walkah: drupal

This year promises to be an exciting one - and one that proves to be full of changes galore. As I mentioned in my last post, much of my 2010 change began late in 2009.

Cue the Bowie...

Leaving Lullabot

Although it's been largely quiet (and really not a huge deal), before the rumours spread too far: I've left my position as the Director of Education for Lullabot. I'm leaving behind a totally awesome team and a wonderful job (in the midst of a recession). Why on earth?!

Let me be very clear: Lullabot isn't in danger, stopping Drupal training, nor is there any backroom drama. The 'bots are wonderful people and chances are very good that we'll continue to collaborate in the future (at the very least, there's still hugs).

This was a very personal decision - and one that was a long time coming. For the morbidly curious, it boils down to three things (and those of you who know me well, know it always comes down to three things):

Travel: Anyone who is friends with a 'bot on Dopplr or Tripit knows that the job entails a lot of time on the road. With over 230 days on the road in the past 2 years, I needed and my kids deserved a break. While we (Lullabot and I) largely worked around this - it's still just part of the gig.

Drupal: I stood up in front of a rather large group of Drupal folks almost a year ago and explained why I hate Drupal - so it's obvious, right? While I feel the points I tried to make still face the community at large (such as smallcore/drupal is not a product, or even rethinking the maintainer structure), I don't actually hate Drupal (as those of you who grok sarcasm might have noted).

However, Drupal has been my full-time job for 6 years. In that time, the community (and the software) has grown and changed considerably. It has been an amazing ride. As Dries mentioned to me on the phone a few weeks ago, "once a Drupal guy, always a Drupal guy". This is probably true - I have no intention of leaving the community, but I am ready for some new challenges.

Open Web: One thing people may have noticed is that when I have had the chance to hack on Drupal lately - it tends to involve "open web" or "open standards" implementations (notably, OpenID etc). Many folks have also noticed that my contributions have trailed off lately. When your "after hours" time starts including more things like "sleep" - your after hours projects take a hit.

I'd like to get back to building cool, new stuff. While I certainly get a lot out of teaching people how to make the most of the tools available, I'm passionate about building the next tools (which doesn't exclude Drupal). These are interesting times on the internets, I wanna have my nose in the middle of it.

Now what?

Officially, I will be freelancing (technically have been for a few weeks). I've already got some interesting things lined up that I'm excited to start talking about soon.

This past weekend, I had the privilege of being one of the chosen attendees for Social Web FooCamp. Needless to say, I was flattered and had an amazing time (thanks again, @daveman692 and @davemorin ) . One thing, however, became very apparent: the conversation, currently, is being dominated by the 'big players' (Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Myspace predominantly). In several discussions I found myself increasingly dropping the phrase:

... on the rest of the web

the big guys

First off, this is not a critique of the Google's and Facebook's of the internet. They are incredibly valuable to the growth of the openweb. The fact that Google, Yahoo and Myspace all three have various OpenID and OAuth initiatives in the wild and are actively pursuing additional ways to open their data is awesome (and Facebook wants to get there). It helps raise awareness and bring (slash confirm) "legitimacy".

The big guys also have resources. They can attend the conferences (and camps!) and have dedicated resources to write the standards, participate in the discussions and help shape the future.

However, they are only part of the discussion.

perspective

The issues the major providers face are different from the rest. They have a few sites with large numbers of users (hundreds of millions). Out here on the rest of the web, we have millions of websites, each with a "small" number of users (hundreds or thousands). We all understand the necessity for open data, identity, standards and protocols, but our reasoning tends to be slightly different.

The big guys recognize the benefit of exposing their data and most are providing OpenID and various levels of OAuth. How many are consuming it?

Sure, the big players want to be the primary authority for your identity and your information. In some cases, it is their business. But, rather than ranting against 'the man', I ask: have we - the rest of the web - given them a compelling reason to yet?

open source platforms for the open web

It's one thing for a major site (with hundreds of millions of users) to act like a silo, but on the rest of the web it amounts to isolation.

Those of us working on open source web platforms have an enormous potential for influence here. Implementing the various open standards "from scratch", while possible, is not realistic or even necessary. Increasingly, individuals have Wordpress blogs or perhaps their company, organization or club has a Drupal site. Web developers are increasingly turning to these platforms, or development frameworks such as Rails and Django. These platforms all have a real opportunity to bake in implementations of these open standards. The DiSo project offers a central place for co-ordination around these efforts.

We have data - gobs of it. We also, collectively, have the users and, in most cases, have more authoritative information about them (we know ourselves, our employees and our members).

We - the rest of the web - need to join the conversation: attend the events, participate in the mailing lists, and build the code to power the open, social web.

I'm back home from a truly spectacular DrupalCon DC and have been reflecting this morning on some of the feedback from my talk: Why I Hate Drupal.

See the slides and watch the video

I first got the idea for this talk several months ago watching the DjangoCon 2008 keynote Why I Hate Django by Cal Henderson. I had several ideas for things to address, but aside from the session description I intentionally said very little about my talk publicly. This, of course, lead to some interesting speculation and negative feedback. All part of the plan.

