rfay's blog

My sessions proposed for Drupalcon Paris

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I proposed 3 sessions for Drupalcon Paris at the beginning of September, and just hope I can get one in. There's one on Debugging Drupal, one on Ctools/Panels Plugins, and one on Upgrade-proofing your site. Looks like they're all kind of low in the running, but they've all gotten some votes. Surprisingly the one that I thought would be the lowest ranked is the highest - the "Upgrade-Proof Your Site: Best Practices to Avoid Major Version Upgrade Headaches".

If you're going and you like any of these topics, thanks for your VOTE!

DrupalCamp Colorado next week - My session got accepted

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My session on AHAH in Drupal got accepted for next week's Drupal Camp Colorado in Denver. So it's time to get it ready. (Update: see the materials here.

AHAH (Asynchronous HTML and HTTP) is a technology built into the Drupal Forms API which allows for updates of a form without doing a full page refresh, and it makes some things really nice. All of the "add to cart" and similar behaviors in the Amazon Store module (try it at alonovo.com/amazon_store) are done with AHAH, meaning that you can add to cart and not end up on another page, and not have a long wait.

Basically, pressing a button causes a simple call back to the web server for replacement elements for the form. Instead of submitting the whole page to the webserver and then reprocessing and redisplaying it, only the part that needs to be updated (like your message that an item was added to the cart) has to be done.

Internationalization and Localization of Warmshowers.org

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Warmshowers.org is my biggest site, with more than 7500 members, and almost certainly the most useful. It's a reciprocal hospitality site for touring cyclists - people offer touring cyclists a place to stay and a shower. It's been in English for years, but that cuts out a significant part of the world's population, and it means that options for cyclists in Latin America and several other places in the world have been more limited than they ought to be.

But we just launched es.warmshowers.org, a Drupal 6 version with all the key parts internationalized and then localized into Spanish. We're very proud of this accomplishment!

It took a lot of work by a lot of people to do this. First, Chris Russo nearly singlehandedly upgraded the site to Drupal 6, a significant accomplishment because of the custom modules we have developed for the site. Then we began learning how to do all of the localization into Spanish, and learning how to get a group together to do the translation.

There are probably four parts to the translation of the site:

Portfolio and Resume

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I've been doing a lot of Drupal jobs and websites over the years, and sometimes update this portfolio.

A couple of my own websites:

  • hobobiker.com. A blog with theming and custom modules for mapping of routes.
  • warmshowers.org. A social networking site: Reciprocal hospitality for touring cyclists. Much custom drupal work, including Ajax-driven Google maps display and geolocation. And now it'sinternationalized and translated into Spanish, French, and Portuguese.

A sampling of drupal work, upgrades, modules development:

My New Development Computer: An Amazon EC2 Instance

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Here in Florida, where we're spending a couple of months, the only computer I have access to is my little netbook, an MSI Wind U-100 . It's a fine little computer, but it doesn't really have enough CPU to run Firefox, the Apache web server, the Eclipse development environment, and do debugging all at the same time. I could read the newspaper while stepping through code with the debugger, because I had to wait at each step.

Drupal: Panels Plugin Example module

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For the Amazon_store Drupal module I've been working on for Alonovo.com, I set up several of the pages to use Panels plugins. But there isn't a lot of documentation on how to do this, so I had to dive in and learn it from the examples available in the code. The result was a set of examples of how an drupal module can implement panes, the Panels Plugin Example which is now available on on Drupal.org.  There are examples of content_type, argument, context, and relationship plugins.  I'm hoping that others will review the code and improve it.

Eclipse for PHP Editing and Debugging

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I used to use the Zend platform for PHP/Drupal debugging, but they ended my support and it seemed like it never worked quite right, so while we were in Argentina I took on the significant task of making Eclipse work as a debugging environment. I eventually succeeded, but now that I'm wedded to Eclipse I'm having to learn lots about it as a working environment. It's amazingly complex and frustrating, but also very powerful.

Today I've been watching a fine series on the basics of the workbench done by Mark Dexter. It is amazing how much they can stuff into a developer's IDE. Even though I'm well along the learning curve with Eclipse I still learned lots from this.

What in the world have I been up to?

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You probably know that Nancy and I spent two years on our bicycles riding from the far north of Canada to Argentina in South America. You can read all about the adventure on hobobiker.com

Even before we got back, I restarted my Drupal development consulting (Drupal is a Content Management System and web development environment) and have been plenty busy in the intervening time. It's been my intent to list some of the projects and learning here, but to this point I haven't done it. Maybe now :-)

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