high standard, but what felt more important to me was meeting people in the UK’s Drupal community, and realising at first hand that the fun-loving, Drupal-interested, hard-drinking weirdos (that I’d always hoped were hiding here and there on the IRC channels and forums) really do exist.

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The Guardian’s Open Platform and Datastore work has really put them at the forefront of modern media. They’ve got a data API, client libraries in PHP, Python, Java etc, and swathes of online documentation, makes them a match made in heaven for Oxfordshire’s geeks.

While we’re on the subject, the Guardian Datastore is also running a competition to win a Flip Mino HD camcorder. They want ideas or tools from you which can bring their data to life. More details on their site, but maybe one for the next Oxford Geek Jam?

Time went by, as it was wont to do, and I still had a slightly incomplete diagram of the Django internal architecture on my desktop. The Django Book had since been reorganized, empires had risen and fallen, we had probably passed peak oil, and I still hadn’t any use for that fecking diagram.

In an attempt to just get rid of it I’ve polished it up and posted it here: a three-page PDF of Django’s architecture. It’s got callout boxes and different colours and everything. Feast your eyes on it; move rapidly between pages, as in a flick-book; complain about the fact that it’s not much of an improvement on the original. Just don’t leave it on my desktop, please.

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Bruce Lawson, Open Web Standards evangelist at Opera, is no stranger to Oxford Geek Nights, and covered new developments in accessibility back in OGN10. This time he’ll be discussing the forthcoming new standard for hypertext markup, HTML5, and what effects it will have on web-browsing as we know it.

Andrew Walkingshaw, co-founder of Inkling Software, will present the rise (and further rise) of their service for data visualization and storage, Timetric. He’ll also be discussing recent work by the Guardian which has incorporated Timetric visualizations, including a recent article on the relative purity of illegal drugs seizures over time.

We still need microslot talks, though, so if you’re interested then do volunteer.

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The flowcharts have been especially useful in coding in the most Drupalish way possible. Drupal core (and well-behaved modules) is built with a hook-based architecture. That means that before and/or after important events, Drupal calls all the functions which follow a particular naming convention: any module which, in effect, implements a hook. That means your code can tag along with Drupal’s powerful core, making hook essential to developing modules efficiently.

What’s changed between Drupals 5 and 6? Not much, to be honest:

• Loading now tries to grab an object, rather than checking if an ID has been returned by the database first
• Updating clears the sessions for newly-blocked users, effectively kicking them out; it also sends notification emails through _user_mail_notify
• Creating doesn’t grab a new ID for the user, pre-creation, owing to D6’s better database abstractions

For your convenience and mine, all six workflows are now in the same PDF. That makes it easier to compare 5 and 6 side by side, but it also makes clear some of the very minor errors I made in the original Drupal 5 diagrams. Well, best let them stand, for transparency’s sake. And besides: if a man’s errors are his portals of discovery, you’d be lucky to fit the chipmunk of serendipity through these.