How I managed to survive my first Drupalcon adventure

Posted Mon, 03/10/2008 - 00:03 by Joel

Lessons Learned from the Community Frontline

How I managed to survive my first Drupalcon adventure

This week, I attended my first full-tilt Drupalcon conference in Boston, MA. I suppose I thought I was ready for this simply because I'd attended a 'Camp or two, but I wasn't prepared for the ensuing melee of the code-head throngs. I don't think there is any amount of reading material that can prepare you for the jolt of standing next to an idol who's coding skill, drive to succeed at their art no matter the compensation, and approachability are all without question, even as you realize the person to your idol's left is looking at you in the very same way. Sobering, to be sure, but still quite a shock. I suppose this experience is the very reason for planning such a large gathering of eight hundred inspired professionals in the first place, and if that's the case, may the Drupalcon Adventure never cease to exist.

Making contrib modules more admin-friendly

Posted Tue, 02/26/2008 - 01:10 by Joel

It's a premise of the upcoming Drupal 7 that the UI is king. We see a lot of planning, lots of work, and tons of code going into this upcoming release's User Interface, but that only addresses core's needs. What about the plethora of contrib modules? Can they get help from Drupal 7 in order to become more admin friendly? They could if they were using the new hook_configuration() functionality!

Here's what I envision. If modules had an API that they could use to do things in the background such as creating new content types, creaing or enabling blocks, and even pre-setting some variables, life would be a lot easier for the average contrib module user.

People who are just trying out a module to see how it works would no longer have to manually configure their site for that new module just to make it work. It would work out-of-the-box.

Adding tables prefixes to an existing database

Posted Tue, 08/28/2007 - 17:23 by Joel

The other day, I was about to add a gallery2 installation and a PHPlist to an already-functioning Drupal 5.2 site, and I realized that if I ever wanted to use PHPmyAdmin to do stuff in this database's tables ever again, I needed to add some sort of prefixing to the Drupal tables first. You see, both of those apps use prefixing on their tables, so to keep my Drupal install's tables from being scattered, I had to prefix them as well, here's how I did it...

CHX needs a new Toshiba lappy

Posted Fri, 07/13/2007 - 13:13 by Joel

Our good friend and coder, CHX, needs a new laptop if he's ever to continue kicking Druplicon-D6's ass at 3:00am. Send him a couple doubloons for his new Toshiba, will ya?

UPDATE 08-21-2007: CHX got a new lappy! It's nickname is "Tank", and it can survive falls from a nightstand without damage. Its just too bad that CHX never sleeps, or he could test that claim...