As it turned out, I was not lynched and nothing rotten was thrown.

What I was not expecting (and what the video doesn't capture), though, was all of the interesting discussion that followed. I was overwhelmed by the positive response and the number of people who agreed with several of the points I tried to make:

Drupal is not a product. To grow into a "movement", we should focus on becoming a better platform, adopt some better practices around development, be a better framework, and create more space for the creation of "products" (install profiles, etc) on top.

What do you think? How to we "fix" this project?

In just a few days, most of the drupal community will be headed to Washington, DC for DrupalCon. As the conference draws closer, I always get excited to see friends I don't get to see and share exciting ideas, but this time there is a lot of growing interest and activity around OpenID.

As has become a bit of a tradition, I'll be giving my 4th OpenID talk. This year, I'm hoping to focus a bit on the exciting new developments from the OpenID community and looking at some of the things being built on top of OpenID (like the OpenID/OAuth hybrid model and the DiSo project).

Also, Chris Messina will be one of the keynote presenters - also talking about online identity. We had Chris on the lullabot podcast this week - be sure to check it out!

Finally, for those of you coming to DC - I'm going to round up interested parties on Saturday for an OpenID code sprint. Hope to see you there!

A few weeks ago, I very quietly made a (personally) significant move in my Drupal life. I "officially" transferred the project ownership of the drupal image module to Daniel "sun" Kudwien. Truth be told, I haven't been the primary maintainer of the module for over a year. That job has been admirably handled by drewish. However, both drewish and I have a lot else on our plates and one of Drupal's most used modules has not gotten the focused attention it deserves.

Now, as Angie will tell you, Daniel is a fantastic Drupal contributor - worthy of the praise he receives. But, I'd like to give a personal shout out: he has helped to take the image issue queue from over 12 pages long down to 3.

Nice work, sun. The community thanks you :-)

Man, we're getting old!

Today (January 15th) is the 8th anniversary of the day Drupal 1.0 was released. Although Dries had no idea at the time - it was a move that would not only change his life, but mine too...

January 2009 also marks the 5th anniversary of my starting to work on Drupal full time (after a few years of "hobby" involvement). My first project (at the time, actually a re-launch) still stands as one of my favourites: http://www.terminus1525.ca/ . Since then, Drupal has defined my career: from co-founding Bryght to my current life as a Lullabot. The community is home to some of my best friends and people I love.

Five years - full-time. No wonder I feel old.

In my usual heard-it-hear-last style... I was out to dinner this week with my friend, Phillip, who was apparently unaware that Lullabot had written a book(?!?) and I was one of the authors.

Well, for most of last year (plus) most of us over at lullabot spent sleepless nights putting together Using Drupal. It went to press in early December, and is indeed on amazon and even on shelves.

I'm personally pretty proud of the book. It's the first Drupal book by O'Reilly and the first to take a comprehensive look at building a "real" Drupal site with heavy emphasis on CCK, Views and the rest of drupal contrib.

I have to say, too, that O'Reilly was a lot of fun to work with. There's a reason they have a reputation for having the top tech books. If you missed it, @eaton and I did a live webcast with O'Reilly which was their biggest ever. Kool-aid for everyone!

If you don't have a copy yet, what's wrong with you? ;-)

My last several weeks (months?) have been pretty darn hectic preparing for Do It With Drupal. Well, we've done it with Drupal - and it was awesome! It was really fun bringing the whole Lullabot team to make it happen. The speakers were awesome, the venue was great and the people rocked.

For those of you who missed it, the event was pretty well documented via the twitter backchannel and flickr photos. Thanks everyone!

I'm back home now... oh - and I moved! I'm now living in a beautiful house at St. Clair and Dufferin.

So it's time to settle in for the holiday season, finish getting unpacked and settled and enjoy a little breathing room. To kick it off, I'm heading to #hohoto tonight. Looking forward to partying with my local Toronto people!

I'm excited to announce that members of the Toronto Drupal User Group have put together an exciting one day, free workshop on Drupal theming.

I will be there to present in the afternoon. Please come out and say "hi". Also, Lullabot will be sponsoring lunch (thanks guys!).

It seems like Toronto has gone Drupal crazy lately. I am loving all the local events!

The event takes place starting at 10am on November 22nd, 2008 at the Centre for Social Innovation. Be sure to check the website for full details. See you there!

Earlier this week I gave a free workshop for PHUG here in Toronto. We had a lot of fun and our scheduled one hour turned into 3 or 4 (oops!). I had a lot of fun with the group and the night received good reviews.

During the evening, we took a pure HTML and CSS design and converted it into a Drupal theme. The design is called VectorLover - freely available from styleshout.com.

I took some time this week to clean up our work, and am making "VectorLover" available for download here. Please contact me if you have any questions or comments. Enjoy!

(Note: Due to the license, this theme will not appear in the Drupal repository. Sorry!)