Acquia Inc. podcasts

2013 Acquia Podcast Greatest Hits - part two - Meet Angie Byron: The Return of Webchick Angie and I were at Acquia headquarters in Massachusetts at the same time in the spring of 2013. This gave us the chance to sit down and chat in front of the camera about all things Drupal. Highlights from our conversation became two podcasts with accompanying video. In this part of the conversation, Angie talks about how she got into Drupal and more. ---Original post from April 24, 2013--- In this episode – "Meet Angie Byron, Part 2: The Return of the Webchick" – we cover how Angie got into the Drupal project, how to hide under blankets, and how to break other people's modules. In part one of this conversation, we talked about the state of Drupal 8 as of spring 2013, what's gone into it so far, what we can expect from the next major point release of Drupal and the fact that Angie has the best job description ever: "My job is to make Drupal awesome." Newbies have it hard: a comic Angie's first experience in the Drupal developer community was so intense, she felt she had to capture it in a drawing. If you can scroll all the way back to November 2007, you'll find this http://webchick.net/node/9. In typical webchick style, she's used this experience to learn, teach others, and improve the Drupal project over the years since then: "That experience taught me a lot about the culture of Open Source and being respectful of people's boundaries and it also taught me that we need to treat newbies better." Thank you, Robert Douglass Rob, thanks for getting Angie into the Google Summer of Code working on Drupal. I officially owe you a beer for this one. Here's the Quiz project still going strong, the module that Angie wrote under Robert's mentorship way back in 2005. In case you didn't know I recently sat down at Acquia HQ with my friend and colleague, Angela "webchick" Byron. She is a Drupal core co-maintainer, book author, Drupal Association board member, public speaker, equality advocate, and all-around powerhouse contributor. Angie works with Drupal Lead, Dries Buyteart, in the Office of the CTO (OCTO): "My job is to make Drupal awesome. We figure out together what's the biggest thing holding Drupal back right now, and whatever it is, we just tackle it."

2013 Acquia Podcast Greatest Hits - part one - Gaelan Steele meets Dries One of my favorite Drupal moments in 2013 was meeting Gaelan Steele in person at DrupalCon Portland. This was eclipsed very quickly by being present when Gaelan and Dries met for the first time - and having my podcast microphone on! This was probably also eclipsed by Gaelan schooling Dries on how he learned to use Drupal ... see his answer below and in the podcast. ---Original post from May 29, 2013--- Gaelan Steele was the youngest delegate at DrupalCon Portland. Since I had had the pleasure of speaking with him and his father Douglas Urner while leading the Drupal Association scholarship committee earlier this year, I really wanted to meet this extraordinary 5th-grader in person. Dries himself showed up while we were talking and asked Gaelan how he uses and contributes to Drupal. The result of the interview hijack is really worth checking out! Gaelan is 11, in the 5th grade, and has been involved in Drupal for the last two years. He's an active member of the Seattle Drupal scene and seems to have made a big impression on the community in Portland. He lists his favorite things about Drupal as, "not having to do everything from scratch and a nice community ... that's pretty much it." :-) What do you do with Drupal? When Dries asks him what the most challenging, the hardest thing he's ever done with Drupal is, he says, "One thing that was definitely hard was integrating Drupal and this grading system that my dad uses called Active Grade. It has a pretty much undocumented RESTful API. It's like a single page app, so you can use the web inspector to kind of figure out how it works, but it's pretty much undocumented." We asked him to give a session on this or something similar next time around. I'm hoping he'll submit a proposal. Best answer of the day After listening to Gaelan talk about some Drupal tech and techniques, Dries asks: "How did you learn all this stuff?" Gaelan: "Um ... The internet."

Thank you for contributing! I think this is some kind of proof of the appeal of the Drupal project and welcoming nature of our community: Manuela Hutter came to Drupal Camp Vienna – her first Drupal Community event – and was already working on a patch at the sprints on day three, mentored by the inimitable Ruben Teijeiro. Note: I apologise for some audio issues in this recording. Q: What are you going to tell people about how things work in the Drupal project? A: The perception of the community as being very friendly and nice. It's really easy to be drawn into the movement here. Otherwise I wouldn't be here, I'd think 'I'm a n00b. What am I doing here?' If it wasn't for the community and the people saying, 'Yeah! Come on!' ... I think I feel more confident about being a site builder for this project and more confident of actually pulling this off. The first thing you always hear is about the steep learning curve, but now it feels alright. Q: Were you able to pick up stuff that will be directly useful [when you go back to work on your company's Drupal project] on Monday? A: I think so, yeah. That's pretty cool. Q: You know you're a Drupalist when ... A: You've involved yourself in the community in some way.

