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In a massive Cathy Theys double-header this week, hear parts rescued from our conversation at SyfonyCon Warsaw (which was plagued by technical difficulties) and check out Cathy's insightful session, "Patch Reviews: Get good reviews, give good reviews. Faster." It is full of practical advice to take your contribution to Drupal and open source software to the next level. In the podcast interview, we talk about the opportunities Drupal has given Cathy; some of the benefits of the refactoring that has gone into Drupal 8; joining up with the Symfony community: mutual learning, different styles of contribution, Drupal's new relevance; and the business case for open source contribution and sustainability. What do you do? I admire Cathy's energy and passion for contributing to Drupal and I find the patience and force of will she brings to getting new contributors up and running awe inspiring. She describes what she does modestly, "I come to conferences and I try and get people involved in the community and contributing. I also really like to hang out outside of the sessions and meet people and talk to them about the troubles that they're having and see if we can fix those troubles and make things easier for them, especially when it comes to contribution. In addition I work on patches and review patches. I also do mentoring." Drupal 8 refactoring #ftw! "I am most excited in Drupal 8 about what all this refactoring and the opportunities that it's given us. One of the things we can do in Drupal 8, that we can't do in other versions of Drupal is translate everything. We can do that because we have the background of unifying things: Things that are entity-like; they're all entities! Field-like? They're all fields now! When our APIs are consistent across all those things, it allows us to translate – across everything! That's a huge deal. We couldn't do that at all without the underlying stuff. It's so incredible." Contribution: the way forward? We touched on a couple of different aspects of contribution, including some that are hot topics lately in and around Drupal: Not only how to do it better (make sure you watch the session below), but also the business case for contribution, and looking for ways to make it sustainable. How professional are we already? "The next big thing is a coming out party for people who are getting paid to work on open source. I think people do it in the closet. People work on issues and it doesn't say at the end of their comment, 'this patch paid for by 10 hours out of my client project for shop X on project Y.' Not all the work gets done like that, but some of it does. I think people are reluctant to say out loud when they do get paid for things. I think we need a lot more information about what's actually going on before we start jumping to conclusions about whether or not it would be good or bad to do them. We need to figure out what is happening now before we try to make decisions about what should happen." Your contributions are your business card - "Any shop (Drupal service provider) that has developers that work on fixing issues in contrib. or core ... What's interesting is clients who are thinking about hiring people and they have choices. If they have a project [focused on a particular] subject like migration or multi-lingual. If they know the developer that work for their two shop choices, they can look up those developers on Drupal.org and see if any of them have ever worked on a [relevant] issue." This can be a big help when evaluating which service provider to hire. If they don't have this kind of experience, Cathy points out, "It doesn't mean they've never done client work on it and you'd want to have a conversation with that shop and see examples of their work." But contribution can be an indicator of whom you're dealing with and how committed they are to the tools they use. Sustainable contribution as a business - "We need to be a...

Part 1 of 2 - I spoke with Richard Miller and Tom Kitchin, software engineers at SensioLabs UK and its parent company Inviqa respectively, via a Google Hangout on Air recently. I wanted to learn more about PHP and Symfony from their perspective and how they think the Drupal 8 and Symfony2 are going to affect each other. In part 2, I learn the inside story on one of the first Drupal 8 sites online, www.sensiolabs.co.uk, what their goals were and how they built it and have kept it running since May 2013, and how Drupal 8 will change the way they design applications for clients going forward. PHP then and now Richard compares getting started in PHP 4 to what the PHP 5.4 (and beyond) world looks like, "I think there's been a huge shift in terms of people's interest in best practices that have come from elsewhere. The new generation of PHP frameworks are a huge leap forward even from a few years ago. Having Composer, a proper package management tool, had definitely changed how we work. I think it really helps. It has fostered a lot more interaction between different communities. Previously within PHP it was all very fragmented; now there's a lot more interoperability between these different groups. We've come on leaps and bounds in the last few years." Tom addresses PHP's growing maturity as a language and ecosystem, "I feel like I see a lot of things in PHP now that I was seeing coming into Java previously. I think it's good that it's bringing structure. Obviously, we need to have some degree of a plan ... since this runs everything now. The main difference between the desktop stuff I was doing in Java and the web stuff is that the web stuff gets used." What should people know about PHP and Symfony? Describing Symfony, Richard echoes sentiments about Drupal's choices in trading power and flexibility for complexity, "As frameworks go, it leaves quite a lot to your choice still. It provides all the tools to avoid having to do all those repetitive tasks involved in making websites, in parsing URLs, how to read controllers and things. Compared to other frameworks I've used and looked at, it is less 'opinionated' about how you actually do things within those controller actions so you get more freedom to work in the way you want, rather than dictating the approach. Dictating the way you work can help at first in projects; having everything laid out for you, you can get up and running a lot quicker, but then you find yourself fighting against the constraints of the framework over time. With Symfony, there's a bit of a 'super learning curve' at first, but you don't run into those 'you just can't do that' problems that I think you do face with other frameworks." "One of the better things about PHP," continues Tom, "is that people can get into it easily. Bringing people into development and these fields is a big discussion point currently. PHP is a good language to get into. The thing to keep in mind is the oft-repeated point 'The first thing you do with PHP? That's not how you do PHP. Please don't keep doing that.' The easy introduction is not how you want to continue, but it's nice that we can get people involved." And then move them along to better ways of working." Is Symfony going to improve Drupal? If so, how? "From a technical point of view," continues Richard, "there's Symfony components that have been used that save the Drupal community from reinventing the wheel, so it helps concentrate on more Drupal-specific stuff. It is making use of components that are part of a stable framework that's already in use out there and that's gone through various changes based on people using it." Is Drupal going to improve Symfony? If so, how? "There's also the benefit of bringing the communities closer together and we're learning stuff from Drupal. We've already seen improvements from contributions back from the Drupal community. We've certainly benefitted from those. There's...

