Acquia Inc. podcasts

Here are the highlights from a few of the conversations I had with attendees of the 2013 Drupal Camp Alpe-Adria, held in April in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The camp was a wild success and attracted a large, international crowd. I'll post a couple more interviews I did at this event in coming weeks. Josef Dabernig Dasjo is an active Drupalist from Austria. He was part of the Drupal Austria Roadshow in 2012 and was part of the podcast I recorded with them at the time. He gave a great session about mapping with his favorite module – leaflet - in Ljubljana. Check out the video of the session. I asked Josef about his plans as a DrupalCon Portland Drupal Association scolarship winner: "The people that are working on mapping projects or contributing to the mapping space in Drupal ... are going to have a mapping session at DrupalCon." Should Have Made a Left Turn at Albuquerque: Building Maps in Drupal will be a panel-style discussion so everyone can exchange their ideas, knowledge, and plans for creating interactive mapping applications with Drupal. I'm hoping to be there. Iztok Smolic You can find out more about the co-organiser of Drupal Camp Alpe-Adria 2013 on Drupal.org and his own website iztoksmolic.com. When asked "Why did you organise this camp?" he replied, "It was obvious we needed to organise a Drupal Camp in Slovenia." Given that they planned on perhaps 80 people coming, and something like 135 turned up on the first day alone, I guess he was right! The 2012 Drupal Business Days in Vienna made a lasting impression on Iztok. It was the first time "where I could talk to people about business, but in an open source way. It really surprised me that people are open about 'exposing' their business ideas with other people," the idea that Open Source businesspeople who are technically competitors can still be transparent, and share best practices and more, "That was mind-blowing for me." Branislav Bujisic Branislav was proudly wearing a very stylish Acquia Insight t-shirt on the first day of the camp. He got it for getting an A+ with Instant Insight for a site he recently built. He came to Drupal 6 years ago because he needed accessibility in his CMS. He chose one of the only two table-less systems that were around at the time. I guess it was a goo choice, since he went on to say (with a huge grin on his face) "I did the project and now I live working on Drupal ... it's beautiful." Didka Birova Please welcome one of the newest members of the Drupal community, Didka Birova from Bulgaria, a student at the Faculty of Computer Science in Ljubljana, Slovenia. As you can hear in the podcast, her first exposure to Drupal seems to have been a positive one! Voice of Drupal Camp Alpe-Adria 2013 Left to right, top to bottom: Iztok Smolic, Branislav Bujicic, jam, Didka Birova, Josef Dabernig, two "Drupal Camp Angels". Ljubljana, Slovenia alpe-adria-voices.mp3

Here are the highlights from a few of the conversations I had with attendees of the 2013 Drupal Camp Alpe-Adria, held in April in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The camp was a wild success and attracted a large, international crowd. I'll post a couple more interviews I did at this event in coming weeks. Josef Dabernig Dasjo is an active Drupalist from Austria. He was part of the Drupal Austria Roadshow in 2012 and was part of the podcast I recorded with them at the time. He gave a great session about mapping with his favorite module – leaflet - in Ljubljana. Check out the video of the session. I asked Josef about his plans as a DrupalCon Portland Drupal Association scolarship winner: "The people that are working on mapping projects or contributing to the mapping space in Drupal ... are going to have a mapping session at DrupalCon." Should Have Made a Left Turn at Albuquerque: Building Maps in Drupal will be a panel-style discussion so everyone can exchange their ideas, knowledge, and plans for creating interactive mapping applications with Drupal. I'm hoping to be there. Iztok Smolic You can find out more about the co-organiser of Drupal Camp Alpe-Adria 2013 on Drupal.org and his own website iztoksmolic.com. When asked "Why did you organise this camp?" he replied, "It was obvious we needed to organise a Drupal Camp in Slovenia." Given that they planned on perhaps 80 people coming, and something like 135 turned up on the first day alone, I guess he was right! The 2012 Drupal Business Days in Vienna made a lasting impression on Iztok. It was the first time "where I could talk to people about business, but in an open source way. It really surprised me that people are open about 'exposing' their business ideas with other people," the idea that Open Source businesspeople who are technically competitors can still be transparent, and share best practices and more, "That was mind-blowing for me." Branislav Bujisic Branislav was proudly wearing a very stylish Acquia Insight t-shirt on the first day of the camp. He got it for getting an A+ with Instant Insight for a site he recently built. He came to Drupal 6 years ago because he needed accessibility in his CMS. He chose one of the only two table-less systems that were around at the time. I guess it was a goo choice, since he went on to say (with a huge grin on his face) "I did the project and now I live working on Drupal ... it's beautiful." Didka Birova Please welcome one of the newest members of the Drupal community, Didka Birova from Bulgaria, a student at the Faculty of Computer Science in Ljubljana, Slovenia. As you can hear in the podcast, her first exposure to Drupal seems to have been a positive one! Voice of Drupal Camp Alpe-Adria 2013 Left to right, top to bottom: Iztok Smolic, Branislav Bujicic, jam, Didka Birova, Josef Dabernig, two "Drupal Camp Angels". Ljubljana, Slovenia alpe-adria-voices.mp3

