Drupal

The Federated Social Web and Drupal - Notes from the Drupalcon BOF meeting

The first meeting in a Drupal-specific context regarding the Federated Social Web took place at the Copenhagen Drupalcon. It was very interesting both because of the range of people interested and because we got a first-hand account of developments from James Walker who is a key part of the Ostatus effort. This blog post is a brief write-up of what was discussed and links to further information.

The news from the future are promising but... - Copenhagen's Drupal Core Development Summit

While the focus of the Copenhagen Drupal Core Development Summit was, rightly so, placed on making progress with Drupal 7 some time was dedicated to looking into the future. In this post I try to find some common themes across the requirements and challenges set for Drupal and some of the issues to look out for in order to meet these challenges.

Drupal Entities - Part 2 - The what, where and when of Entities

The second post in a series that explores Drupal entities. While in the first post we look at how we got to where we are in this post we try to give some more depth to the definition of what is an entity and discuss where and when they should be used.

Drupal Entities - Part 1 - Moving beyond nodes

One of the biggest changes at the architecture level of Drupal 7 is the introduction of entities as an abstraction for content. In these series of blog posts I take a look at how Entities came to be, what are they exactly and how they can be used in modules. This first post goes looks at how entities landed in Drupal 7.

Open Sourcing Drupal Training

As Drupal gains popularity, the need for developers is increasing and consequently so is the need for trainers. Let's make sure that the first point of contact for people to the community is a positive experience by open-sourcing our methods of teaching.

Drupal has some (entity) relationship issues

With entities Drupal took a huge step forward in providing conceptual clarity in how it deals with things like users, comments, taxonomy terms and nodes.

I believe there is one more step to take to bring even more clarity that will hopefully be possible in Drupal 8. This is the content of my Core Developer Summit lightning talk- hopefully it is not completely off the mark.

Custom Apache Solr filters - trials and tribulations

Where we recount the enjoyment that was had by mistakenly thinking that there was a simple solution to our search problem, then stumbling across one of the few cases that seem not to be handled "out of the box" by the Apache Solr module and learn how much fun it is to write your own faceted filters.

On Supporting Activity Streams in Drupal

Supporting Activity Streams in Drupal is an interesting problem. On the one hand you have the endless possible actions afforded by Drupal and on the other hand you have the necessarily restrictive standard on which to map those actions. Add to that the need to make this as transparent to the user as possible and it becomes a really fun little exercise. In this post we take a brief look at Activity Streams and what some of implications of supporting them in Drupal are.

De-centralised social networks and Drupal

While centralised (or at least single-point of control) social networks are dominant right now, social networking is really something bigger that what any one company should handle. Work is underway to provide the necessary technology stack to achieve that and we would love to see Drupal lead the way the same way it has done with Semantic Web technologies. This is hopefully just our one of many contributions in that direction. We set the scene and figure out what would be a good, practical first goal.

The Drupal Learning Curve - Myth or Reality?

Does Drupal really have a steep learning curve? If you read the usual CMS comparison posts around the web that seems to be the general consensus. But I don't believe that is entirely fair and, as most things, it is all about relativity - how steep the mountain is depends on what is at the top of the mountain once you get there.