drupalcon

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Wanna come to a BoF about BoFs?

Birds of a Feather, has such a nice ring to it. This way of self-organizing allows people of like minds to flock together in their motley way spontaneously sprung from the confines of the well architected schedule which didn’t quite fit their needs.

It’s a testament to the efforts of conference organizers at DrupalCon that they can field submissions from such a large number of presenters striving to satisfy the needs of thousands of people with wildly popular sessions. In Copenhagen, rooms were filled to the brim with eager listeners, and even afterwards people seek out the recordings of the sessions they missed. It’s an ideal opportunity to broadcast the latest and greatest in Drupal.

But then there’s the fringe. And the DrupalCons provide for that too. Many computing conferences allow for physical spaces for BoFs: Birds of a Feather sessions. A whiteboard is used to mark the available time slots and locations, where people put in their suggestions and find their niche.

Not seeing anything on the official schedule that suits? Head on over to the BoF board! There's now a forum on the DrupalCon website where people are chatting about BoFs already! I really love BoFs, and I think we can even make them better and get more out of them.

Some rights reserved by ellyjonez

Making a better BoF

At DrupalCon San Francisco, I had an epiphany, OK, not a huge one. BoFs kinda suck when you spend 20 mins going around and introducing one another, and then you get into the meaty bits and it’s already over. There’s an alternative: Open Space Technology.

If you are reading this and Drupal 7 is not yet released, pop over to the critical issue queue and roll, review, or comment on a patch before you go any further!

In the run-up to our talk "Apache Solr Search Mastery" at Drupalcon San Francisco, we decided that we would not have time to really cover all the advanced topics in the session. So we're going to put up a couple blog posts before hand to invite some discussion and encourage people to dig into the code ahead of time and then we can take questions at the end of the session or during a BoF.

This first post describes the elements of a module that implements a customized IP-address-based scheme for access control on Solr searches. It's a simplified version of the sort of access controls that some universities or companies use to only show (for example) journal articles purchased under license via a website for the library where the license restricts access to students or employees who are on-site. The attached module demonstrates how such a scheme for controlling which nodes appear in search results can be implemented. The code there should be contrasted with the code in the apachesolr_nodeaccess module.