Tech-Wanderings of Greg Holsclaw

It is a bit tardy, but last month I attended the Google I/O conference. It was a two day conference where Google was able to showcase many of their open APIs, demonstrate how to use them, as well as having more general fireside talks about the future of HTML and a whole Social track highlighting Open Social, OpenID, and OAuth technologies. Chris DiBona gave his Open Source is Magic talk, which he gave as a keynote speaker at the Boston DrupalCon.

The main reason I am writing is that most of the speakers were mentioning how many installations of a particular API are out on websites, as a testament to how easy it is for developers to use their APIs. The thing that irked me is that many CMSs like Drupal have developed wrappers for their APIs, increasing the pool of potential users beyond developers, to Drupal users.

So I just had one of those moments when I realized that Drupal is creeping into all aspects of my subconsciousness. Today, a normal ordinary word morph into a Drupal related abbreviation. On the Bay Area Drupal group mailing list an email just went out with this as the subject line, "[BDUG] re: Drinks"

My mind instantly wondered if this message would have some new cool links for Drupal resources.

Drinks - Drupal links

No I am not trying to redefine the word. I am just showing how pervasive Drupal has become in my head.

So when I am trying to explain or evaluate the value or health of an open source project, the visibility of the project to the outside world is one key indicator. That being said, the Google Summer of Code (Drupal announcement, http://drupal.org/node/249455) is a great measure to evaluate how a project is doing, and maybe where it is going, especially when compared to other like minded projects. Here is a quick breakdown of the number of projects that Google is sponsoring for a few hand picked projects.

Drupal: 21
Wordpress: 8
Joomla: 15
Plone: 5
Zope: 5
Xwiki: 10
Wikipedia foundation (partial MediaWiki) 4
Moodle: 12
Django (a python framework): 4

I might have missed another CMS/CMF project, but once again Drupal is on top in the number of projects sponsored by Drupal (one more than last year it seems). I believe this establishes that Drupal has a well running community that crafts acceptable projects that are well staffed, both from the student and mentor side. So many sponsored projects by Google means they are confident Drupal is worth investing in, and will be around for a long time. Great job Drupal.

Drupal sometime gets a bad name because designers have a hard time theming the site. It is true that you need to know more PHP than a designer ever wants to know, but if you get a good theme implementor, working along side your design, you can get sites look like this: Vintage Faith Church:

My church needed a website that they could updated more easily than flat HTML files through Dreamweaver, and one that would use an in house designer, with custom art an photography donated by the community. They also have a Drupal developer willing to theme and implement the entire site. (Showcase page on DrupalCon, Boston, vote for the designer! (I just implemented it))

Well, Drupal's visibility is surely rising. I bought a jQuery book for reading on the long flight home once Boston DrupalCon, 2008 is over (yes, I will blog about it later). In jQuery in Action in the introduction, the author is giving examples how jQuery is taking the JavaScript world by storm, 'winning the support of major websites such as MSNBC, and well regarded open source projects including SourceForge, Trac and Drupal' (emphasis added).

Three cheers for Drupal and for the start of another great DrupalCon.

I have written up the complete case study/showcase description at http://drupal.org/node/224003. Here is the intro quote:

Dog Park USA is a testament to the leverage Drupal as a Content Management Framework (CMF) gives web site developers. With the large array of core and contributed modules, and a bit of experience, the short time it takes to get a functioning site up and ready for content contribution can be astonishing.

Since my wife and I are developing this site in our spare time, our limiting factor is time. Re-inventing the wheel is not something we want to do, and with the speed, breadth and depth of Drupal, its contributed modules and its great community, we didn't need to.

The article contains brief descriptions of how we created the desired functionality through Drupal's module, links to all the pertinent module, themes and support documents, followed by some points of customization that really made the site our own.

Even though I will only be able to attend Monday/Tuesday and Wednesday until lunch (a company off-site is scheduled the same week), the proposed sessions were more than enough for me to make the trip out. Glad to know that Dries' State of Drupal will be on Monday, and I am hoping that the schedulers frontload Monday/Tuesday with the best sessions. There will be more than I can physically attend I am sure.

Quickly wanted to announce that I have created a Link to Us module that creates a page to display uploaded banners that can be used by others to link to your Drupal site.

The module will create well formed SEO links with full title, alt and anchor text determined by the node title, taxonomy term or other pages that are directed to the module. This allows users or writing contributors the ability to use consistent banners to link to your site. Also, link campaigns have a natural page that can be used to establish consistent, well formed links.

A demo can be found at the sponsoring site.

I know I missed the initial discussion when the 'rel=nofollow' attribute was attached to all 'Filtered HTML' content by turning on the 'Spam link deterrent' function, but I believe using the nofollow attribute on all these posts is detrimental to Drupal.org. It is true that link spam is always an issue for major sites, but the current solution is not fairly applied and is detrimental to search engine results.

First, when most links are marked as nofollow, the true internal (or organic) structure of the site is discounted, and the programmatic menu links are the only form of organization. Secondly, the users that have access to the 'Full HTML'filter don’t get their links marked, while the rest of us are marked as nofollow, which seems less than fully equitable. I am only bringing this up since I believe it may impact the future growth of Drupal.org, even if just a little bit.

For the company I am employed at, we are maturing in our development skills and in the complexity of the website projects we embark on. Since coming on with the company in January, we have all been using HomeSite as our development tool. But since it has lots of shortcomings as just a really good text editor, I decided to test out a few other IDEs to recommend my company switch to. I compared Eclipse with the PDT (PHP Development Tools) plug-ins and ActiveState's Komodo (while passing on Zend Studio, since we do develop in PHP, we are branching out into other languages as well. The following is the comparison and recommendation that I sent to our COO for consideration. Any comments or further options are welcome so I can update my full recommendation.