The DrupalSouth code sprint was a huge success and a standout feature of an already excellent conference. I put this down to some ingenuity and some great preparation. I interrupted two of the people who made it all happen, Dan "dman" Morrison and Heike "HeikeT" Theis from Wellington, New Zealand, to get to know them better and talk about how they put together the code sprint at DrupalSouth. How to prepare a model code sprint If you've been to many of these events, you'll have seen how getting everyone up to speed at a sprint, who is doing what, and so on can end up eating a lot of time and productivity. I am not talking about mentoring time and helping new contributors – that is very productive! I'm talking about how the DrupalSouth team was able to eliminate a lot of friction by planning and informing participants at a high level of detail and then add structure and motivation to the mix. Plan in detail with clear instructions and information: When/Where What to expect What to bring How to prepare How to help Whom to contact for help Really, go check out the announcement page, the fantastic level of thought and detail, plus all the useful Drupal Ladder and other helpful links. Now copy it and paste it into your code sprint page as you are preparing :-) Add structure and motivation So far, so good. Now make your code sprint awesome: Dan and Heike can up with a set of actionable, bite-sized code sprint tasks (and bonus tasks) across 5 areas of contribution to Drupal 8. Anyone who completed the tasks for a given area was given a nice tag to add to their conference badge ... they also made a difference to Drupal 8, and got props from the rest of the conference all weekend. I saw more than one person sporting multiple badges being congratulated on Saturday and Sunday. The contribution areas and tasks were split out into these categories. Check out the full list of code sprint tasks on the DrupalSouth site! Community Contributor Developer Builder Tester Patcher The concrete, doable tasks, combined with the clear preparation instructions allowed people to arrive and get stuff done, feel useful, and be productive right out of the gate. Dan explains the problems that this structure helps fix: "I've been a [code sprint] mentor at a few previous DrupalCons. My experience had been that you get a big number of beginners who just want to join in and they get told, 'Here's an issue in Drupal core that's been open for 3 months, please patch it. They are people who haven't got the latest version of Drupal on their laptops. Some of them haven't even installed it locally before, so I saw this big gulf between what we want our core contributors to do in the code sprints ... yes, we'd like to close issues, we'd like to do patches ... and what these people thought they were going to do. I've seen faces drop when they realize that we're talking about Drupal N+1. These are people who are involved with Drupal, who are using it on a day to day basis. They're site builders, they've now just taken the step to get involved with the community. They've got a Drupal 7 site and we're talking about Drupal 8 ... We're talking two years in the future." Heike continues: "We are trying to bridge the gap to get people onto the [Drupal] Ladder. We pick them up when they arrive and we introduce them to those tasks and then we basically pass them on. However, most of these things are actually a good point to then go to the Ladder and continue." All of the materials are backed up by more documentation on the DrupalSouth website, which includes links to the Drupal Ladder. There is also healthy overlap between this set of tasks and the Drupal Ladder, "but it's our job to make it a little more in your face with a physical piece of paper; there's something you can point at. People are actually leaning over the table and looking at the thing...

At SymfonyCon Warsaw in December 2013, I spoke with Fabrice Bernhard, co-founder of Symfony service provider Theodo and President of the French PHP Users' Association, AFUP ("Association française des utilisateurs de PHP"), and we compared notes on Drupal, Symfony, and all things open source. Fabrice, meet Drupal "I was in Portland for SymfonyLive that was happening at the same time and same venue and was connected to DrupalCon. That was my first (physical) encounter with the Drupal community. It was an amazing experience. First of all, basic facts: 4000 people instead of 400, so a much bigger community, but also much more diverse. The Symfony community is very tech-oriented whereas in the Drupal community you see all these other influences from UX and design parts that are really interesting. It was nice to spend time with these people and discover much more than you discover at a typical SymfonyLive Conference." Fabrice joined the DrupalCon sprints in Portland. "It was all new to me. I didn't feel like I could fit in directly, but it was amazing. I saw the first-commit ritual." (This is one of my favorite moments at any DrupalCon.) "This is a great thing. I hope we will be able to import it into the Symfony community soon." Drupal: from maybe not, to yes please! I asked Fabrice what he thought about Drupal in the past (i.e. before Drupal 8). "I've always had a lot of respect for the solution, the community around it, and all the things you can do with it quite easily. But it's true that as a core geek, when you dive inside and you see some of the code, it's not the latest design patterns. It's not been architected from the beginning; you see that many people have contributed ... I wasn't keen on working in it if there wasn't a real benefit from the functional side, so I wouldn't have used Drupal for building anything custom. Symfony was much more comfortable for that." My next question was if new architecture in Drupal 8 and its inclusion of Symfony2 components is changing his opinion of Drupal. "The change is first of all cultural. The idea of having a nice core, nice architecture on the inside and getting the Symfony components because they are so well done is huge. It sends a signal to everyone in the web community. To Symfony developers it is, 'Hi! You can join in now and you can't complain anymore about the code. If you do complain, just contribute now.' The the Drupal developers, it sends a signal saying, 'We're growing fast and now we need a solid base.' To the whole PHP community saying we should be working together. We all have our own strengths, but when we work together it works better. And to the whole web community, because PHP has grown so well thanks to solutions like Drupal and because PHP has been criticized for not being a 'hard core' language. I would say Symfony brings this hard-core aspect to the PHP language and that Drupal takes it on and shows the web that we can be hugely popular and have high standards on the coding side." What are you most excited about in Drupal 8? "As a person who usually develops tailor made solutions, I want to use Drupal to take care of the whole content management [problem space] and use its power as a framework. Than I want it to communicate really nicely with some custom made parts of my Symfony apps. I've done some proofs of concept and I gave a talk at SymfonyLive London how to technically integrate Symfony2 projects with Drupal 8 (video below). Of course, the nicest way would be to use the API parts. That's why I am really interested in everything that goes on in the [Drupal core]. That is what will enable Drupal to communicate better with other parts of big IT systems. That is where it will really stand out from the crowd of content management systems." I wanted to know if Drupal 8's easy integration thanks to being fully RESTful would change how Fabrice approaches his business and works for his clients. "...

