Featured post: A Reflection on Karen McGranes DrupalCon Portland Keynote
I just finished listening to the DrupalCon Portland’s Wednesday keynote presented by Karen McGrane about UX experience and content for all devices.
More...Notable:
Building an Association Site on Drupal Commons 3.0
Jason Schaffer May 9, 2013 RSS
When the team at Blue Coda first began thinking about launch...
Let's Get Personal: The Basics
DC Denison May 6, 2013 RSS
Personalization is as old as marketing itself. Give each cus...
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Business
The Truth About WYWISYG Editing in your CMS
Yesterday at DrupalCon I saw Karen McGrane speak for the first time. Karen is a respected content strategist and frequent keynote speaker. She's fantastic, and I was thrilled to see her speak live for the first time.
The main point made during Karen’s keynote is that we need to think differently when thinking about digital content. Legacy processes designed for print publishing shaped much of... More
Technology
Automate review for security risks with source code analysis
Security issues are created in custom code when developers cut corners during development or don't make proper use of the APIs, among other reasons. There are several ways to discover such issues, including peer-review, code scanners, vulnerability scanning, and even by being exploited -- tho certainly undesirable! While each has its place and individual merits, let’s talk about security-focused... More
Design
Notes from Views Mini-Course, Part II: Creating Flexible Views with Drupal
Here are notes from the 2nd class in our Views mini-course.
Watch the recording Views Mini-Course, Part II: Creating Flexible Views with Drupal 7.
Review the notes and recording from last week.
Sign up to Views Mini-Course, Part III: How to back up your Views safely. May 15th.
In today's class we will look at the Views UI in detail. I'll show you how to create flexible views.... More
Latest posts
Drupalcon bound
In case you haven't seen it yet, a tentative schedule for the upcoming Drupalcon is out today: http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/program/schedule. I'm excited to see all the great sessions we'll have and looking forward to seeing those drupal.org usernames revealed again as walking, talking people. Thanks to everyone who voted for my session proposals - both have been accepted and scheduled for the main room:
Drupal 6... More
Drupal at Hostingcon, Chicago [Updated with Video]
The Drupal community got together to help promote Drupal at Hostingcon, in Chicago last week. We learned some important lessons. One hosting company told us they were sponsoring their local Joomla group and had managed to grow it to over 300 users in less than a year. Wow! Hosting companies promoting open source projects. When you consider that hosting companies are paying anywhere from $5 to $200 per affiliate sale providing office space and snacks seems really cheap in comparison. That same company noted that Drupal sent a lot of business their way but they had not set up financial... More
Pretending to be the user
As someone who crafts experiences, I’m often engaged with product owners, developers, marketing folks, etc. As such, I’m like an information funnel. Good or bad, I listen to everyone involved. So you can imagine, I hear a lot of ideas. Usually those idea’s take the form of “If I were the user, I’d expect it to work like...”
This unfortunately is a bad practice. You and I, we are not the user. We’re merely one of many. As architects of the applications we’re building, we are so much more advanced than the average user. Drupal is no exception.
Currently, the users of Drupal, are by-in-... More
Six Drupal.org redesign proposals received, association votes on Monday
Last night I met with Tiffany Farriss and Drupal association board member Larry Garfield at the Palantir offices in Chicago. I was in town for HostingCon. We reviewed the six proposals we received from 6 design firms.
The proposals are extensive and the 26 Drupal association members are being provided with the raw proposals to be reviewed. On Monday, August 4th, the Drupal board will meet and Tiffany will present a summary and analysis of the proposals with a recommendation. Some of the design firms have worked on Drupal sites previously so we are able to take a look at their work. Some... More
We are in Alpha
We have some good news for Acquia watchers: the Carbon distribution and Spokes network service have entered private alpha testing and are steadily marching towards beta.
We've been conducting internal alpha testing for Carbon and Spokes for a few weeks now. One of the nice things about hiring lots of new employees, particularly non-developers, is that you get a lot internal testers. We've been doing internal alpha tests with our sales, support, professional services, and management team. The user feedback is useful, and we've found lots of things to improve. But this kind of feedback is... More