I got the chance to catch up with Alan Burke at DrupalCon Prague. He and I go back a long way; we met at one of the first Drupal events I ever attended, DrupalCon Brussels in 2006. In the meantime Alan and his co-founder Stella Power have built up the successful Drupal agency Annertech in Ireland and they have an impressive list of contributions to Drupal to their names. Here, we speak about Drupal's technical history over the last 8 years and the exciting improvements coming in Drupal 8, the business climate for Drupal in recession-plagued Ireland, and the Drupal community's culture of teaching, learning, and sharing. On choosing Drupal in 2005 "Drupal looked like a powerful tool. I read all about it and said, 'it's really difficult to learn, but it's really solid,' and I figure that that was a better thing than something that was easy to use but wasn't solid. The long term benefit of learning something solid would pay off and it has." Drupal 4.6: How we used to do it, aka "CMS by hand" "There were little things like when I wanted to install a module, I had to download the SQL file, run the sequel query on the server to install the correct tables ... that was fun ... You needed to do the same thing to run Drupal. [!] There was no Form API (not that I needed to know that I didn't have it). There was no Views. There was no CCK. There wasn't even Flexinode when I started. It was a long time ago." "At the same time, you could download things like the Calendar Module, which was amazing, to have such a system with one click installed. The amount of functionality you got out-of-the-box was just mind blowing. And now ... it's still mind blowing." Drupal from 4.6 till now Alan claims two things are consistent throughout Drupal's history: "It changes all the time and it gets better all the time. The other thing is that at every single release of Drupal, there's always people who are worried about the next version, how complicated it is and 'I hope that the following release they won't do so many changes ...' and it always happens. Drupal 8 is a sea-change from Drupal 7. Drupal 9 will be as big a sea-change. But people can't see it now. To know that's coming because you've been involved in the community that long is interesting, 'cause you see other people who don't see that coming." Running a Drupal business in Ireland Alan talks about building Annertech, "It's a little challenging. Anyone familiar with the economic situation in Ireland will know that we're in the depths of a recession. We've had the fortune to start a company in a recession and have to grow it and build it during a recession. It keeps you tight; it keeps you lean. You don't have room for expensive mistakes. From a business perspective, that's been useful." "We got into business to build top quality Drupal websites and that's been enough to get us more business. Luckily, we've had successful projects and happy customers," who have spread the word about Annertech for them. I asked where the next wave of customers and growth would come from in Ireland: "Drupal doesn't have that strong a reputation, however, it's got enough of a reputation for us that people have picked Drupal, gone looking for help and found us." "Drupal's got a long way to go. Right now, local authorities and local government is starting to pick it up, some of the third-level institutions are picking it up. It's growing, but it's got a long way to go. Microsoft has a big presence in Ireland. That reflects on the technology choices at all levels. Open source hasn't taken off in Ireland as much as in other countries, but that's changing slowly." Teaching and learning in the Drupal Community Alan's strongest memory of DrupalCon Brussels 2006 is one that seems to explain a lot about the Drupal community's self-identity and how it works: "I remember sitting down for dinner with a big bunch of Drupal people on the...

Dan Callahan is part of the Identity Team at Mozilla who are trying to solve some of the problems of privacy and security on the Internet that have been hitting the headlines recently. Dan works on the Mozilla Persona project, a system to both replace passwords with verified identities and put that verification under user control, rather than the control of large corporate entities. Background: Now is the time for more privacy Security and privacy online are now a concern for more people than ever, following the highly publicized revelations of mass – probably illegal in some cases – data collection by the NSA, the British GCHQ, The German BND, and others. I am personally unhappier than ever to have to entrust 3rd parties with my login credentials since my Adobe login was one of millions improperly stored by the company, stolen, and now released publicly. I have had to update numerous passwords after several sites contacted me saying basically, "Hey, we reset your login credentials because your name was on that Adobe list we saw." This was unsettling to say the least and put a bit of a ding in my productivity. The password must die Today's "social sign-ons" as offered by Facebook, Google, Twitter and others, offer users a fast, password-free login experience across sites, but have a significant problem. As Dan puts it, "The cost there is that I have to send all of my data, all of my logins through some central third party, usually an American advertising company. We think we should be able to find a way to give you the same login experience as Facebook or Google, but with the ability to still choose who you are." "Most social auth. systems 'phone home' every time you want to log in," the system is informed of every site I visit and asked to confirm my identity, "Every single login is traceable. Every single login phones home. It's amazing profile data to gain: To see where people are logging in, how often they're logging in there ... But most sites that move to social auth. aren't reaping any benefit from the profile data they get. All they're doing is wanting to have some way to log in where they don't have to worry about storing user passwords, because it is very, very hard to do that," as I had confirmed for me by Adobe recently. Dan has a message for developers: "There is a 3rd choice. There is something that gives them all of the ease of social auth., but without the privacy downsides, without the limitations. If your users aren't comfortable using Facebook, and that's the only option you give them, you're immediately cutting potential customers out of your site." Users must own and control their own identities "Is it worth giving up privacy in order to have convenience, in order to have ease of use? Maybe not." The Persona system establishes users' identities by querying a trusted source (an email provider) using public key cryptography, and then storing that in the browser, not on 3rd party servers. "The browser holds that identity and can show it to a site and the site can validate the email provider's signature and log you in." Your identity provider never knows what you are doing with your identity. "We build this wall between proving your identity and logging in somewhere." "The core idea behind Persona is that browsers are capable. They have very competent, fast Javascript engines. With facilities like local storage, we can make the browser an active participant in the login transaction. We hope to get this standardized and present it to the W3 and have Firefox support it natively. Right now, we use a Javascript polyfill that works in all browsers, but our ambition is for Persona to be the next standard of authentication on the Internet, built straight in the browser." Mozilla: open source, open standards Dan talks about Mozilla's mission as one of ensuring the web remains "an open, pubic resource and that there's a voice for real...