Part 2 of 2 - I had the great pleasure of speaking with Lukas Smith at SymfonyCon Warsaw in December, 2013. Lukas is a major contributor to open source and is involved in a range of projects, including the Symfony framework, Drupal, and many more. He is one of the 50 most active contributors on GitHub. Thank you, Lukas! In part one, we talked about how Lukas manages to contribute so much to so many open source projects, social competence in open source (I love this quote: "We talk about social incompetence among geeks, but actually I think many open source developers have a social competence that other people in other industries might lack, which is accepting people for who they are and finding common ground on the code that we love."), and aspects and potential benefits of the the PHP Content Repository specification. How Drupal and Symfony2 started dating Lukas was involved in the early conversations with Drupal core developers that led to the adoption of several Symfony2 framework components into Drupal 8. He was yet another PHP type who had written off the Drupal community as being ruled by the "not invented here, I gotta do my own thing" mentality and was pleasantly surprised when Larry Garfield contacted him about Symfony. "We got to talking. Initially they [Drupal core folks] were just looking for a way to objectify the request data. In the Symfony2 world, that is represented by the Symfony HttpFoundation component, but it turned out to be a little bit of a gateway drug I guess because more and more things happened after that." Some of the "things that happened after that" are Drupal 8 pulling in a bunch more Symfony 2 components, the Twig template engine, and several other new libraries. The "Getting off the Island" campaign successfully took the Drupal project from "Not Invented Here" to "Proudly Found Elsewhere". The benefits of "open-sourcing our open source project" are manyfold, from getting a larger developer community and therefore better code, to having more influence in the broader PHP landscape, and more. Our Drupal tool belt just got more awesome The architectural changes in Drupal 8, adding Symfony2 components, making it easily compatible with lots of other libraries and projects, seriously expands my toolkit as a Drupal developer. "If you're working more as an end user, maybe not as much will change. You get more high quality code or it might work better. But if you're willing to dive a little bit deeper, there are now lots of opportunities now working on the thing that you love – Drupal – but still interacting with other people. You have that as a career opportunity, as an opportunity to meet new people, to get around!" "We've gotten a few feature requests from the Drupal world, but we've also gotten patches from the Drupal world and people like Larry who traditionally have only been speaking at Drupal conferences, they are now out there. Cathy Theys is here at the SymfonyCon speaking. It really is an opportunity to meet new people, meet new communities, and broaden your expertise." Symfony just got more awesome, too Now that the Drupal community is getting to know the Symfony2 framework, "There are a lot of people providing feedback on how it works or how it doesn't work. There have been several feature requests that came in from the Drupal world that make absolute sense. Maybe it's part of that, but last year, it felt like every month some CMS was announcing that it was adopting at least some of the Symfony components. I think that Drupal in many ways paved the way. Many other CMS's were saying 'If we want to keep up with Drupal, we gotta get on this! We can't waste our time doing the stuff that Drupal is getting for free.' Drupal showed it is a viable approach. It increased our user base considerably. I read in Dries's blog post that he's hoping to get more talent by adopting more of the general development principles, but in turn, I am also...

