Drupal

Next week, I will be at the Nonprofit Software Development Summit in Oakland. I am scheduled to help out with a wide range of sessions about Drupal and political data. I have been attending this summit since its first year when CivicSpace was still young; it will be good to catch up with everyone and see what people are doing with Drupal.

In March, Greg, Matt and I will be talking about Drupal security for users and developers at Drupalcon DC. Long-term, insecure configuration and development for Drupal should be harder, with better user interface and APIs; but I think education is still needed. There will be a lot going on since it is a Drupalcon, including another round of usability testing.

Earlier this week, Angie, Earl and I were on The Linux Link Tech Show #273. We talked about a wide range of topics. If you like podcasts, it might be a good introduction to Drupal and what is happening now.

I am speaking both Saturday and Sunday at BADCamp. Saturday I will be talking about Drupal Development Tools and Resources with Matt Cheney. We will demo tools we help build, like Drupal’s API reference and Drupal for Firebug, and other great tools we use to help build sites smarter and faster.

Sunday I will be talking about Importing data with job queue and import manager. I have done this presentation in a few different forms before, at DrupalCon Boston, NewTools Drupal Day and a SFDUG meeting. This presentation will be more-technical than the others and explain how you can queue and manage jobs with Job queue and Import manager.

As always, I will be on the lookout for people interested in Drupal usability and improving the API module.

The Job queue issue queue has been quiet and I have been testing it with the development version of the API module, so it is time for a Drupal 6 release.

Before the Boston Drupalcon, I was asked “Can you describe what the experience of using your [Drupal’s] design will be like in 5 years?” I usually think one or two release cycles ahead, 2 years maximum, so this is a challenge. Read more

I will be on the Performance tuning expert panel at Drupalcon Szeged. I am excited to see a continuing focus on usability and hope to help during the sprints. Please consider sponsoring the conference if you can.

I will be on vacation the week before Drupalcon. If you know where to find vegetarian food between Prague and Budapest, email me.

I gave a talk about scalability at the last SF Drupal User’s Group meeting. Performance and scalability is an excellent topic for a user group meeting; everyone wants to know about scalability and there is enough material for hours. I did my talk in two parts: I spoke about the general process and demoed useful tools. Read more