Part 2 - In this podcast, Yves Chedemois, aka yched, and I cover some changes to Drupal 8 core – CMI, the plugin system, and how they (and object oriented code) benefit developers. Yched is an important contributor to Drupal: he has been a maintainer of what was called CCK in Drupal 4.7 through Drupal 6.x, then became the core Field API in Drupal 7. In part one of our conversation, we talk about Yves's time working on Drupal, being part of the Drupal community (and the "Hey!" moment), Drupal development sustainability, and how the Drupal community stepped up to help him when he needed it recently. We spoke on a very pleasant September afternoon outdoors at DrupalCon Prague. You might hear the odd skateboard or two in the background of our conversation. People should be excited about CMI in Drupal 8 "The first notable point: CMI is going to change the life of every single Drupal shop out there. It's just huge. This changes how you work with a Drupal site; developing it or maintaining it while it is live." CMI is the core initiative that moved configuration out of the database on Drupal 8, separating it from content, and into .yml files. This makes it possible to do content staging; to version control, import, and export configuration; and opens the doors to new ways of working and building Drupal products and distributions. "It trickles down to many changes, API-wise. It unifies a lot of things. Previously, all systems in core and contrib. that had to store configuration, had to invent their own storage and take care of their own database storage; come up with the right schema and come up with the right API functions to load and save and invent the code flows around them. Now, it's mostly taken care of for you. You don't have to bother with it anymore. It's nice for module developers, because you just have to follow the practices. You have to learn them once ... there's a learning curve, but you're guided along the way. What you learn on one subsystem mostly applies to all the other subsystems throughout all of core and contrib. This is huge." While there is individual business logic and APIs defining views, image styles, rule triggers, etc. – since these are radically different from one another, "but how they work: How you load one, how you save one, how you modify one," and how you react to and interact with with them, "is going to be the exact same flows. Learn once and apply to everywhere. People should also be excited about the plugin system in D8 The same pattern applies to yched's "2nd most important and interesting" innovation in Drupal 8: the plugin system. "It's the same pattern of unifying practices and APIs on stuff that many subsystems had to reinvent in Drupal 7. In core, you had image styles and image effects; image effects are typically plugins. On the Field API side, we had widgets, formatters, and field types. Those are 'plugin-like things' ... We had a series of things that basically represent the same pluggable feature, but there was no common API. So each of those subsystems had to invent them on their own." In Drupal 8, developers can learn a unified set of patterns and practices and apply them across most of what they do in code, most anywhere in Drupal. "In getting those APIs right, it's been about not only getting it right for the use cases we have in core, but also how we can make it easy to learn, easy to leverage in your own contrib. or custom module ... How to define a new plugin type ... How to interact with it. I think this will be really important in D8. In D8 core, we have 20 different plugin types and this will only explode in contrib. The plugin API will be a very, very strong unifying pattern in how you structure your Drupal code." How do I get into Drupal 8 now? "All of these unified APIs we've been talking about in CMI and the underlying concept of config. entities relate to the entity system as we know it in Drupal...