Part 1 of 2 - I had the great pleasure of speaking with Lukas Smith at SymfonyCon Warsaw in December, 2013. Lukas is a major contributor to open source and is involved in a range of projects, including the Symfony framework, Drupal, and many more. He is one of the 50 most active contributors on GitHub. Thank you, Lukas! How do you contribute so much? About his contribution he says, "I don't know how I got to that number. I try to comment on tickets, try to network people, to encourage them to talk ... I guess it's mostly commenting. I guess I do a lot of that." Lukas is a partner at L//P (pronounced "leap"), "I can do part of that as part of my role at L//P." He says he has 8 hours of work time for pure contribution and probably adds that much again or more from his personal time. Projects he is a part of include Doctrine, PHPCR (the PHP content repository), Jackalope (the reference implementation of PHPCR), "a bazillion bundles for Symfony2", "and other stuff ..." :-) Open Source - communication, competence, common ground Lukas talks about meeting PHP core developers at LinuxTag 2001 and how open and accepting they were. "The cool thing about open source developers in general is that it attracts a certain type of people. We talk about social incompetence among geeks, but actually I think many open source developers have a social competence that other people in other industries might lack, which is accepting people for who they are and finding common ground on the code that we love." Getting off even more islands: PHPCR I was already excited about the idea of the PHP Content Repository specification as a way to standardize data storage and make it easier to exchange data between different systems. Lukas blew my mind a little bit when he explained, "We base this on the Java content repository specification (JCR) and the reference implementation of PHPCR [Jackalope], actually talks to the reference implementation of the Java spec ... This is really exciting. We're not only building something for the PHP world, we're actually bridging two communities that traditionally don't 'get along'. We're not compatible at all. That's really exciting. We've done tests together with Adobe CQ and Magnolia that both use that reference implementation as their storage repository and we can talk natively [using] PHP objects and talk to their storage and exchange data." "At the same time, once we get this into more PHP projects and CMSs, then we can exchange data more easily, but we can also work together. Rather than Drupal building their content repository, figuring out how to do versioning, how to deal with large binary data ... Typo3 doing the same thing, and Joomla! doing the same thing, we could start exchanging code and focus our energies more on what sets us apart rather than redoing the same things in all these different places." "The success of PHP is undoubtedly linked to the success of CMSs built with PHP, but these have such long histories. We were just evolving these APIs, adding things on, removing a little bit ... so many of these APIs are just not as consistent as they should be. The great thing about PHPCR is that we built this on JCR, which has 12 years of time that they put into this to come up with a consistent API around all the needs you have for content management systems. We've applied all that experience." Lukas is hoping to see PHPCR in Drupal 9 ... :-) More Lukas Lukas Smith also tweets as "lsmith" and has a blog at http://pooteeweet.org/

Ryan Weaver is the single biggest contributor to the Symfony2 framework's documentation (which is excellent, check it out!), a self-described Symfony evangelist, and lead at KnpUniversity.com, makers of fantastic PHP tutorial screencasts like this one on using Composer to include PHP libraries in Drupal 7. This is part 2 of a 2-part conversation with Ryan Weaver from SymfonyCon Warsaw 2013 - This recording is a little different: Ryan and I were chatting during SymfonyCon Warsaw. I had asked him about doing an interview for the podcast and we got to talking about our projects, business, and the open source world. At some point I thought, "I shouldn't lose this," and switched on my recorder. While part one is a more 'formal' interview as described below, this is an excerpt from our casual conversation on the floor of the convention. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed speaking with Ryan. Here, we touch on a bunch of things, including Drupal's history, sprints and the culture and value proposition of contribution; how clients are becoming savvy about open source and demanding more of us as service providers; in-person connections fueling remote collaboration; my personal contention that Drupal.org is better than GitHub would be as a home for the Drupal project (centralization, reputation economy, "Darwinian" survival of the fittest code); adding to existing solutions instead of reinventing the wheel (hello using Symfony2 components in Drupal 8 core!); the shift from "not made here" to "proudly found elsewhere" in Drupal and the new spirit of embracing change, PHP convergence and Drupal's new relevance ... In part 1, we talked about the great Symfony documentation and its team, discovering the power of community in open source (instead of doing it all yourself), Symfony2 components in Drupal 8 bringing the two communities together, the advantages (present and future) of loose coupling in Drupal 8's architecture, the next big thing, and more! Drupal's New Relevance The next step beyond "Getting off the Island": Drupal's innovations can now become relevant and helpful in the broader software world because the project becomes up-to-date in so many ways with the advent of Drupal 8. "I did a talk a couple of years ago at SymfonyLive, talking about Symfony components and that was one of the points I brought up," Ryan adds, "Okay, how great is it that Drupal's able to use Symfony components? That's great. But, what if ... fast forward a couple of years ... What if modules in Drupal start to become decoupled? What if the module, which holds everything right now, actually ends up being a small glue layer for Drupal? And all the innovation, all the core stuff that people have spent years getting perfect, is extracted to its own PHP library? Just a PHP library and the module leverages the library ... and I, Symfony developer or any other developer in PHP, now leverage this library that has all this amazing stuff in it! The possibility of the Drupal world starting to push things into the PHP world is incredible, with how big the Drupal world is and how many people are contributing to it." Ryan goes on to paint a vision of a more unified PHP community through this kind of mechanism.

