robin's blog

In Seattle, our local Drupal User Group is organizing a Drupal conference called the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit.  This event includes technical and business oriented talks.  It's going to be a great time, and I recommend signing up now before it fills up. 

We are limited to 150 people, and we already have about 50 people signed up. 

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Ah, admin/build/modules...I really want to love this page. It lists all of my modules. It shows version numbers. There's a lot to offer. When you work on a larger site, there are so many modules. CCK, Internationalization, and of course Core provide long lists of modules. How do I find that one module in that big list?

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Is it possible to have one headset for my computer running Ubuntu and my mobile phone? The answer is Yes! At CivicActions, we have team members working all over the world. In order to keep us connected, we have plenty of meetings on the phone. Although I have resisted, I finally decided to get a proper headset for my SIP phone.

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This Saturday the Seattle DUG is hosting a one day DrupalCamp. We are calling it a MiniCamp, because we usually manage two day events. This one is a little different. In true BarCamp style, we are not specifying speakers or topics. Heck, a schedule barely exists. The intent is to bring people together, to cooperate and learn more about Drupal. I am really excited about this, because there is more opportunity for everyone to participate.

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Two recent projects at CivicActions had some queries that were causing performance issues. What is interesting to note that in both cases, we found that adding a correct index to a table or two helped mitigate some of the issues.

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I noticed on the Drupal development mailing list, that Drupal 7 has some significant changes for file handling. From Angie Byron (webchick): I just rolled the second in the series of Drupal 7 unstable releases for developers (see http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/2008-October/031094.html for more info). Among the highlights this release are: * Several awesome File API improvements. Files are now "first-class objects" like nodes and users are, the API has been dramatically cleaned up for better consistency, AND there are a slew of new hooks like hook_file_load() and hook_file_validate() for contrib modules to react to when stuff happens to files. This is a great enabler for some awesome stuff in core like image handling and document management. See http://api.drupal.org/api/search/7/hook_file for more info. A HUGE shout-out to Andrew Morton (drewish) for sticking with this patch throughout its long, LONG development cycle. :)

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Have I ever told you how much I love data? After listening to Larry Garfield's talk Drupal Databases: The Next Generation, I now love data more than ever! The database layer for Drupal 7 has been completely rewritten to take advantage of PHP's PDO extenion. Not only does it allow Drupal to work with many different database types it also simplifies how developers interact with the database.

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Drupalcon Szeged is one week away. I am glad I am attending, and I am planning on leading a Birds of a Feather (BOF) during the conference. The focus of the BOF is creativity and programming. I want to discuss the weird mix of human behavior and code. Sounds strange I know, so let me describe in more detail.

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DrupalCamps help bring out creativity. This weekend I attended Vancouver's DrupalCamp, and I really enjoyed myself. On top of it, I am always amazed by talking with others at these types of events. Other developers who I think really know their stuff said to me, "The camps are great. They remind of how much more I need to learn." I thought they knew it all!

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I had the joy of attending Linuxfest Northwest on April 26 in Bellingham, WA. The weather was great (just like last year), and the atmosphere relaxed and fun. Linuxfest is a 2-day community event, run by volunteers and free to the public. It is such a cozy atmosphere, and it is easy to interact with the speakers and the exhibitors.

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