Part 1 - I spoke with Yves Chedemois, aka yched, on a very pleasant September afternoon outdoors at DrupalCon Prague. You might hear the odd skateboard or two in the background of our conversation. Yched is an important contributor to Drupal: he has been a maintainer of what was called CCK in Drupal 4.7 through Drupal 6.x, then became the core Field API in Drupal 7. In part one of our conversation, we talk about Yves's time working on Drupal, being part of the Drupal community (and the "Hey!" moment), Drupal development sustainability, and how the Drupal community stepped up to help him when he needed it recently. In part two, we cover architectural changes to Drupal 8 core and what they mean for developers. Drupalfund - 1st project funded! Amazingly, given the incredible time and dedication he pours into Drupal, it is neither Yves's principal activity, nor part of his "day job". His laptop is on its last legs and froze up due to overheating during a code sprint in Prague. "I keep dragging this laptop with me. It let's me post patches and work on Drupal stuff, so good enough. Except that it will freeze on me regularly. The funny thing about being at DrupalCons is that you have all those sprints. When it freezes, I usually have to fan it on my lap until it gets to a nicer temperature. But doing that in front of 50 other people in the room is a ... fun thing to do ..." After the third time that he had to stop and fan his computer, fellow Drupal community members, led by Dick Olsson, decided yched should have a new laptop. Dick put together a funding campaign on the Drupalfund.us funding platform built by Mogdesign and it was fully funded in 24 hours! "It was an awesome DrupalCon effect, which is also an awesome proof that the Drupalfund platform is a great tool to have. It's something we need to have at this time in the Drupal community." Drupal is a lot of work Yves goes on to outline how much time and effort maintaining core components requires. "People are pouring hours and hours of work [a day into Drupal] for a period of two or three years. It's huge. We need to account for the fact that we need to make that sustainable at some point. We need to get our funding tools straight." "The project, whether Drupal core or critical contrib. modules, or contrib. modules that are experimenting with what will be critical three years from now – the next Views, the next Panels – really need some backup. The message should be if you're using Drupal and making money out of it (which we very much hope!), and you're not contributing something, you're doing something wrong. At the same time, we have no identified place to funnel that. We're asking you to do something for us, but we have no place to direct or point those people to." Read more about yched's campaign on the Drupalfund.us blog: Melting laptop kicked off Drupalfund's success Yves goes on to mention using Gittip to support Drupal developers on an ongoing basis and also the challenges of this model, especially when it comprises individual actions, rather than a community strategy. More on sustainability in Drupal This is the campaign that was kicked off and fully funded for yched during DrupalCon Prague: Funding yched to complete D8 Entity Field API More about yched's campaign on the Drupalfund.us blog: Melting laptop kicked off Drupalfund's success Here's another perspective on the sustainability of Drupal from Mike Gifford at Open Concept: Gittip, Nurturing Community & a Drupal Shop Challenge Tom Geller discusses the broader topic of crowdfunding and technology investment here: Raising Money the Old-Fashioned Way - Crowdfunding for technology gains traction I spoke with the team from Top Shelf Modules about these issues in Acquia podcasts 110 and 111. Disclosure I am a community advisor the Drupalfund.us.

Part 2: I spoke with the Top Shelf Modules team – Susan Rust, Ryan Cross, Rik de Boer, and Karl Scheirer – on November 4, 2013. In part two, we go into more depth about TSM's mission and discuss the sustainability (or otherwise) of Drupal's volunteer-based development model and the various efforts and experiments underway to change, improve, or "fix" it, some more pragmatic – like TSM and drupalfund.us, some more idealistic, like Gittip sponsorships and similar. Listen to part one and read the accompanying post, in which we went over the concept behind TSM, the quality and challenges in the Drupal contrib. module space, Drupal 8 and why it is time to upgrade your modules now (!). Q: What is Top Shelf Modules' Mission? A 1: To benefit all users of Drupal and encourage business models beyond pure site building by improving the non-core part of the Drupal ecosystem. Top Shelf Modules ("TSM") treats Drupal contributed modules like real software projects and holds them and their maintainers to standards of quality and reliability appropriate to a software project like Drupal. Supporting TSM through donations, contributions, or sponsorship will lead to direct benefit for the individual Drupal professional or organization that does so, as well as the Drupal platform as a whole. To learn about how this can benefit your development business, one of the participation models is explained well here: http://topshelfmodules.com/fund/fund-contrib A 2: Rik de Boer puts it a little more strongly: "We have to stop the mindset that this is a community where some people just give give give all the time and other people just take take take. That is really not sustainable. That needs to change. If you want quality, you cannot expect people to work for free forever. There need to be some sort of platform where people who are willing to put their money where their mouth is, know that when they spend their money, it's going to a good cause. So they will get some value for money for that and that's where TSM comes in. That's why TSM vets all those modules: So that you know if I support these guys, I'm getting bang for my buck." What is #driesday? A: Karl explains that, "Dries Day is an international Drupal holiday that we invented without asking Dries. The idea is that it is a community day." As with most IT projects, Dries Day has experienced scope creep. It's gone from a buy-your-favorite-developer-a-beer kind of concept to a let's-all-volunteer-on-Drupal one. The TSM team points out that for some contributors, this may look like any other day, but many of us mere mortals and those poor souls who don't live near a thriving local Drupal community don't get as many chances for coordinated contribution. "We call it a worldwide Super Sprint that everyone can participate in," Karl goes on, "It's an excuse for me to post silly pictures of Dries everywhere, which I find amusing." "Some people think it actually has to do with sort of worshipping Dries himself," but this is not the case, "Dries is a mascot that we use," a focal point for motivating the community. If you want to participate, check out Dries Day on Facebook for ideas and information. People are planning mentoring and other activities. Susan Rust explains TSM's vision, "We have a couple of requests. We ask that all the Drupal companies take the day on November 19th to allow their team to work on Drupal. We encourage everyone not think this is just about code," (think training, sponsor a camp, update your modules to D8 (that's code, I know), take Drupal to a local school, ...), "Whatever part of Drupal lights you up, go do that." TSM will have a template available to print a sign showing how many hours you donated and are looking for prize donations to hand out to notable achievements on Dries Day 2013. Good place to send that slightly out-of-date Drupal swag that someone, somewhere will treasure, folks! The internet was...

