Drupalcamp Colorado 2009 has come and gone. The event garnered over 200 participants - at least half of which came from out of State. Over 40 sessions (if you include BOFs and the opening and closing sessions) occurred over the two days ranging from pure business to the highly technical. Ubercart was heavily presented with Ubercamp partnering with Drupalcamp. The camp was followed by a media sprint.

pingVision presented in quite a few sessions:

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Vivek Kundra, the CIO of the United States, unveiled the new IT spending dashboards at usaspending.gov earlier this week. Tim O'Reilly has all the details in his blog post titled Radical transparency: the new federal IT dashboard. In short, the dashboards are designed to help CIOs of individual government agencies get a handle on the effectiveness of government IT spending. The site was built with Drupal.

This is a fundamental change in the way government is going to be run, and it is great to see Drupal play a small role in that. Great stuff!

I've just released a new module (fanfare) which seems to work pretty well. I have a couple of silly bug fixes to put up tonight (knew I should've called it "beta") but other than that it works great. It's called Node Reference Variables:
http://drupal.org/project/nodereference_variables

All it does is present a load of stuff (depending on other contrib modules installed and some admin options) via the hook_preprocess_node() preprocess hook for themers to use to do cool theming stuff with Node Reference CCK fields. Main feature I'm using is the jQuery UI tabs it provides.

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Kat Bailey posted a very kind review of my Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery book.

From the review:

The book aims to get people with little to no knowledge of Drupal or JavaScript up to speed with creating really awesome functionality, really fast. In fact, its title almost belies the breadth of its scope: although the use of jQuery in Drupal 6 is the one topic that it covers exhaustively, it doesn't skip over any of the basic tools or concepts required to get going with Drupal, and so it would work pretty well as a first Drupal book for any aspiring front-end Drupaler. It covers everything from the ultra-utra-basic ("what is CSS?", "what is a Drupal block?") to Drupal JavaScript Behaviors (and everything else in drupal.js), to JavaScript Theming, to AJAX, to building modules with AJAX functionality, to jQuery syntax, effects, and even writing jQuery plugins!

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Stephanie Pakrul and Chris Fassnacht from Top Notch Themes discussed Return on Investment and Ubercart. These are my notes from the presentation. I also took video that is broken up into four pieces at the end of this post. I was at the back of the room, so the sound is a little quiet. Hopefully it is still helpful.

They started out by talking about the strongest feature of Ubercart is its automatic integration with Drupal. That makes things relatively easy for the developer.

75% of users make a judgement about your company based on the design of a site. Business metrics can improve drastically with a good design. Quite simply good design can improve your conversion rate and improving you conversion rate is the investment that keeps on giving.

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Because of a bug in the Drupal 7 PostgreSQL chain (either in PDO or the database) BIGINT handling is not fixed in today's Drupal 6 release. And you wonder why I hate that database.

There has been some discussion in recent days regarding Object-Relational Mappers (ORMs), Drupal, and why the latter doesn't use the former. There are, actually, many reasons for that, and for why Drupal doesn't do more with the Active Record pattern.

Rather than tuck such discussion away in an issue queue, I figured it better to document a bit more widely.

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A little over a year ago, as we were putting the finishing touches on the Lullabot Learning Series, we needed a quick-and-easy way to sell our video downloads and DVDs. We took a look at several of the options out there and Matt ended up stumbling across Shopify, who's tag-line is "E-commerce made easy". Their solution is fully hosted and they claim "setup within minutes". And sure enough, within mere minutes Matt had set up a working site. Within a few hours, it had a Lullabot logo and mostly worked the way we wanted. It took us another day or two to wire it up to our shipping warehouse, and to Fetch, the company which we used for our digital downloads. Overall, it was a quick-and-painless solution.

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When it comes to search, Drupal seems to do OK by itself. However, there are a number of supporting modules which will make your Drupal’s default search even better. These include Porter-Stemmer (english only), Search 404, Search by Page, Similar By Terms and many others.

If you’re seekign to help an advanced user out, then modules like Search config can help with that. But what about the user who won’t dare go into the hidden area of ‘Advanced Search’? This is where the power is - right?

It sure is. This is where you tell Drupal what content types and categories you want to limit the search to. This is where a user, simply looking for a job on your site, which lists information about jobs, news, blogs and other items, can focus their results.

So, why don’t you stop expecting the user to figure this out, and just make it happen for them! That’s what this video is all about. Using the default Drupal search box and forcing it to focus on specific content types or categories. You control what Drupal searches for and you control where it shows up!

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Have you ever needed to remove a JS or CSS file in certain conditions such as a custom themed page? In Drupal 6 that has become a whole lot easier.

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We’ve talked through the ’strategy’ behind the proposed D7UX Information Architecture (IA), now let’s take a look at it in detail. What goes where.

Let’s go through each major section in turn:

Content

The ‘Find Content’ page, showing a searchable, sortable, filterable list of all the content on your site is the ‘landing page’ for the Content section of the site. From this page you can also choose to Add Content (although it is suggested that for Content Creators this also be shown as a Shortcut on the Toolbar).

Different types of content can be filtered into different tabs, as comments are, for example, on this page. You may also wish to provide separate tabs for content such as Products (if you have Ubercart running), or Events or Projects

Structure

This section of the IA groups together tools used to ‘build’ content for the website which both have and create a User Interface (UI), including:

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At last I can announce the release of my new six-hour video series from Lynda.com, "Drupal 6: Online Presentation of Data", which you can check out with a free one-day pass. (Of course it's also available to anyone with a Lynda.com subscription, starting at $25/month for all-you-can-stand training in over 600 topics.)