This week's podcast features two Drupal Scots: Duncan Davidson (recorded live in a back alley right after Drupal Camp Scotland 2013) and Brian Ward (recorded via Skype, post-event). Duncan is the Scottish regional manager and UK Professional Services Manager for i-KOS and Brian is a developer at heehaw.digital in Edinburgh. I apologise for the slight audio deficiencies that crop up in both recordings. Meet Duncan Davidson Duncan has been involved in running the Scottish Drupal Camps since the very first one in 2010, which he set up in just a couple of weeks when he found out Addison Berry was staying in Edinburgh at the time. Duncan echoes how I feel about the Drupal community, "It crosses so many genres of people, their quirks and foibles; it brings a cross-section of humanity together that probably otherwise wouldn't be brought together." I've been asking people recently about their favorite Drupal modules. This is the interview in which I decided I have to disqualify Views ... sorry, Earl. My excuse is that it is going into Drupal 8's core, so that takes it out of the running. In reality, it's because 7 times out of 10, it is people's first answer. :-) Shout out: miiCard Drupal integration for online identity verification Go check out the miiCard and its Drupal Module. It is a Drupal integration with the miiCard API that, according to its makers, lets users "prove their identity to the same level as a passport or driver's licence purely online". The miiCard team is looking for reviews and help to get the module ready for prime time. Here's a quick intro and a place to find more information about the Mii Card: http://www.miicard.com/developers/libraries-components/drupal Here's its project/sandbox page on Drupal.org: http://drupal.org/node/1974022 Here's a demo of it in action: http://drupal.demos.miicard.com/ Meet Brian Ward Brian Ward from Hee-Haw Digital in Edinburgh came to Drupal only about a year ago, thanks to a new manager who, "Was quite adamant about showing us that Drupal was going to be the better way of doing things." He goes on to say that Drupal "is probably the most powerful CMS I've used so far. It's one of the biggest learning curves; I think everyone would agree, but it's easier to do things faster. You can do the complicated things faster than most CMS's. That makes it a good CMS to use in a digital agency." Brian's favorite module plug actually goes to Commerce, because "it works out of the box and it is really easy to customise." He also tells a funny story about now being so deep into Drupal that he has even configured a Wordpress site to work like Drupal, "And hey! It was a nice site! But it was the only way it [ed.: his site design] would ever happen. Wordpress is usually an absolute minefield ...". duncan-n-brian_final.mp3

This week's podcast features two Drupal Scots: Duncan Davidson (recorded live in a back alley right after Drupal Camp Scotland 2013) and Brian Ward (recorded via Skype, post-event). Duncan is the Scottish regional manager and UK Professional Services Manager for i-KOS and Brian is a developer at heehaw.digital in Edinburgh. I apologise for the slight audio deficiencies that crop up in both recordings. Meet Duncan Davidson Duncan has been involved in running the Scottish Drupal Camps since the very first one in 2010, which he set up in just a couple of weeks when he found out Addison Berry was staying in Edinburgh at the time. Duncan echoes how I feel about the Drupal community, "It crosses so many genres of people, their quirks and foibles; it brings a cross-section of humanity together that probably otherwise wouldn't be brought together." I've been asking people recently about their favorite Drupal modules. This is the interview in which I decided I have to disqualify Views ... sorry, Earl. My excuse is that it is going into Drupal 8's core, so that takes it out of the running. In reality, it's because 7 times out of 10, it is people's first answer. :-) Shout out: miiCard Drupal integration for online identity verification Go check out the miiCard and its Drupal Module. It is a Drupal integration with the miiCard API that, according to its makers, lets users "prove their identity to the same level as a passport or driver's licence purely online". The miiCard team is looking for reviews and help to get the module ready for prime time. Here's a quick intro and a place to find more information about the Mii Card: http://www.miicard.com/developers/libraries-components/drupal Here's its project/sandbox page on Drupal.org: http://drupal.org/node/1974022 Here's a demo of it in action: http://drupal.demos.miicard.com/ Meet Brian Ward Brian Ward from Hee-Haw Digital in Edinburgh came to Drupal only about a year ago, thanks to a new manager who, "Was quite adamant about showing us that Drupal was going to be the better way of doing things." He goes on to say that Drupal "is probably the most powerful CMS I've used so far. It's one of the biggest learning curves; I think everyone would agree, but it's easier to do things faster. You can do the complicated things faster than most CMS's. That makes it a good CMS to use in a digital agency." Brian's favorite module plug actually goes to Commerce, because "it works out of the box and it is really easy to customise." He also tells a funny story about now being so deep into Drupal that he has even configured a Wordpress site to work like Drupal, "And hey! It was a nice site! But it was the only way it [ed.: his site design] would ever happen. Wordpress is usually an absolute minefield ...". duncan-n-brian_final.mp3

