Heine

Using Open Atrium to deploy a highly custom, enterprise grade intranet solution

The World Bank's Communicate intranet launched last week on Open Atrium. The nearly 1,000 person communications team spread around the world is better positioned to collaborate now that their main communication tool is custom tuned to their specific business processes.

By starting with Open Atrium and the Features site building paradigm, we were able to address the World Bank's custom needs on a broadly supported core code base.

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Get new Lullabot videos early and get 'em cheap!

After spending a while trying to figure out the best way to offer discounts to our past customers on new video releases, I came to a realization: why not just give a discount to everyone who buys the videos early? Lullabot fans can more easily complete their collection, and new customers will have an incentive to find out what all the hubbub is about.

Each video in the Lullabot Learning Series is offered in two formats: as a downloadable video file, and as a DVD. Once we're finished with the production and editing process, the video download is pretty much ready to go. However, the DVD version usually takes a few weeks at the pressing plant and then ship to our warehouse.

We've opted to sell the download-only versions of new videos while we wait for DVD versions to come in. However, since these releases aren't available yet in all formats, we're now calling them "early releases" and offering them at a big discount.

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A simple solution how to add a description field to your node/add forms.

What is that for?

We are building a website that has landing pages. Structure could be like:

• About Us (landing page)
  • Who we are?
  • What we do?
• Locations (landing page)
  • United Kingdom
  • Ireland

The site structure is based on a menu, thus each page has its menu and most importantly parent menu item if it is not landing page. When visitor is viewing a landing page, the page consists of a text from landing page node and a list of first level sub-menu items with its description (views can't do this afaik).

Here is the landing page layout:

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I took a few days off from work to spend some time with my family -- I haven't had more than a 3 hour break in the last 4 weeks and was away from home during the weekends. DrupalCon Paris ended about 48 hours ago, so I'm sitting here with post-DrupalCon blues, staring at the waterfront, thinking about how fun and exciting the conference was. As usual, I wasn't able to attend more than a couple of sessions, but nothing beats talking to Drupal users and brainstorming together. And I talked to many Drupalistas ...

Looking back at DrupalCon Paris, it struck me that sometimes we can generate ideas faster when we work alone, and that sometimes creativity happens best in groups. The same is true for solving problems. The time leading up to the conference, the time at the conference, and the weeks after the conference provide a unique blend of individual and collective idea creation and problem solving that is so important for Drupal. Let's not underestimate that. I certainly value the retrospective that seems to be part of the post-DrupalCon blues (and the waterfront Mojitos that help fuel it).

With 850 Drupalistas attending DrupalCon Paris, I wasn't able to talk to all of you -- I feel sad about that because we have such an amazing community. To those people that I have been able to talk to and brainstorm with: thanks for inspiring me!

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When you create a new Drupal installation two users are created. The first is the obvious admin user with uid 1, which you will use to create your first pieces of content (or, for larger sites, to create the moderation role, assign the necessary permissions and create the moderation users). The second user might be less obvious. It's the virtual anonymous user with uid 0. You will not find it in any user listing, you can not assign any roles to it and you can not log in as the anonymous user. It's important to realize that both users are very important.

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Mark Boulton gave a great presentation at Drupalcon Paris on using grids for design covering his design process.

This series of videos covers the session. Sorry, no tripod - the videos were taken with my iPhone.

Hope you enjoy them.

Part I

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drupalcon-paris-2009-drupalcon-5-500x500.jpg The war is on! 3893830817_4ced9483fa.jpg i like to be very direct ;) all youre html are belong to us session

As pro

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In a past life, I use to teach cooking classes and as a class exercise at the end of the first class I would ask my students to cook a particular dish, using a collective set of ingredients, and bring it to the next class. Each student approached the problem differently, using their own techniques and tools, and they all mixed in their own "secret sauce" to improve on the collective ingredients. It was interesting that despite starting with the same ingredients, the students ended up in wildly different places and with different quality. The difference came from the little things - the tools, the techniques, and each chef's secret sauce.