Part 1: I spoke with the Top Shelf Modules team – Susan Rust, Ryan Cross, Rik de Boer, and Karl Scheirer – on November 4, 2013. In part one, we go over the concept behind TSM, the quality and challenges in the Drupal contrib. module space, Drupal 8 and why it is time to upgrade your modules now (!). In part two, we go into more depth about TSM's mission and discuss the sustainability (or otherwise) of Drupal's volunteer-based development model and the various efforts and experiments underway to change, improve, or "fix" it. Q: What is Top Shelf Modules? A 1: Top Shelf Modules ("TSM") aims to raise the quality of Drupal contributed modules (aka "contrib." – the modules that add to and change Drupal's functionality of the Drupal core.) to the standards of quality and reliability matching the success of the platform and the number of people and organizations relying on it today. Susan and the group's backstory from years of being Drupal service providers: "One of the things I noticed was how much time we spent trying to get module to work. When Drupal core is being built, there is a lot of process, there are checks and balances. We want to see some of those same mechanisms overlaid onto contrib. so that there are higher standards of interoperability, usability, and documentation." TSM has started with a set of 36 modules they want to curate, to bring to the highest possible standards and keep them there. "[In the Drupal world], we think it is normal to spend a good part of our project dollars doing regressive work rather than saying, 'all our modules, our professional tools, should work off-the-shelf pretty well and robustly.' We like to think of ourselves as going towards the Underwriters' Laboratories model for modules." This is not an app store! Karl points out, "It's important for people to know that everything we do goes onto Drupal.org. We keep everything as open as possible. It's important to us that we stay 'Drupal compatible.' We use the same ideas and ethics that are in Drupal." A 2: At the same time, TSM wants to financially reward the creators and maintainers of contrib. modules whose code makes it possible for so many people and organizations to earn money themselves using Drupal. As Susan says, "We would like to see writing Drupal modules be its own, viable Drupal profession." "We're trying to get some revenue flowing into contrib. Contrib. maintainers find it very difficult to make a living doing contrib. and as our projects in Drupal are scaling, we can't rely on having an entire ecosystem built on catch-as-catch-can. We have the concept that we [all] have to be good stewards and recognize that if I am making a living using contrib. modules, I have to share that money downstream with the people who built them. It is a simple logical connection, but the funding just hasn't come from that," explains Susan. TSM has gotten off the ground through sponsorships from Drupal businesses and is hoping to expand its funding base to make modules curation a viable business proposition. "A lot of shops may not be tracking that line item [fixing and patching contrib. modules for every project], and I would challenge them to start doing that. Look how much of your time is spent chasing, hunting, researching, patching modules. What if that could get diminished by 80%? How much would you save? Even 20%!" "This isn't meaningful work" for your developers, "We're not in Drupal to fix potholes, we want to build skyscrapers." Q: When should I upgrade my modules to D8? (Given that TSM is all about contrib. modules, this question had to be asked, right?) A: Now! Why 1: Learning – It's a great chance to start learning all the exciting new stuff in Drupal 8 core. Why 2: Help improve D8 core – It's still a great chance to help the core development team find bugs and ways to optimize and improve D8 core while there's still some flexibility there. As of...

In this podcast, I have a chat about Drupal with Josh Waihi, Enterprise Architect for Catalyst IT, and also find out why you should attend Drupal South in Wellington, New Zealand in February 2014 if you possibly can (Submit your session proposals now!) Amazing news, hurray! – Since this podcast was recorded at the DrupalCon Prague sprints on September 27th (hence our scratchy voices in the conversation), the Drupal South team invited me to be a keynote speaker. I am thrilled and have gratefully accepted. Josh and Drupal Josh is a self-declared "database geek". This is reflected in his contributions to Drupal. He helped build the PostgrSQL driver for Drupal 7 core and is the maintainer of the TBTNG Migrator Module. Josh explains, "You can migrate your drupal site from one database type to another, like MySQL to Postgres. It uses Drupal's schema system to migrate from one db type to another. That means you can do things like inherit a website done by another company that used a different database," than what you like to work with, "and you can migrate it onto a database you're more familiar with. Or you could move a site to a different database to see if it performs better," or even use different database types on different development and production environments. Drupal South 2014 - "Unlikely Hero" From February 14 to 16, 2014, Wellington New Zealand will host the South Pacific regional Drupal conference, called Drupal South this time around (last year it was DrupalCon Sydney, and before that, it was Drupal Down Under a couple of times). Day 1 will have three tracks: a business day, sprints, and a training day. Days 2 and 3 will be filled with amazing sessions covering all aspects in and around Drupal the technology and Drupal the community. Speakers from New Zealand and Australia will be joined by others from around the world, including some prominent Drupalist friends of mine like John Albin, Larry Garfield, Emma Jane Westby, and the one-and-only chx! I am looking forward to catching up with them and meeting a bunch of new friends there! Submit your session proposals now for one or more tracks: Business and Strategy, Coding and Development, Front End, and Site Building. No matter who you are, you can become an Unlikely Hero, too. I can't think of a better, more influential, or friendlier project for you if you want to make your mark and have a chance at changing the world. Alongside all that, Josh promises, "a few surprises at the conference and definitley some events in the evening" (said with a massive eyebrow wiggle).