Shannon Vettes is the Partner Manager at Commerce Guys in Paris; the company leading the way in making Drupal the platform of choice for eCommerce. Among other things, she has the rewarding job of coordinating adding modules and services to the Commerce Marketplace and getting integrators involved in the platform, too. Talks on project management I met her recently at Drupal Camp Scotland in Glasgow, where she was the keynote speaker. She spoke about project management and called "The Fortune Teller must Die." "The purpose of my talk is to get everyone to realise that project management is practice. It's something that you learn and build over time and not something that you use to predict everything that 'should' happen and control every little thing ... and then blame your poor development team who is trying to do it and failed (!) because you planned it properly or poorly ... Whatever happened, you don't blame them. I gave tips and techniques about doing project management the right way. It's a rinse and repeat job. You don't plan once and be done. I think that is the biggest misconception - or misuse! - of the entire business." She also uses the funny neologism "firemanism" to describe project management on a bad day :-) Slides! The slides from both of her Drupal Camp Scotland '13 sessions are available online: Keynote - Project Management Revolution: Why the Fortune Teller Must Die The Science of Guessing: Estimation Techniques from Project Managers Shameless Plug! Shannon wanted to plug three things: Kickstart distribution Shannon: "It will change the way you do web development with Commerce" Commerce Guys: "Commerce Kickstart is Drupal Commerce packed with features that make it more complete, faster to launch, and easier to administer. And like Drupal Commerce itself, it's free, supported by an active developer community, and backed by Commerce Guys' unmatched expertise. Using Commerce Kickstart can take up to a month off of your development time." Commerce Marketplace Shannon: "It is loaded with awesome apps, with more being added all the time, and they are all free!" Commerce Guys: "Everything to improve and strengthen your online store." Turbo tickets Shannon: "quick, cheap, reliable support for Commerce" Robert Douglass announces Turbo Tickets Commerce Guys: "When you submit a Turbo Ticket with a specific question about a Drupal Commerce-related development challenge, a Commerce Guy expert will provide an answer within two business days." shannon_final.mp3

Shannon Vettes is the Partner Manager at Commerce Guys in Paris; the company leading the way in making Drupal the platform of choice for eCommerce. Among other things, she has the rewarding job of coordinating adding modules and services to the Commerce Marketplace and getting integrators involved in the platform, too. Talks on project management I met her recently at Drupal Camp Scotland in Glasgow, where she was the keynote speaker. She spoke about project management and called "The Fortune Teller must Die." "The purpose of my talk is to get everyone to realise that project management is practice. It's something that you learn and build over time and not something that you use to predict everything that 'should' happen and control every little thing ... and then blame your poor development team who is trying to do it and failed (!) because you planned it properly or poorly ... Whatever happened, you don't blame them. I gave tips and techniques about doing project management the right way. It's a rinse and repeat job. You don't plan once and be done. I think that is the biggest misconception - or misuse! - of the entire business." She also uses the funny neologism "firemanism" to describe project management on a bad day :-) Slides! The slides from both of her Drupal Camp Scotland '13 sessions are available online: Keynote - Project Management Revolution: Why the Fortune Teller Must Die The Science of Guessing: Estimation Techniques from Project Managers Shameless Plug! Shannon wanted to plug three things: Kickstart distribution Shannon: "It will change the way you do web development with Commerce" Commerce Guys: "Commerce Kickstart is Drupal Commerce packed with features that make it more complete, faster to launch, and easier to administer. And like Drupal Commerce itself, it's free, supported by an active developer community, and backed by Commerce Guys' unmatched expertise. Using Commerce Kickstart can take up to a month off of your development time." Commerce Marketplace Shannon: "It is loaded with awesome apps, with more being added all the time, and they are all free!" Commerce Guys: "Everything to improve and strengthen your online store." Turbo tickets Shannon: "quick, cheap, reliable support for Commerce" Robert Douglass announces Turbo Tickets Commerce Guys: "When you submit a Turbo Ticket with a specific question about a Drupal Commerce-related development challenge, a Commerce Guy expert will provide an answer within two business days." shannon_final.mp3

