planet drupal

A great opportunity arose a few months back when Tom Nightingale and I were each beginning work on client sites needing advanced search functionality: the Search API module, providing "a framework for easily creating searches on any entity known to Drupal, using any kind of search engine" was becoming more awesome and more stable by the day, and the FacetAPI module had just been announced, but there was no integration between the two.

The attraction to Search API, for the project I was working on at least, arose from some initial uncertainty around whether we'd be using Sphinx or Apache Solr for the backend, and from the fact that we definitely wanted to use a Views front-end for displaying search results.

Five years ago Dries blogged about distributions becoming an integral part of the Drupal ecosystem. He saw a future for Drupal that included tailored products for many different markets. Today there are a large number of distributions targeting many categories. In this post I'm going to discuss Build Kit and how it can be used as a platform for building and maintaining distributions and custom site builds.

Build Kit

The philosophy of Build Kit was introduced in the blog post by Development Seed, Features and Exportables on Drupal 7. As outlined in this blog post the components are:

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.

Drupal 7 is out!

Late Tuesday night was one of the most exciting Drupal events I've yet to be part of: the official release of Drupal 7. I've been working on the Drupal 7 documentation for over a year at this point, and crunching really hard the last few weeks on the Install and Upgrade guides, and core module documentation. I knew the day was coming, but it was even more inspiring than expected being a part of those last few days and hours leading up to the launch.

When Angie (aka. "webchick", Drupal 7's core maintainer) started rolling the release, it was quite obvious how excited everyone was on IRC, as this went on for about five minutes straight after she created the final release:

This post is a followup to a presentation I gave at the Pacific North West Drupal Summit in Vancouver held back in October.

I posted the slides for that presentation on Slideshare, Continuous integration with Git & CI Joe.

Background

We've discussed using the Simpletest module in a previous post, Drupal Simpletest Module Abridged. Simpletest is a powerful way to know that the code powering your Drupal site is operating correctly and that new functionality is not breaking what has already been implemented.

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!)

A few weeks ago, I embarked on my first overseas trip to go to Copenhagen for this year's European DrupalCon. It was my 4th DrupalCon to date, but I've been wanting to attend one of the European ones for a while, as they have a reputation for having a different vibe than the North American ones (and of course so I could finally see some of Europe!)

The Core Dev Summit (+ Code Sprint Day)

Like the last conference in San Francisco, it was prefaced with the Core Developer Summit, which is a full day of presentations, discussions, and code sprinting on the core Drupal platform. The Core Dev Summit is the single day (twice a year at this point), where a good number of the people who work on Drupal core come together to take a step back and discuss in-depth any ideas or concerns. This often leads into some dedicated sprinting on core related issues (as well as some of the most crucial contributed modules).