I spoke with Thijs Feryn, Technical Evangelist at Combell at the Portland Convention Center while DrupalCon and Symfony Live were both happening there in May 2013. This conversation gives some background and context to Thijs's Acquia.com guest blog post, "Why PHP is for Real". Thijs's post is about PHP's history, use, and ecosystem (community, frameworks, QA, performance, and my favorite: PHP the Right Way.). It includes a plethora of links to popular, useful tools and reference materials to get the most out of using PHP. Thijs is an active presenter who speaks on both technical and non-technical topics. If you use his name as a search term (he seems to be the only "Thijs Feryn" active on the web), you'll find a lot links to his talks and activities online.

Part 4 of 4 – On October 4/5, 2013 (depending on your time zone), I hosted a live Hangout on Air with three major Drupal core contributors: Lee Rowlands (larowlan), Tim Plunket (tim.plunkett / @timplunkett), and Daniel Wehner (dawehner / @da_wehner). We talked about what's going on in Drupal 8 and how you will benefit from all the new stuff. This post is the last of four that cover the details of that conversation. Here, we talk about upgrading modules to Drupal 8, touch on theming in Drupal 8, and name Drupal 8's most compelling feature according to each of my guests. In part 1, you can meet Lee Rowlands, Daniel Wehner, and Tim Plunkett and hear about the events that led to this conversation. In part 2, you can read, see, and hear about wins for developers in the entity/field and plugin systems in Drupal 8. In part 3, you can read, see, and hear us tackle the questions "Why do some people think Drupal 8 is 'too hard'?", talk about "tribal skills", how Drupal's core team plans and makes decisions, and the whether Drupal 8 is "code heavy". Backstory – Lee Rowlands felt "We do a lot of introspection and critical analysis in open source and Drupal, that's what makes it great. But sometimes I think we don't stop and celebrate the wins. And that some of the noise going on around the Drupal 8 developer experience didn't touch on all the wins that we're getting from the changes in Drupal 8. He wrote a blog post and gave a presentation at the Melbourne users group outlining some of the many ways Drupal 8 will be a great experience for developers. Is themeing going to be easier in Drupal 8? Probably :-) ... We've adopted a templating engine called Twig, which is maintained by Sensio Labs, the same folks who look after the Symfony2 framework. Since Twig is "Proudly Found Elsewhere", the Drupal community is joining a large community of Twig users and maintainers from a variety of other projects. This gives us all the benefits of joining forces with another, vibrant open source community. Twig will be the subject of some of my upcoming podcasts or live broadcasts, so start putting together your questions! In the meantime, the Twig homepage itself contains useful information (and code samples!) about why Twig is a great templating engine. It is also a gateway to Twig's spectacular documentation, and much more. My gut feeling on this is similar to the pattern that's emerging around D8 in general. There's a bunch of new stuff to learn, but that stuff is unified within Drupal and it's a bunch of skills and knowledge that are useful and applicable outside of Drupal, too. Should I upgrade my module to Drupal 8 now? As of early/mid October 2013, the answer is "not yet". "Where's the best place to look for code examples for module developers?" - As of this recording and writing, it is slightly too early to upgrade your contributed modules and expect them to remain production ready. As Tim Plunkett points out, "If you want to port your module [now], you're doing it for core, not for contrib., because you're helping us find inconsistencies and bugs," in Drupal 8's core, "You're going to have to update it a couple more times. If you want to participate like that, that would be really awesome." Drupal 8 core is not yet stable enough to provide the final word on APIs and other internals. The Pants and Example modules (the go-to resources for module work in stable, Drupal releases, they contain solid example code and implementations for commonly-used systems) are works in progress right now. A couple of useful starting points: If you want to learn about getting "vanilla plugins" running as quickly as possible, look at Tour module and its APi documentation. If you want to use plugins that have dynamic configuration, the Action module is really great (see here and its API documentation). Asking about specific issues on IRC can be...