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." angela_byron_apr13_part_2.mp3

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." angela_byron_apr13_part_2.mp3

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 Acquia 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." This is part one of a two-part conversation. Here, we discuss the state of Drupal 8 as of spring 2013, what's gone into it so far, and what we can expect from the next major point release of Drupal. We touch on many of the improvements and initiatives that are going to make Drupal 8 great: SPARK: improvements in the authoring experience for "victims of Drupal" :-) WSCCI - web services: "write once, publish to any channel" MOBILE: including responsive front end- and admin-themes in core HTML5: simplifying and future-friendlifying Drupal markup The Twig templating framework: replacing PHP Template Engine in Drupal 8 Symfony integration: aka "proudly found elsewhere" and "getting off the island" Getting off the island: Larry Garfield challenges the Drupal community to learn from other projects and technologies "Symfony2 meets Drupal 8": Announcement by Fabien Potencier Drupal 8 and Symfony 2: notes by Dave Nugent from a talk by Fabien Potencier at DrupalCon Denver 2012 Learning Symfony / Drupal 8: overview by chx You got Symfony in my Drupal 8!: Symfony components in Drupal 8, overview by Geoffrey Roberts at Cross(Functional) Drupal 8 and Symfony - All you need to rock!: Symfony training at DrupalCon in Portland 2013 D8MI - multilingual initiative: including install-to-finish in your native language! VDC - Views in core: adding Drupal's most-used module, a powerful query-builder UI, to the core CMI - configuration management: improving staging and deployment in Drupal 8 SCOTCH - blocks and layouts everywhere: unifying how pages are built in Drupal 8 We also worry if we've forgotten something ... angela_byron_apr13_part_1.mp3

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 Acquia 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." This is part one of a two-part conversation. Here, we discuss the state of Drupal 8 as of spring 2013, what's gone into it so far, and what we can expect from the next major point release of Drupal. We touch on many of the improvements and initiatives that are going to make Drupal 8 great: SPARK: improvements in the authoring experience for "victims of Drupal" :-) WSCCI - web services: "write once, publish to any channel" MOBILE: including responsive front end- and admin-themes in core HTML5: simplifying and future-friendlifying Drupal markup The Twig templating framework: replacing PHP Template Engine in Drupal 8 Symfony integration: aka "proudly found elsewhere" and "getting off the island" Getting off the island: Larry Garfield challenges the Drupal community to learn from other projects and technologies "Symfony2 meets Drupal 8": Announcement by Fabien Potencier Drupal 8 and Symfony 2: notes by Dave Nugent from a talk by Fabien Potencier at DrupalCon Denver 2012 Learning Symfony / Drupal 8: overview by chx You got Symfony in my Drupal 8!: Symfony components in Drupal 8, overview by Geoffrey Roberts at Cross(Functional) Drupal 8 and Symfony - All you need to rock!: Symfony training at DrupalCon in Portland 2013 D8MI - multilingual initiative: including install-to-finish in your native language! VDC - Views in core: adding Drupal's most-used module, a powerful query-builder UI, to the core CMI - configuration management: improving staging and deployment in Drupal 8 SCOTCH - blocks and layouts everywhere: unifying how pages are built in Drupal 8 We also worry if we've forgotten something ... angela_byron_apr13_part_1.mp3