Part 1 of a 2-part conversation with Ryan Weaver from SymfonyCon Warsaw 2013 in which we touch on the great Symfony documentation and its team, discovering the power of community in open source (instead of doing it all yourself), Symfony2 components in Drupal 8 bringing the two communities together, the advantages (present and future) of loose coupling in Drupal 8's architecture, the next big thing, and more! Ryan Weaver is the single biggest contributor to the Symfony2 framework's documentation (which is excellent, check it out!), a self-described Symfony evangelist, and lead at KnpUniversity.com, makers of fantastic PHP tutorial screencasts like this one on using Composer to include PHP libraries in Drupal 7. Not being the best is the best Ryan describes getting into an open source software in a way that describes the power of the community. Talking about the first time he saw a friend do scaffolding in Ruby on Rails, "I watched him do this command and thought 'That was 12 hours of work for me that you just did as one command'. The power of that blew my mind and I had to find something that did that in PHP, which is how I ended coming to Symfony. We've all done it: You start, thinking you're the smartest person in the world and doing your own thing ... I was slapped with the reality check of how wonderful it is for people to collaborate because I never could have done that. I would still be working on trying to get something of that functionality." Drupal + Symfony - How are we doing? "The code I've seen from Drupal people that have started to do things in more of the namespace/Symfony kind of way, has been incredible. There's a Behat extension for Drupal (Behat: BDD for PHP). It was made more or less by Open Sourcery in Portland and it is incredible! So you have all this Drupal: functions and hooks and all of as sudden, you look at their code, there's dependency injection and all these really advanced things. I've been really pleasantly surprised by the advanced things that they're already bringing to the code itself." Drupal 8 + Symfony + All the PHP In answer to the question "What are you most excited about for Drupal 8?", Ryan explains, "I see an increasing number of people that are coming from the Drupal world that are looking at Symfony. Not they're switching to Symfony, but they're increasing their options." He explains how Drupal-the-CMS can be perfectly complimented by a compatible, highly specific, custom Symfony application. "What's really exciting for a Drupal developer or a Symfony developer is when you're in Drupal and run into Symfony pieces, those are going to be the exact same Symfony pieces that you'll see when you're using the Symfony framework or Silex, which is the micro-framework built with Symfony. So whether you're using Drupal or the Symfony framework, or Silex, it is all exactly the same classes, objects, and ideas. So in Drupal, if you're getting the request object and you're getting post information, or files, or something, that is the Symfony request object, that is the Silex request object! The toolsets are being blurred. How dangerous are we now that Drupal people can do custom things and traditional custom developers can do Drupal more easily. It's really really exciting." "You could integrate a Symfony or Silex project with Drupal. You could have a Symfony project and it goes through Symfony's routing and you get inside of a controller where you normally render the page. You could forward that over to Drupal, pass the request to Drupal because it is a content page. You boot up the Drupal engine and pass the request over there, because they're using the same technologies. Normally, if you have two PHP projects, you can't really put them together. They'll crash into each other. But inside a single thread, we should be able to pass the information over to Drupal. Drupal does its normal page processing (not knowing it's not really the one...

This week's podcast is parts of a fun conversation I had with Ruben Teijeiro at Drupal Camp Vienna in December 2013. I "borrowed" him from mentoring Manuela Hutter at the code sprint to talk with me, but in the end, they both still managed to get a lot done that weekend. Thanks for your contributions, folks! Ruben's description of himself on his Twitter page says a lot about this energetic, Spanish contributor. "/** Drupal Mercenary **/ drupal_set_job('Ericsson@Stockholm'); Front-end, Back-end, WTF-end… I can fix it!" Big Drupal Ruben talks about working on Drupal for a large enterprise company, "This is the biggest project I have ever worked on. It's exciting to know that big companies like Ericsson are making an effort to work with open source projects and with Drupal. They are happy. The feedback I have from the business team is that they are happy with the project, performance and everything." "I worked on projects for Unicef. It's good that you know that Unicef is built with Drupal and other big sites are built with Drupal. For me, I am so proud of that." Community Drupal Ruben is an active mentor, contributor and a community fanatic. The first memory of Drupal he described to me was how excited he got when he figured out how easy it is to contribute code to Drupal. "I learned how to deal with the issue queue and I learned how to send my first module, how to contribute some translations. and I said, 'Oh! I can contribute so easily in this project!' Then I started to meet people and I went to my first Drupal event. For me, the best experience is knowing you can have friends and that you are part of something that is big." "To me Drupal is like a family to me, like a family in the online world." Drupal is easy - you will aways find the answer I was slightly taken aback when Ruben told me that everyone should know that "Drupal is not complicated. It has this stigma that it is complicated." Then he explained, making a couple of important points: "The thing is, Drupal is easy for a site-builder. You need some learning, but it is not hard. And Drupal for development, okay, some things are hard, but you have people to ask, so it's easy ... For example, when I was working with other systems, I tried to Google something, I didn't find anything. Then I tried to find somebody to ask and never found anyone. With the Drupal community, the easy way is to go to IRC and ask somebody and you will always find an answer. If you don't find the answer on Drupal.org or wherever, just go to IRC and you will always find the answer." He says his two biggest mentors in Drupal are Jesse Beach and Cathy Theys.