Drupal and the Digital Agency - Give to Receive iKOS is a digital agency specialising in eCommerce and Drupal. I caught up with Myles Davidson, Managing Director and Richard Jones, Technical Director, at DrupalCon Prague where they had been busy getting up to speed on developments in Drupal 8. Share More, Do More Business - Give to Receive Buy This Book – Richard is the author of Getting Started with Drupal Commerce, a great resource for learning about Drupal Commerce, the powerful open source eCommerce toolkit. As he and Myles discuss in this interview, they believe deeply in doing business the open source way. Being experts in what they call "a niche within a niche" and sharing that knowledge and code–a possibility unique to open-source-based businesses–has helped build iKOS's reputation as a service provider and brought them more business as a result. Richard explains that "giving all of our code away", eventually starts to pay off. Now other UK digital agencies come to iKOS, based on the integration work that iKOS has done with payment provider SagePay, for example. "That collaboration with other agencies, it's really interesting to me that they are our competitors, but [the journey has been] getting to the mindset that we're all working toward the same goal and that there's enough of a big pie out there. Giving back to the community has paid us back tenfold." I put it to Myles that investing in code that is open for all to see and use helped iKOS's reputation and brought them more clients. He agrees, "Absolutely," but there seems to be more to it: "Honestly, that was kind of a byproduct. We were doing everything aligned with our business goals. Agencies always find it hard; we're chasing client work. But we started changing. If we were going to do this, we were going to do this right. We felt we had a coding standard and so many little byproducts have come out of this. We've had an incredible staff benefit." So one benefit came from exposing junior developers to the benefits of releasing early and learning from thousands of their peers in the drupal community. "Early on we'd have taken that. That would have been reason alone for us to keep contributing." "Out of the blue, because we did one flavour of work in a speciality for one area, what do you know? We got a knock on the door from someone else saying, 'We've seen that module that you've done. It's really good. We need that level of quality in our area.' If there's one area where the code has to be peer reviewed and has to be secure and the right level, it's in transactions." "The other byproduct and the absolute surprise is in that you can give to receive. Now we can say that's true. I think I was a little skeptical at first, but it's been transformational for our agency: not just to go to Drupal, but to adopt the community." Roots: from proprietary to open source iKOS's journey in a nutshell: 2002: Enterprise Java business with its own CMS in 2001 (with a massive 31 modules!) Maintenance of own system was hard, "critical mass" not achieved for that platform. Drupal discovered: Their initial thoughts had nothing to do with community or open source's strengths beyond, "This is just another product, another tool. It happens to be free." Since 2008: All Drupal all the time, starting with Drupal 6, contributions in and around Drupal Commerce. They found out the true power of Drupal and open source when they were frustrated by the limitations of the Ubercart eCommerce package for Drupal (it was not initially conceived for sales tax and other variations in law and practice outside the US). Since open source lets you build and modify your product until you have your own, perfect toolset, iKOS began contributing and giving back started with working on Ubercart's successor, Drupal Commerce, for their own projects. It was an awakening and transformation from the...

Part 3 of 4 – On October 4/5, 2013 (depending on your time zone), I hosted a live Hangout on Air with three major Drupal core contributors: Lee Rowlands (larowlan), Tim Plunket (tim.plunkett / @timplunkett), and Daniel Wehner (dawehner / @da_wehner). We talked about what's going on in Drupal 8 and how you will benefit from all the new stuff. This post is the third of four that cover the details of that conversation. In part 1, you can meet Lee Rowlands, Daniel Wehner, and Tim Plunkett and hear about the events that led to this conversation. In part 2, you can read, see, and hear about wins for developers in the entity/field and plugin systems in Drupal 8. Backstory – Lee Rowlands felt "We do a lot of introspection and critical analysis in open source and Drupal, that's what makes it great. But sometimes I think we don't stop and celebrate the wins. And that some of the noise going on around the Drupal 8 developer experience didn't touch on all the wins that we're getting from the changes in Drupal 8. He wrote a blog post and gave a presentation at the Melbourne users group outlining some of the many ways Drupal 8 will be a great experience for developers. Why do some people think Drupal 8 is "too hard"? Daniel Wehner - object oriented code - "Drupal has always been this old, procedural, 'simple' system. Nowadays with Drupal 8, everything has been rewritten, so they don't know any particular code. So they have to relearn a lot of code, but [take heart!] not all of the concepts changed." Lee Rowlands - comparison with moving from Drupal 6 to 7 - "I can relate to those concerns, having gone through the same thing between Drupal 6 and 7. People probably say there wasn't that big a shift, but I felt that there was. I can completely understand that people would feel uneasy about having all these Drupal 7 skills and when they look at Drupal 8, they feel that they might not be relevant anymore. But the underlying concepts are still there. It's really module developers who are going to experience the changes, but I think it's well worth learning because the things that they do learn will bring their PHP and programming skills to modern standards." "Drupal 7 was built to run on old versions of PHP, so there were concepts we couldn't use in Drupal," namespaces for one. Now that Drupal 8 requires PHP 5.3, "it brings Drupal up to date with a lot of what the 'modern' PHP world is doing. It's a worthwhile investment." Lee also points out that the Drupal community is full of experts willing to help others learn new skills and techniques, "You're not on your own." Tim Plunkett - "A lot of what I've heard is the 'we're adding Symfony, we're adding this and that and that's all making it more complicated.' That's funny because a lot of the Symfony stuff is the easier part for me because their documentation is so good and there's other examples. A lot of the hard and confusing parts are just us modernizing to PHP 5.3. A lot of the concepts like dependency injection, dependency injections containers and all is what everyone else is doing." For the Drupal community, "it's just a little bit of growing pains. Symfony is not to blame. It's us finally getting pulled kicking and screaming into modern, object oriented programming." On "Tribal Skills" We also discuss "tribal skills" and the fact that Drupal 7's core is obsolete in that "no one writes code like that anymore". The potential danger here is that anyone whose knowledge and experience of coding is limited to Drupal 7 hasn't got much to offer outside of that niche. Whereas, someone who knows her way around Drupal 8 code, has useful, up-to-date development knowledge and a skill set that will be relevant and applicable to a wider range of activities. Core Planning and Coordination In response to the question, "How do core generalists get to give feedback on the big picture of Drupal 8 architectural...