If you can, I would like you to make a donation to this IndieGoGo campaign to help Vincenzo Rubano DrupalCon Portland. What's this all about? Read on. FOSS is your license to make a difference Lately, some people on the web have been making arguments like "It doesn't matter if a CMS is open source or proprietary. It's about features and service. I promise my (proprietary, license-fee charging) CMS will do what you need. Nobody cares about the rest." I call BS. I say being free and open source is important. I say it matters that we are an open source project. I talk to a lot of people around the world explaining business reasons for using Drupal and Free and Open Source Software, but there are other reasons that are just as important. Vincenzo is making a difference This reminded me why: Vincenzo Rubano is an Italian high school student who has been blind since birth. He uses Drupal to run his own website, titengodocchio.it (translated, "Ti tengo d'occhio" means "I've got my eye on you."), a website to promote accessibility on the web and in software. On that website, he keeps a blacklist of other websites and software applications that are not accessible. He doesn't leave it at just pointing fingers. He also writes reports on those sites and apps to help those developers who are willing to improve their software. How's that for motivation? How's that for making a positive difference in the world? There's more: The welcome and support he received from the Drupal community quickly turned him into a contributor, too. He works with accessibility maintainer Mike Gifford testing patches and submitting bug reports. "I started looking at the issue queue for open accessibility issues and I decided to see if I could give a hand to the community, to contribute back for giving me this great product." Could he do that with a proprietary CMS? I don't think so. The GPL is our license to make a difference. Every improvement to Drupal benefits everyone using Drupal for whatever reason to whatever end. Why accessibility matters Many of us in the Drupal community support accessibility for pragmatic and idealistic reasons. Accessibility helps win us government and other contracts. It underscores our commitment to inclusiveness, transparency, and information freedom. Vincenzo has a more compelling argument: I think that every website, every program, or any content that is not accessible to blind users is just a discrimination. This is the reason why I started my website; to help to fix this problem and stop this discrimination. Decide for yourself – Help if you can Listen to this young man yourself in this podcast. If the 19-year-old high-school senior and accessibility activist can be with us in Portland, I believe not only that he will benefit greatly from the experience, but also that Drupal and the web will, too. His fundraising project is off to a good start, but let's get him over the finish line. Make a donation at IndieGoGo. I already have. Thank you. vincenzo_rubano_portland.mp3

If you can, I would like you to make a donation to this IndieGoGo campaign to help Vincenzo Rubano DrupalCon Portland. What's this all about? Read on. FOSS is your license to make a difference Lately, some people on the web have been making arguments like "It doesn't matter if a CMS is open source or proprietary. It's about features and service. I promise my (proprietary, license-fee charging) CMS will do what you need. Nobody cares about the rest." I call BS. I say being free and open source is important. I say it matters that we are an open source project. I talk to a lot of people around the world explaining business reasons for using Drupal and Free and Open Source Software, but there are other reasons that are just as important. Vincenzo is making a difference This reminded me why: Vincenzo Rubano is an Italian high school student who has been blind since birth. He uses Drupal to run his own website, titengodocchio.it (translated, "Ti tengo d'occhio" means "I've got my eye on you."), a website to promote accessibility on the web and in software. On that website, he keeps a blacklist of other websites and software applications that are not accessible. He doesn't leave it at just pointing fingers. He also writes reports on those sites and apps to help those developers who are willing to improve their software. How's that for motivation? How's that for making a positive difference in the world? There's more: The welcome and support he received from the Drupal community quickly turned him into a contributor, too. He works with accessibility maintainer Mike Gifford testing patches and submitting bug reports. "I started looking at the issue queue for open accessibility issues and I decided to see if I could give a hand to the community, to contribute back for giving me this great product." Could he do that with a proprietary CMS? I don't think so. The GPL is our license to make a difference. Every improvement to Drupal benefits everyone using Drupal for whatever reason to whatever end. Why accessibility matters Many of us in the Drupal community support accessibility for pragmatic and idealistic reasons. Accessibility helps win us government and other contracts. It underscores our commitment to inclusiveness, transparency, and information freedom. Vincenzo has a more compelling argument: I think that every website, every program, or any content that is not accessible to blind users is just a discrimination. This is the reason why I started my website; to help to fix this problem and stop this discrimination. Decide for yourself – Help if you can Listen to this young man yourself in this podcast. If the 19-year-old high-school senior and accessibility activist can be with us in Portland, I believe not only that he will benefit greatly from the experience, but also that Drupal and the web will, too. His fundraising project is off to a good start, but let's get him over the finish line. Make a donation at IndieGoGo. I already have. Thank you. vincenzo_rubano_portland.mp3