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The Economist project really reflected a collaboration between quite a few shops out there with the Economist as the central hub of activity. They worked using several teams all using Scrum meaning that there needed to be a scrum of scrums each day. I found the informal style of the talk easy to watch. Here are my shaky videos of the presentation.

NOTE: Sorry about 5 and 6 being QuickTime - I'm waiting on the embed codes from blip.tv. Click twice to start those videos or click twice to stop them.

Part I

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Having just returned from DrupalCon Paris 2009 with mixed feelings as to how I forged my own experience there, I thought I'd put down some thoughts on conference attendance and participation — what (not) to do.

1. Don't minimize the jet lag factor.

   I had an 8-hour shift in going to Paris, and my first day there after touching down around 7am was pretty much lost in the fog. The second day was really my first day, and that would have been better spent having to myself to just settle in, check out my hotel neighborhood, find decent food, orient myself as to where the conference venue was, etc. As it was, I had to run off to the conference for my first day of meetings and such. I should have arrived a day earlier.

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DrupalCon Paris is over. Countless of badly needed discussions and brainstormings happened, and we have a couple of weeks to finalize and clean up all of the new APIs and features we added to Drupal 7.

A couple of people asked when the videos will be up:
Kristof and his team are working on it, as there were some changes for uploading on archive.org
They should all be up by end of this week.

And another couple of people asked whom to send presentation material to:
That would also be Kristof and his team. But, if you do not have his contacts, please send it to me and I will forward.

Cheers!

I took it all with me, just in case :-)

Here is the list with all the items in the black box.

• Black computer bag (I have a name and an address attached to it)
• iphone/pod cable, marked logic3
• half of a black PC cable (power cable, 250V)
• US power cable (brand HP) with US adapter (grey) to avoid third round thingy (125V)
• Adapter US to EU
• Phone recharger (Nokia)
• Pocket for Nokia phone
• Hotel Key (grey with holes)
• NatWest (Maestro) bank card

Prolly one of the most frequently asked drupal design questions to me and others in the Drupal forum is “how do I [insert question] CSS”. Answering these questions provide little more than the proverbial fish, whereas we really want to be teaching them how to fish. Heres a few resources that can really give you a head start with CSS.

Last week I had the chance to attend my second drupalcon. Just as in Washington I represented Siruna in order to create some awareness around mobile... and of course Siruna.

If you are not sure what I am talking about, you will probably remember our stand and the free Hoegaarden.

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Roel De Meester gave a talk on Aegir at Drupalcon Paris. These are my notes.

The Aegir session covered a basic overview of what and how the system can be used to rapidly deploy instants of Drupal. It culminated with three short case studies of how it is currently being used.

What is Aegir? Aegir is simply a bunch of linux scripts plus a Drupal site. You can think of it as one site to lead them all. The current beta (0.3) is a stable release and can be deployed.

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I'm sitting on a plane from Paris to Philadelphia after Drupalcon. My feeling was very good about the Con. The presentations that I attended were, in general, good. There were a few that were not-so-great, but that's pretty normal. Not all sessions will be great. I took quite a bit of video - not all sessions, but quite a few. I took some notes. I'll get my notes and video up on line as I'm able.

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In order to get tagadelic ready for D7, before the release, I copied the source into git.

I also committed a few importand fixes and improvements to the Drupal-6 branch today, and merged them into HEAD (aka master).

From now on, I want to focus on Drupal 7 stuff only:

• Improvements and bugfixes for DRupal 6 will have to wait.
• New features are all ignored.

However:

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After Washington, this was my second drupalcon I participated.
I attended several sessions, most of them had been interesting and confirmed me in my way of working, one was really boring because of the way how it was presented (I guess the presenter bored himself) and two inspired me to write a submission for the next Drupal event in Vienna.

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Following our presentation at Drupalcon Paris, Philipp and I have received almost an overwhelming number of compliments and positive feedbacks. Thank you for those who attended the presentation and I am very glad many of you have found the presentation useful :)

A number of people have also asked me to:

• a) make the slide available online
• b) share the names of books I recommend

So for 'a', I've attached the presentation to this post.