walkah: drupal

I'm certainly not the first to post about this, but it looks like Drupal will have a strong showing at SXSW Interactive 2009. There's even a front page post on drupal.org to bring awareness. A group of us from Lullabot went last year and we had an absolute blast. If you haven't been, sign up now!

The panel picker is live and I suggest you *all* vote for Drupal with Its Pants Off (you know you wanna). What's really exciting, though, is the long list of other Drupal panels on the list.

Looks like there'll be lots of Drupal in Austin next March... even http://sxsw.com/ is Drupal powered!

My hotel is booked. See you there!

Sadly, I won't be there... but you should be!

I have to sit this one out due to scheduling conflicts, but the posted schedule looks really good. Of course, the Lullabot team members going are all over the schedule. Everyone should attend webchick's intro to testing and be sure to attend the testing party - she has promised chocolate!

Scanning through the schedule, it's nice to see that fellow Toronto Drupal Users Group member, Emma Jane, will be giving a presentation on Drupal for small business networks.

So, while my socks and I will only be there in spirit, you should be there in person. Register now!

I finally "re-launched" my blog last night, after tinkering for a few months. I'm now running (at the time of writing) Drupal 6.3. More interesting, however, is that my site is almost entirely powered now by Views 2.

The biggest visible change is the home page. Inspired in part by Dave Shea's lovely blog, I wanted to make my front page shorter. So now, I'm displaying the latest full post, with 9 previous titles only. This is all done with views (using the awesome new "attachment" display type).

The other interesting bit is that I'm using the latest version of twitter module so that the "twitter" block on the right is actually views2 powered as well (and gets cached).

I'm sure I'll keep tweaking, but I dig it. How about you?

Last night I put together a simple module for Drupal to implement the XRDS-Simple spec. It is based loosely on the xrds-simple wordpress plugin.

XRDS-Simple is an important piece of the DiSo project. From the XRDS-Simple spec::

XRDS-Simple provides a format and workflow for the discovery of resources metadata, and other linked resources. As web services continue to grow, applications utilize a wider range of web services and resources across multiple providers. XRDS-Simple allows providers to document their resources in a machine-readable way, which can be automatically discovered by consumer applications.

So, check it out: http://drupal.org/project/xrds_simple .

I had an interesting e-mail exchange yesterday with Chris Messina and a handful of folks from the DiSo project about "DiSo for Drupal". For those of you who haven't heard of it DiSo is:

DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: “to build a social network with its skin inside out”.

See, Chris recently started a new job working on DiSo full-time at Vidoop. With the announcements of Facebook connect and Google's Friend Connect, there is a battle raging for control of your identity and your relationships. DiSo, in many respects, is the free open answer for the rest of the internet. It combines several free, open standards that already exist in the wild like OpenID, OAuth, and Microformats for exchanging identity and "friend" information.

So, Chris reached out a handful of us Drupal folks about getting on board. The good news is: we, the Drupal community, are already well on our way:

• OpenID (in Drupal 6.x core)
• OpenID Provider : http://drupal.org/project/openid_provider
• OpenID Attribute Exchange : http://drupal.org/project/openid_ax (in progress via Google SoC)
• OAuth : http://drupal.org/project/oauth
• Atom : syndication only - http://drupal.org/project/atom - might be nice to have a basic envelop generator/parser implementation
• XMPP : http://drupal.org/project/jabber , http://drupal.org/project/xmpp and http://drupal.org/project/xmpp_server (the latest of which is maybe the most promising)
• vCard / hCard : http://drupal.org/project/vcard

The big holes at the moment (from a DiSo perspective) are XRDS-Simple support and better support for microformats - specifically XFN.

From the list of Drupal modules above, you may notice that this is an area of interest of mine :-P I look forward to working with the rest of the DiSo project and the Drupal community on this stuff!

The third annual Drupal Camp Toronto event is coming soon. On Friday May 23rd and Saturday May 24th join the Toronto Drupal Users Group in celebrating two days of Drupal at the University of Toronto!

We're putting together an exciting event this year. We have John Resig coming to talk about jQuery and ActiveState will be giving away prize packages. Plus we'll have two full days of information - tips, tricks, case studies and howtos. Make sure to register soon! We already have over 100 people signed up!

Also, we are actively seeking both speakers and sponsors. Propose a session or contact us if you're interested in sponsoring or have other questions.

Hope to see you there!

Summer is coming - which means it's time for Google's Summer of Code. This is the fourth year of the project (and the fourth year that Drupal has been involved). We continue to be one of Google's favourite open source projects this year grabbing 21 spots - which means a $105,000 investment in Drupal development this summer!

I'm excited as this will be my third year as a mentor and my project this year will be OpenID Attribute Exchange support for Drupal. Attribute Exchange is one of the next important pieces in digital identity and one that I'm pretty excited about. My student, Anshu Prateek, has shown a lot of enthusiasm. I think it's gonna be a good summer!

I know it's late notice, but I'll be hosting a free workshop tomorrow night, April 2nd at 7pm as part of the PHUG + RMI free workshops.

For those of you here in Toronto that are unaware, PHUG is the new local PHP User Group. They have a lot of momentum and are an exciting group - I look forward to more collaboration in the future betweeh PHUG and DUG-TO.

The workshop will be Drupal Basics - a crash course in everyone's favourite CMS. We'll look at the core Drupal concepts, how building sites in Drupal works, and some basic theming tricks.

It's a free event, but space is limited so please register. Looking forward to meeting some new faces!

UPDATE: P.S. this isn't an April Fool's joke ;)

Dries finally took the wraps off his other new Drupal related venture: Mollom.

I've been amongst the beta testers on mollom (I'm uid #8!) for a long time now, here on this blog and with some other projects. I have to say, it's impressive. It's sort of like Akismet but has some interesting goals that are slightly different. The key is in calling it "content monitoring" rather than just "spam blocking" (which it already does effectively). Think: high powered moderation tools - with network intelligence.

Congrats, Dries, on another one! (When do you sleep?!)

With almost a week gone by since I left Boston, it's high time to do a quick recap of DrupalCon Boston 2008. Despite spending most of the week battling a nasty stomach flu, making two trips to the Apple Store in Cambridge, and being without my laptop (which suffered a failed keyboard and trackpad), I had a great time and want to offer my congrats to the organizing team for a solid event!

Although I took part in 6 sessions, I only presented one of them on my own: OpenID and Identity in Drupal. I was pleased with how the session went - packed room with lots of great feedback and discussion. For those interested, check out the slides on slideshare.

Otherwise, it was really great to see all the old faces and meet some new ones. For anyone who missed it, the Acquia party was a blast (Orbit rocks!). Looking forward to the next!