Matt Edmunds, UX Interaction Designer at Acquia, talks about his 9+ years of working with Drupal ... since version 4.3! This gave us the chance to reminisce about the days when we felt we could keep an eye on roughly the whole project on any given day or week. This was probably not truly the case back then and it certainly isn't now. His fine art background led him to theming in Drupal. As his art training led him into design, it also created a natural path to User Experience work, aka "UX". Today, he spends a lot of his time simplifying, unifying, and clarifying Drupal interfaces and workflows for the SMB and enterprize versions of Drupal Gardens. A lot of his work flows back into cooperation with Drupal community module maintainers and patches on Drupal.org. What Drupal Gardens really needs While the Speak Lol Cats Module has exactly zero bugs in its issue queue, I think my hopes for getting it into the Drupal Gardens codebase are going to go unfulfilled. Matt is Old Skool I checked Matt's username, "tinycg", on Drupal.org and he has indeed been around a while. He is d.o user 15024 – I bow down to your Drupal-Ninjaness, Matt! Video evidence This also really happened. output_1-2.mp3

Matt Edmunds, UX Interaction Designer at Acquia, talks about his 9+ years of working with Drupal ... since version 4.3! This gave us the chance to reminisce about the days when we felt we could keep an eye on roughly the whole project on any given day or week. This was probably not truly the case back then and it certainly isn't now. His fine art background led him to theming in Drupal. As his art training led him into design, it also created a natural path to User Experience work, aka "UX". Today, he spends a lot of his time simplifying, unifying, and clarifying Drupal interfaces and workflows for the SMB and enterprize versions of Drupal Gardens. A lot of his work flows back into cooperation with Drupal community module maintainers and patches on Drupal.org. What Drupal Gardens really needs While the Speak Lol Cats Module has exactly zero bugs in its issue queue, I think my hopes for getting it into the Drupal Gardens codebase are going to go unfulfilled. Matt is Old Skool I checked Matt's username, "tinycg", on Drupal.org and he has indeed been around a while. He is d.o user 15024 – I bow down to your Drupal-Ninjaness, Matt! Video evidence This also really happened. output_1-2.mp3

Kyle Browning, the Director of Mobile at WorkHabit, talks about developing for Drupal as a mobile platform and the open-sourcing of the new Drupal Create app for iOS. The evolution of mobile + Drupal Kyle describes his work as "handling the communication from a mobile phone to a website," and talks about the need for mobile-capable websites and apps that has developed since 2010. The Drupal Create app builds on Kyle's work building the Drupal iOS Software Development Kit and the rewrite of Drupal's Services module before that. "I wanted to focus on making sure that the Drupal community had this as an option; to be able to communicate to their website from their phone." A dynamic app for a dynamic platform Drupal Create lets you post content, handles your session data, but it does much more, too. Kyle explains, "You can dynamically change what content you can create from your app, via configuration on your Drupal site. You can reorder your forms, just like you do with the regular Forms API ... Since Drupal is such a dynamic platform, we wanted to make the app listen to the website and 'take note' of how how these forms are built and things like that." Fly! Be free! Open-sourcing the code The Drupal Create codebase is licensed under the MIT License, not the GPL as we said in the podcast audio. The MIT license is more permissive still than the GPL, but also compatible with it. Open sourcing the full Objective-C source code for Drupal Create on GitHub not only puts the code out there for other developers to use and improve on, it can also help people learn how to do their own mobile development. "It'll be great to see what features people in the community add. It'll be great to see what things they hated that I did ... It's going to be really fun to hear from the community what they think about it." At WorkHabit, "we really care about Drupal and we want to give the tools to the community so it can foster innovation inside of itself." Moshe Weizman, Acquia's Director of Research and Development, and manager of the Drupal Create project underscores that sentiment this way, "We want people to take it and do anything they want to with it." Moshe didn't actually say, "Fly! Be free!" but I pictured him doing so and the image stuck with me. Acquia's official press release puts it pretty well, too, saying the release of a fully functional mobile-communication codebase "is kick-starting development of mobile content publishing apps for Drupal." Downloads Drupal Create codebase: http://github.com/acquia/drupal-create Drupal iOS SDK: http://github.com/workhabitinc/drupal-ios-sdk Drupal Gardens iOS app (based on the Drupal Create codebase): http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drupal-gardens/id561249662?mt=8 ios_app_release_kyle_browning.mp3