Part 2 of 4 – On October 4/5, 2013 (depending on your time zone), I hosted a live Hangout on Air with three major Drupal core contributors: Lee Rowlands (larowlan), Tim Plunket (tim.plunkett / @timplunkett), and Daniel Wehner (dawehner / @da_wehner). We talked about what's going on in Drupal 8 and how you will benefit from all the new stuff. This post is the second of four that cover the details of that conversation. In part 1, you can meet Lee Rowlands, Daniel Wehner, and Tim Plunkett and hear about the events that led to this conversation. Backstory – Lee Rowlands felt "We do a lot of introspection and critical analysis in open source and Drupal, that's what makes it great. But sometimes I think we don't stop and celebrate the wins," and that some of the noise going on around the Drupal 8 developer experience didn't touch on all the wins that we're getting from the changes in Drupal 8. He wrote a blog post and gave a presentation at the Melbourne users group outlining some of the many ways Drupal 8 will be a great experience for developers. "I work all day on Drupal 7 sites. Drupal 8 is where I get to do the fun stuff. There are a lot of things in Drupal 8 that I couldn't wait for, dealing with shortcomings in Drupal 7 on a daily basis. 'I want it now' kind of stuff (I picture Lee having a tantrum at this point), in particular the plugin stuff, and the entity filed API changes. That was my motivation for that talk." D8 win: Entity field improvements Lee describes how things are in Drupal 7: "In Drupal 7, there are massive arrays attached to nodes that represent the field data. For every field there's a property, which is the name of the field, then there's an array which has a language and then it's an array of values and each one of those is keyed by columns in the field table ... It's very arbitrary, it almost seems so. The only way to debug it, or to figure out what is going on is to either put a break point where you get to that code or to dump out the contents of the node and see what you're doing. But in Drupal 8, "The improvements in Drupal 8 that the entity/field team have worked on – and that I have been exposed to first hand by the Forum and Comment [module] upgrades – it's a far greater developer experience." Check out Lee's presentation (slides 7 through 11 here) for code samples showing just how much easier this is to work with in Drupal 8. Tim compares getting a TID in Drupal 7 v in Drupal 8: "Just this morning, I was working with a taxonomy term and I wanted to get a link to it ... and it was Drupal 7! I had to remember, I have to actually do '/taxonomy/term/./tid' instead of [in Drupal 8] just calling a method on it and getting the URI," and in Drupal 7, "every entity has a different way of saving things. The massive unification [in Drupal 8] is amazing." About this win in simplicity and uniformity, Tim comments, "The sheer number of entity types we have ... If you learn parts of the entity system, that expands to 40 things and instead of having to learn 40 things, you learn one thing. There's no way this is 40 times harder." So there's a learning curve, some getting used to thinking about the new coding paradigms (PHP 5.3, OOP, etc.), but everything works the same way, you can reuse what you learn across every system. You end up learning something (perhaps complex), but you learn that one thing and it works everywhere! Lee continues, "If you're not touching the low-level stuff, you probably won't even need to worry about it. You just need to use the parts of the API that are user-facing like the :getPropertyDefinitions() method that you can call on any field or any entity and it'll tell you the properties that it has. It's self-documenting." Daniel also points out that this unification could lead to new and exciting developments in the contributed module repository, too. "The Drupal 7 Entity API Module is the basis of a lot of great...