I spoke with Slovenian Drupalist-extraordinary Janez Urevc at Drupal Camp Vienna 2013. Alongside being a Drupal developer at examiner.com, he is also a major force in everything media+Drupal. Janez is slashrsm on Drupal.org, Twitter and "all the other online services you can imagine." He's on the team planning Drupal Camp Alpe-Adria 2014, which will be in the beautiful Slovenian resort town of Portoroz in May. Knowing the wonderful Drupal community in Slovenia and the region around it and the fantastic location, I highly recommend this camp! Compare Drupal now to when you got started "It's ... better!" :-) Janez is a man of few words, but they're to the point. He is also kind enough to go into more detail after giving his summaries. What's your favorite thing about Drupal? "People. Events. Energy." "I remember when I was at my first DrupalCon ever, in Copenhagen and I came to a sprint." If you weren't there, it was a huge, open space filled with people working on code everywhere. "I saw this [huge number] of people working for the entire day. It was just before the Drupal 7 release. Everybody was stressed; everybody was trying to get things done ... Similar to the situation now going on for Drupal 8 ... It just fascinated me, the positive energy driving this crowd. That's something I really like in this community. " Drupal 8 and media Janez spoke on the Core Conversation track at DrupalCon Prague. His talk was called "Let's fix file and media handling once and for all." "We have great solutions for media in Drupal 7 right now and we had great solutions in Drupal 6, but we're still not there yet." People complain about various aspects of the solutions. "My point in Prague was that this is the perfect time to start preparing media for Drupal 8. D8 is still in development. We have time to think about the changes we want to introduce. And time to implement stuff. A great conversation emerged." The group involved went on to dedicating the entire Friday sprint to planning how to make this vision a reality. Here is the report on the Drupal 8 Media Sprint at DrupalCon Prague. What are you mot excited about in Drupal 8? "Everybody says CMI and this is one of the biggest improvements. I'd also say as a developer, I really like the APIs and how things are structured in Drupal 8. All of my friends, colleagues, and coworkers are saying, 'We can't wait to start using Drupal8! We want to work on projects now!' I'm happy I'm seeing people excited about it." Describe being part of the Drupal community I love this answer and have the same feeling: "Feeling that you're welcome everywhere you go." /warmfuzzymoment

A quick blast from the past this week from the first Drupal community event at which I was recording material for a podcast. This gives this particular event an extra sparkle in my memory. True to form for the Drupal community around the world, many of the people I met at this camp have become friends with whom I stay in touch or even get to see now and then at a DrupalCon or Drupal Camp somewhere. Community ftw! ---Original post from April, 2012--- I just got back from a fantastic weekend with a couple hundred members of the Bulgarian Drupal community at Drupal Camp Sofia 2012. There was a lot of Drupal going on all weekend; some great sessions, lots of hallway track and an evening with the best-dancing Drupal community I have met so far at a little place called Veseloto Selo. A seemingly calm taverna-stye restaurant basically exploded from family-style eating to people dancing on the tables ... well, standing on the chairs at least. I wanted to introduce you to a few of the people that were there and some of the sounds of the weekend. This podcast features a bagpiper I encountered in a park in central Sofia, the birds outside my window and parts of conversations with Hristo Atanasov, Kaloyan Petrov, Martin Martinov, Svilen Sabev, and Mario Peshev. Stand out quotes: "Because of Drupal, I was able to sustain a business model as a freelancer." "Open source teaches you to share without losing anything. You share; you win and the other person also wins. It's contributing, it's sharing, it's like an open world after all! It's kind of a way of living." "I have a module that runs on 300 sites. It makes me really thankful for all the other modules that I use." Thanks for listening! And thank you Drupal Bulgarians for the hospitality!

Drupal 8 Wins: Avoiding the Dead Hook Blues, Part 3 - Today we wrap up this mini series with Larry Garfield, Kris Vanderwater, and me answering the question "Do I need to learn Symfony to develop for Drupal 8?", getting the lowdown on plugins, and doing a wrap-up on the important points from our whole, 3-part conversation. In August 2013, I spoke with Larry Garfield and Kris Vanderwater in a 90+ minute live Hangout on Air about the origins, details, and implications of the big architectural changes coming in Drupal 8. Today's video and audio podcasts are the third set of "curated" excerpts from that long conversation. In part one, we covered Larry and Kris's Drupal backgrounds, early Drupal memories, compare Drupal 4 to Drupal 7 and 8, some pragmatic reasons to choose Drupal, and how to get your head around the Symfony2 framework. In part 2, we went over the Go PHP 5 project as the first seeds of cooperation between different PHP projects, how the Symfony2 framework became part of Drupal 8, why we aren't building Drupal 8 on Symfony full-stack, and CMI, abstraction in Drupal, and the future of Features in Drupal 8. Symfony2 != Drupal 8 Q:"If I'm not familiar with Symfony, will I have a hard learning curve for Drupal?" A: Larry Garfield - "Adopting various Symfony components has had a huge impact on Drupal, however people should not confuse the parts that are done with Symfony versus the parts that are done with PHP 5.3. PHP 4 and PHP 5.3 are different languages: conceptually, structurally; they happen to be mostly backward-compatible, but that's about it. Drupal 8's biggest shift is that it is a PHP 5.3 system. We have ported Drupal to a new language. That is the biggest jump for people. Symfony is a PHP 5.3 component library that we're using a lot of pieces of to save time and because they have already solved a lot of hard problems in ways that are very good." "You don't need to know Symfony full-stack in order to use Drupal. Understanding the HttpKernel would be helpful, but you don't need to build a couple of projects with Symfony full-stack to work with Drupal. You do need to understand PHP 5.3 development: classes, objects, not using globals, dependency injection, events as a concept. These are all things that are not specific to Drupal 8 or Symfony. They are specific to PHP 5.3 and modern PHP development." A: Kris Vanderwater - "If you're a Symfony user and have used it in your projects in the past, you're going to be able to carry some of that knowledge forward. The places where we're using Symfony are in CMI, the routing system, the dependency injection container (which is awesome and you should absolutely learn it no matter what, just for your own well-being). With the exception of the dependency injection container, most of the rest of the stuff is behind various layers of Drupal stuff. You're probably not going to need to deal with it unless you absolutely have to." Beyond the dependency injection container, Kris says the only one you might need to touch would be the routing system, and you'd have to be doing something routing specific. There are Drupal wrappers around most of the Symfony components, so "the short answer is 'no', you don't need to know Symfony in order to do Drupal." Plug-ins Q from the event live chat: "Question: Plugins, plugin types, plugin managers, arrrrgh! How?" A: Kris "A plugin type is a term that we use colloquially to refer to a type of plugin ... You actually won't see that in code anywhere. You might see it in a couple of comments or something like that, but a 'plugin type' is just words that we use." "Plugin Managers are actually a class that composes together the ability to discover where a plugin exists. You can think of this in terms of hooks. Info hooks in Drupal 7 have largely been replaced by plugins in Drupal 8. So when we talk about 'discovery', that's what we mean." "Plugins are just the...

