The Graceful Exits blog

NGOs and CRMs at DrupalCon Copenhagen

jp.stacey 2 September 2010

I've all but finished my "live blogging," such as it was: DrupalCon Copenhagen actually ended a week ago, so "live" is stretching it a bit. But I had a fantastic time, and a large part of that was attending the self-organising and friendly "Birds of a Feather" sessions that are planned by attendees on parallel tracks to the more formal, session-based conference.

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Thursday 1: Jennifer Lea Lampton, "Wordpress is better than Drupal"

jp.stacey 1 September 2010

Live demo

Want to get content into Wordpress

"Dumb" copying and pasting seems to work OK

Appearing is pretty bad, but oo, I have lots of themes. Really quick to switch them, and it just works.
Installing a new theme - JUST WORKS. So painless

Awfully large header. Can we change that?
An editor. So we can!

My mom has got images of horses too. What can we do with that?
Hey, we can create a gallery. Let's do that.

Now we can add some images. Upload one. There's small boxes for a bunch of information. But we can add them.

Can I make a page for my gallery to show on?

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Thursday keynote: Jeremy Keith, "The Design of HTML5"

jp.stacey 26 August 2010

Communities can become an echo chamber. I'm honoured to be here from
outside the community, and really glad you're getting people from
outside it to come to DrupalCon

HTML5? I mean the spec. What do other people mean?
This is like AJAX. Became "Anything cool done with Javascript"
Now HTML5 is "Anything cool on the web, full stop."
CSS3?

You can get the what from Google
The why is: design principles. Behind human endeavours
American Constitution
Karl Marx

XHTML - feels like a break
Enforced a coding style - validator more powerful
1.1 - have to serve as an XML mime type

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Live user journeys demo and comparison of Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla

jp.stacey 26 August 2010

I saw Hagen Graf do a live walkthrough of Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla from scratch back on Monday. Since then, I've turned my rough notes into a more detailed writeup on the Usability group on groups.drupal.org.

I don't think the unconference was recorded, and live demos don't work anyway if all you're recording is sound plus slides (is that rumour true?) so that writeup should help fill the gaps.

Wednesday 6: Richard Jones, "Sharpen Your Axe"

jp.stacey 25 August 2010

My CMS journey
Threw out proprietary CMS in 2008.
Started with D6

Early experiences
Massive learning curve.
Brought in contractors really early.
One good, one not so good

Early d sites
Took longer
Difficult to maintain
Different techniques from one site to the next
Confusing for site owners - didn't like admin backend. Way too complicated
Generally disappointing

Used to do this way

Designs
Web kit
Build structure
Then rework web kit
Rework design
Multiple loops of iteration

Not like that any more!

Time for a reboot
Could change everything
Design, ux

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Wednesday 5: Rasmus Frey and Martin Elneff, "Creating better solutions through incremental change"

jp.stacey 25 August 2010

You're not Microsoft - don't make things more complicated than they are
Also, it's not a USP, so you don't have to say "Agile" just to get the gig.

Rasmus Frey - consultant

NGO - Kvinfo? - research institutions on women gender women's rights
"We like women, so it seemed like a good fit for us"

Major "clusterfuck" of multiple websites, multiple developers, no documentation.
Library - traditional paper lib, 18,000 titles
Online magazine called "FORUM"
Mentor network
Searchable repository
Expert database
Women Dialogue
Kvinde woMen history

Question they aked us:

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Wednesday 4: Jeff Miccolis, "For every site a .make file"

jp.stacey 25 August 2010

Development Seed

You're a developer
who uses drush
and has deployment issues

a. problems

Deploying is ugly
Standard way to deploy - commit everything to a project-specific svn repos
Better than nothing, but e.g. what version of the Date module is in your repos?
But what if you've got a devel version of Date
and you're running PHP5.3
Then they're not compatible

Also

SA-CONTRIB-2010-666 !!! (not a real SA)
But you haven't SEEN this site in four months
Say you upstream-fixed the module with patches
Have to now look at svn/git logs for e.g. that directory

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Wednesday keynote: Rasmus Lehrdorf, "Performance"

jp.stacey 25 August 2010

Start in 1993. Mosaic.

Was working for a company building on greenscreen thin terminal dinosaurs, trying to extend tech.
Trying to build apps on these.
We have to move to the web.
Slow to move
So I quit.

Websites in 1993 had a CGI counter on each page that forked a Perl exec. Extremely slow.

What we wanted was HTML with inline exec on every page.

1994 PHP born. Embedded in HTML comment tags.
SQL from the start. MiniSQL.

HTML comments tiring, so read a book on parsers... Rewrote in 1995 to look more like a real language, but with no braces.

2001 Drupal

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Wednesday 2: Stuart Broz, "Making Drupal scale (Trellon sponsored session)"

jp.stacey 25 August 2010

Earth Day, biggest secular holiday

Collecting pledges for responsible acts - billion acts of green - through authenticated users. Slightly scary uncacheable numbers

Events page -Apache Solr as backend, geo IP lookup

Only a fair way in - two weeks before - where we realised the site arch wasn't right.
Single db server
One instance of web server with Pressflow
And a lot of hopes and dreams
Expected traffic was 25 million hits before 10am EST - in 2009 that's when the site went down!
We didn't expect to be involved in performance
But audits showed it was going to go down

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Monday 6: Randy Fay, "Debugging Drupal (hands-on techniques)"

jp.stacey 25 August 2010

Strategies

Think first
Drupal watchdog / Apache logs
Config / code changes
Internets?

Best practices
Source control,
Take notes
Backups
Local staging

Divide and Conquer
How to split problem down into parts that can be taken on

Divide by modules - turn off N modules [this only works on small sites, really]
Divide by code execution - step through code. Binary search. Ugh
Divide by code commits - git bisect

Tools and prep
Version control
Drush
Understand a debugger

"I enabled a module called 'fail'. DON'T DO THAT."

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