I first talked about this course in January and was able to implement at least one suggestion from your comments (about creating calendars). There are also videos about mapping, charting, and preparing data for tabular export, all built on a foundation of CCK and Views.

Since Lynda.com's audience is mostly graphic designers, the course starts out with an in-depth description of data structure: As you know, data planning is at least as important as implementation! And it's an essential subject whose subtleties elude most beginners.

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I've been on the go so much that I haven't had the mental space to sit down and articulate a lot of the cool stuff that is going on. A few weeks ago I took part in a new open source conference, Writing Open Source (WOScon). The conference was born from conversations Emma Jane Hogbin and I had last fall, and she took the ideas and made it a reality in Owen Sound, Ontario. It was very small but packed with awesomeness, from people to ideas to food. There were quite a few exciting ideas for the Drupal community which will get written up and worked on down the road a bit. Lots of folks have written up summaries* of the event itself, but that single event has started something quite a bit bigger. The last day of the conference we transformed the conference website into a new community site and started a new Twitter/identi.ca hashtag for #wosdocs. We've started a new open source community to focus on documentation. That may not sound exciting to lots of people, but it is, even if you aren't a "writer" and here's why.

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Designing an Information Architecture (IA) for Drupal is an incredibly challenging project - essentially you are trying to design an IA that allows just about anyone to do just about anything. Flexibility is very often the enemy of good design - people make good and fast decisions with fewer options not more - but how do you choose the right options so that they work for as many people as possible? Tricky stuff.

To give you a sense of the breadth of the scope - we need to design for both:

• people who use Drupal every day (efficiency & capability is key) and people who are brand new (evaluators & learners - does this make sense to me, does it appeal to me, will I be able to use it to do what I want?)
• Verity, the content creator (ref: Who Is D7UX for, very limited set of tasks but very frequent use) through to existing power users/developers (know Drupal inside out and don’t want the UI to get in the way)

In devising the proposed information architecture we have applied the following principles/philosophies/guidelines:

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Designing an Information Architecture (IA) for Drupal is an incredibly challenging project - essentially you are trying to design an IA that allows just about anyone to do just about anything. Flexibility is very often the enemy of good design - people make good and fast decisions with fewer options not more - but how do you choose the right options so that they work for as many people as possible? Tricky stuff.

To give you a sense of the breadth of the scope - we need to design for both:

• people who use Drupal every day (efficiency & capability is key) and people who are brand new (evaluators & learners - does this make sense to me, does it appeal to me, will I be able to use it to do what I want?)
• Verity, the content creator (ref: Who Is D7UX for, very limited set of tasks but very frequent use) through to existing power users/developers (know Drupal inside out and don’t want the UI to get in the way)

In devising the proposed information architecture we have applied the following principles/philosophies/guidelines:

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This is the first in a series of posts discussing the proposed information architecture (IA) for D7UX.

Before we get into too much detail, be sure to check out this great video that Roy Scholten (Yoroy) posted recently that helps explain some of the key features and rationale of the IA and how it relates to the current Drupal information architecture.

This is the first in a series of posts discussing the proposed information architecture (IA) for D7UX.

Before we get into too much detail, be sure to check out this great video that Roy Scholten (Yoroy) posted recently that helps explain some of the key features and rationale of the IA and how it relates to the current Drupal information architecture.

Yesterday we took the beta-wraps off of Acquia Search, and I followed up with a post about why Acquia Search matters for site visitors. We're still having some good discussions in the comments and the Twitter-sphere, but today I want to talk a bit more about the technical details. How does Acquia Search work, what does our infrastructure look like, and why is it a great deal for site owners?

Acquia Search is a hosted search service based on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The way it works is that Drupal sites push their content to the search servers hosted by Acquia. We index the content, build an index, and handle search queries. We provide the search results, facets, and content recommendations to your Drupal site over the network.

Your site's data is protected in transit by SSL and by HMAC authentication in the Acquia Network. Plain english? The data is encrypted so anyone snooping in the middle can't read it and the request is authenticated which means that the Acquia Network knows you sent the request you claimed to, and you know that messages received from the network are legitimate.

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Yesterday we took the beta-wraps off of Acquia Search, and I followed up with a post about why Acquia Search matters for site visitors. We're still having some good discussions in the comments and the Twitter-sphere, but today I want to talk a bit more about the technical details. How does Acquia Search work, what does our infrastructure look like, and why is it a great deal for site owners?

Acquia Search is a hosted search service based on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The way it works is that Drupal sites push their content to the search servers hosted by Acquia. We index the content, build an index, and handle search queries. We provide the search results, facets, and content recommendations to your Drupal site over the network.

Your site's data is protected in transit by SSL and by HMAC authentication in the Acquia Network. Plain english? The data is encrypted so anyone snooping in the middle can't read it and the request is authenticated which means that the Acquia Network knows you sent the request you claimed to, and you know that messages received from the network are legitimate.

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Update: #D7CX pledges are for all, not just top 40 module maintainers. all modules should pledge. non maintainers pledge help w/ docs, QA. there is a pledge for everyone.

Drupal 7 is going to be a phenomenal release. The code is miles ahead of Drupal 6, and the D7UX work is poised to bring us a giant leap forward. I really think we are going to make a major difference in CMS land and in the world in general with this release.

In order to make the biggest possible impact, we need most of the top 40 Contrib modules to have full Drupal7 releases on the day when core Drupal 7 is released. Our failure to accomplish this for Drupal 6 was devastating. So, let's turn our attention toward #D7CX - Drupal 7 Contrib Experience.

I want to collect pledges from maintainers to support the #D7CX effort. A pledge consists of writing a statement like below at the top of your project page on drupal.org. Here are my three pledges ...

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