Drupal 8 Wins: Avoiding the Dead Hook Blues, Part 2 - In today's conversation, Larry Garfield, Kris Vanderwater, and I go over the Go PHP 5 project as the first seeds of cooperation between different PHP projects, how the Symfony2 framework became part of Drupal 8, why we aren't building Drupal 8 on Symfony full-stack, CMI, abstraction in Drupal, and the future of Features in Drupal 8. In August 2013, I spoke with Larry Garfield and Kris Vanderwater in a 90+ minute live Hangout on Air about the origins, details, and implications of the big architectural changes coming in Drupal 8. Today's video and audio podcasts are the second set of "curated" excerpts from that long conversation. In part one, we covered Larry and Kris's Drupal backgrounds, early Drupal memories, compare Drupal 4 to Drupal 7 and 8, some pragmatic reasons to choose Drupal, and how to get your head around the Symfony2 framework. The Seeds of Cooperation Larry surprised my by pointing all the way back to 2007 as the origin of his blog post "Getting off the island in 2013" and the eventual adoption of Symfony2 components into Drupal 8. The Go PHP 5 project was the first collaboration between PHP projects. It was a joint effort to force the adoption of PHP by hosting providers, by eliminating the "chicken and egg problem" and setting a date for Drupal, Joomla!, and others to drop support for PHP 4 in 2008. As Larry puts it, "We assassinated a programming language." Interestingly, there is some interest in doing this again. Larry goes into some detail about how Drupal adopted the Symfony2 HttpFoundation Component and eventually other components as well. Why not go all the way? In response to the question, "Why not build Drupal the CMs as a layer on top of Symfony full-stack?" Larry says, "If we were starting from ground zero right now, there would be a viable argument to make for that. There are places where that might be problematic however: Symfony the full-stack framework is structurally designed on the assumption that all changes are code changes. Your configuration is config files that you edit and then deploy to production after a compile step. It's not built around the 'site-builder clicky-clicky' model. That's not what the full-stack framework is optimized for. " Where will Drupal 8 be better for developers? "That's not a short list," points out Larry. "Some of the major improvements are ..." Returning output that is not just a page "became a first class citizen". Drupal 7 and earlier was a page-building tool. Drupal core is more loosely coupled, making it a lot easier to change or override. "Drupal, at the platform level, is mostly objects that are configured using a dependency injection container, which means you can override piece of core and even reassemble them differently without technically 'hacking core'. You're not modifying code, you're just manipulating configuration at a much lower level." For module developers, "Drupal 7 had an [very limiting] approach of passing blobs of data around and letting them get modified: render arrays, form arrays, alter hooks. You have a big blob of state and you manipulate it until you're ready to do something with it. Everything was treated as a global. Drupal 8 doesn't use arrays as the ultimate data object, you actually have a structured data object that has actual architecture. You have service objects that can act on those or other events that then get wired together. You have a lot more discrete. small pieces you can use." Resources Larry on Twitter Larry's blog post "Getting off the island in 2013" Palantir (check out their beautiful responsive site and sign up for their newsletter!) Commerce Guys Kris on Twitter Kris's Blogpost "A Drupaller in Symfony Land" "Create your framework" by Fabien Potencier Video!

