drupal

This post is part of our Abridged series, which aims to explain the basics of some of the more ominous yet awesome Drupal projects in simple and practical terms. We hope these posts will help demystify some of these projects for people who have been hesitant to try them out!

Here, we'll take a look at Boxes module, including a review of its history within the Drupal project, the current state of the module, how to start using it, how we use it at Affinity Bridge, and some resources. Special thanks to Tylor who recently did a sitdown (team discussion/learning session) on Boxes module, and wrote the technical sections of this post.

Background

Boxes module is a Drupal project that was originally built by Jeff Miccolis from Development Seed. It's been around for quite a while, but many people don't venture into using it, largely because it's not clear upfront what the benefits are over core Blocks.

At DrupalCon Chicago this past week, there was a "Core Conversations" session track, made up of sessions pitched by contributors to the core Drupal project. A wide range of topics were covered from the Butler project (a new system for context and blocks), to the built-in Help system, to Deployment strategies, to redesigning the issue queue. These sessions were shorter presentations followed by a discussion period for the attendees to give input on the topics.

It's already that time again, DrupalCon Chicago is on next week! We've got three members of the Affinity Bridge team attending the conference, looking forward to learning, sprinting, and presenting a few sessions.

Dave Tarc, our newest team member Katherine Bailey (welcome!), and I (Ariane) will be at the conference, and we've got a few events/sessions that we're working on and would love to see you at:

Tuesday, Mar. 8, 3:15pm: "Help Needs Help!" 

Big news in Affinity Bridge offices today! The announcement went out on Drupal.org this morning that myself (arianek) and Jennifer Hodgdon (jhodgdon) from Seattle have been appointed by Dries Buytaert as the new Drupal Documentation Co-Leads! 

This has been a long time in the making. It's really exciting to have the work I've been doing recognized, and also have the ability to leverage that work to improve documentation and help build a stronger Docs Team. On top of that, my community spotlight was also posted today, which is incredibly heartwarming.

This past weekend we attended the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit and I gave an introduction to open data and beautiful maps. I talked about open data, covered the creation of a map in under 10 minutes, and discussed how to create beautiful maps using advanced techniques like custom tilesets. The video is already online thanks to the hard work of Justin Carlson, posted on his blog here and embedded below:

Tylor Sherman: Open Data & Beautiful Maps from Carlson Media on Vimeo.

It was an incredibly jam-packed weekend for Drupallers here in the Pacific Northwest, with the 2nd annual PNW Drupal Summit in Vancouver. The Summit is a weekend conference that is targeted towards people already working with Drupal (moderate to advanced level), and is done in a regional mini-DrupalCon style: pre-scheduled sessions/tracks, keynotes from Drupal 7 maintainer Angie Byron (aka. webchick) and Chapter 3's Josh Koenig (aka. joshk), and Drupal 7 code sprints (that resulted in bringing the Drupal 7 criticals count from 13 to 8 over the course of the weekend, HOOAH!)

With Drupal 7 down to 30 critical bugs, and Drupalcon Copenhagen just around the corner, it's only a matter of time before Drupal 7.0 ships. We want to make sure our Drupal 7 documentation is in great shape for this fantastic new release, and the Documentation Team could really use YOUR help getting there!

Did you miss out on last year's PNW Drupal Summit in Seattle, here's your chance to attend! Our second annual regional Drupal developer conference is in Vancouver this year, October 2-3 at Robson Square.

Last year's conference was a fantastic weekend of sessions oriented towards developers, business/management, themers, designers, and power-user/configurers. This year is sure to be another stellar line up of presentations, workshops, and birds-of-a-feather (aka. BOF) sessions to educate and enthuse all intermediate to advanced developers, and anyone else who manages, documents, designs for, or administers any Drupal sites.

When we started transitioning into using an Agile development method just over a year ago, one of the first and most constant challenges we ran into was how to make it work for our clients. Agile has been a fantastic tool for defining internal processes that really work for us at Affinity Bridge. Many of our clients, being non-profit organizations and academic institutions, however, are accountable to boards who have to review and approve their budgets ahead of time. They're not able to bill according to work done during agile sprints, without having budgeted for the work ahead of time. Here are a few tips from the lessons we've learned for doing agile development while managing estimates and budgets in a way that works for our clients.

Last week, Zoe, Dave, and I made our way down to San Francisco for DrupalCon. It was a fantastic week, and even though I knew how many people were attending, I was still stunned by the actual size of the crowd, especially when we were all gathered together for the keynote sessions.