Drupal 8 Wins: Avoiding the Dead Hook Blues, Part 1 - In August 2013, I spoke with Larry Garfield and Kris Vanderwater in a 90+ minute live Hangout on Air about the origins, details, and implications of the big architectural changes coming in Drupal 8. Today's video and audio podcasts are the first set of "curated" excerpts from that long conversation. We cover Larry and Kris's Drupal backgrounds, early Drupal memories, compare Drupal 4 to Drupal 7 and 8, some pragmatic reasons to choose Drupal, and how to get your head around the Symfony2 framework. "Thank You" == Community When Larry found something in Drupal 4.6 that needed fixing, like "good open source citizens" do, he submitted his very first Drupal core patch. He explains, "This is something Drupal does very well. The initial patch got committed ... I still remember Dries, when he committed the patch ... This is something he almost always does: He says thank you. You know 'Committed this patch to Head. Thanks.' and I'm just some random newbie with Drupal and here's the project lead saying thank you to me. It sounds corny, but I still remember; that felt awesome. Just the extra little 'thank you' there ... That was like 'Okay, it was a good call for me to hang around with these people'." Drupal Then Till Now Comparing Drupal 4.x to Drupal 7 and 8, Larry explains, "Drupal 8 certainly has a huge number of changes, but that's hardly new for Drupal. If you looked at Drupal 4.6 compared to 7, you would barely recognise it. It still has hooks and it still has things called 'nodes', but that's about as much as you can say that's consistent between the two. Kris adds, "I was showing Ryan Szrama some of the things we've done in Drupal 8 and he made a comment: 'The difference between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 is greater than the difference between Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 7.' I totally agree with that. That's really something. Drupal 7 is still a PHP-4-style system. Hooks are really an answer to not having objects ... to a certain degree." The Journey out of Fear and into Excitement I asked Kris to talk about how he got from self-inflicted FUD about Symfony and Drupal 8 to being excited about it. "As one of the initiative owners for Drupal 8, I had been doing a lot of work on it, without having to wrap my head around what work had gone into "Whiskey" [the Drupal 8 'WSCCI' the Web Services and Context Core initiative, led by Larry]. But every time I touched it, there were a million moving pieces. It was intimidating and it gave me a big fear factor. This was FUD [fear, uncertainty, doubt], but it was all within me. I gave Larry an awful hard time about a lot of this stuff ... Things did change drastically, so I needed to get in and work through it." "Fabien Potencier – who wrote a huge portion of Symfony – has a 12-part series walking through a pretty good number of the components that we ended up using within Drupal." Following this, Kris, "I took some of the things that we had introduced into Drupal 8 and I pulled them out of Drupal and dropped them into a repository with some Symfony components and started trying to compose it all together into a cohesive whole to help me understand what it was that was sitting inside of Drupal ... I've made it through most of Symfony's raw components and the results for me were really exciting because once I understood all this stuff that sat there, I didn't have to guess at a lot of the words that were coming out of Larry's mouth anymore. And that was really beneficial." :-D Kris goes into some more detail about some specific technical benefits, and comes to this conclusion: Basing Drupal on Symfony components like the routing system "is kind of the best of both worlds. You can leverage Drupal's tools that are sitting there ... It excites me for people who have already built something in Symfony and they like stuff that Drupal does and want to start leveraging it. So how do we mix it together...

I met Anthony, aka @ircmaxell, for the first time at the PHP BeNeLux conference in early 2013. He was among the first people I spoke with on mic about PHP. Our conversation about PHP being secure was one of the seeds that grew into the "Power of PHP" series on Acquia.com, though you'll notice we were still calling it "PHP Myths" at the time. The series will be continuing in 2014, stay tuned to the Acquia podcast and the Acquia blog for more! If you enjoy this conversation, be sure to check out the other two podcasts I released with Anthony (links below). ---Original post from February 15, 2013--- This is part three of a conversation I had with Anthony Ferrara – PHP core contributor, security expert, and Senior Architect at NBCUniversal – at the PHP BeNeLux '13 conference. In part one of our conversation, we talked about open source as an ethos and how it affects business. In part two, we talk about what the Four Freedoms mean to us as IT and web professionals, and the growing impact and influence of open source software. Anthony Ferrara is a prominent member of the PHP community and creates many free tutorials and materials "to help people understand complex topics in simple ways". His blog about PHP, security, performance, and general web application development is at http://blog.ircmaxell.com/ and his YouTube Channel is here: http://www.youtube.com/user/ircmaxell. "PHP is as secure as any other major language" "The first fundamental misconception about PHP is that people think PHP isn't secure. That is absolutely not true. PHP is as secure as any other major language. The problem with PHP is also the problem with every single other language: you can write insecure code in it," he underscores his point, "but that's a fundamental problem in every single programming language. The job of security is not up to the language. It's not up to the tools that you use. It's up to the people that use the tools. Even the best tools can be misused and lead to major security issues." Rails, Java, Javascript and other languages have all had vulnerabilities over the years. "If you find a language that has not had a vulnerability of some shape or form, I'll show you a language that hasn't been used." Developing securely Every single developer need to think about security when writing code. This doesn't mean being a security expert, but everyone should be aware of security and best development practices. Using many of the PHP frameworks and tools that have come out in the last few years, "It actually becomes quite easy to do security and not have to think about it." This can lead to its own problems, of course: "If you depend too much on those tools, those tools become weak points." Anthony suggests being pro-active with your tools and I'd add you should never trust them blindly. If you do, you lose one of the advantages of working in open source, the freedom to study and understand your code. Fixing vulnerabilities in PHP and elsewhere Anthony describes how newly discovered vulnerabilities get reported and handled in so-called "white hat" and "black hat" scenarios. The "white hat scenario" involves someone discovering a problem and reporting it responsibly (privately) to the security team, giving them a chance to fix it before releasing the technical details of the problem. The dangerous scenario is when a vulnerability is discovered by the security team in the aftermath of a security breach of some kind. "You have a black hat, a 'bad guy' who finds that vulnerability and they start using it to attack sites and we learn about it after it's already being used in the real world. That's when you can tell the difference between proactive and reactive projects: The proactive project will be able to identify it quickly, get a fix, and get it out there and then communicate the level of severity and get the problem fixed in the real world. Rails, Drupal, and PHP core do...