Drupalcon

Back in the saddle again - at DrupalCon Nashville

mikeryan — Fri, 11 May 2018 16:06:11 +0000

Back in the saddle again - at DrupalCon Nashville mikeryan Friday, May 11, 2018 - 11:06am

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Those of you with an interest in Drupal migration may have noticed my absence in the last several months. A confluence of things led me to take a break from the Drupal community: a bout of physical exhaustion (initially diagnosed as Lyme disease, and then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯); professional exhaustion managing the D8 migration core initiative and maintaining a few contrib modules on top of paid contracts; and emotional exhaustion from the community drama of early last year. I was, frankly, depressed - whether it was more a product of the exhaustion or an underlying contributor to the exhaustion (actually, probably both in a feedback loop), I needed to deal with it. Fortunately, my contract work had been going well enough that I could afford to take a sabbatical for a while (although perhaps not for quite as long as I did😬).

Pro tip: engaging with the real world helps a lot. In my case, my wife and I had moved to Southern Illinois, where we didn’t know anyone, four years ago. While I haven’t exactly been housebound - we attend many local events, eat out at the local restaurants, hike in the Shawnee National Forest, etc. - I wasn’t really engaged with the local community. In the last several months, however, I’ve volunteered (and now become a board member) at the Liberty Theater - making popcorn and selling concessions at many events, as well as building them a new website (to be launched soon - on WordPress, sorry Drupal folks!) and proposing and running their first GoFundMe campaign. I’ve also been playing guitar and bass in weekly jam sessions at our favorite brewpub, and I took the lead in rebooting the series when the original organizer took a sabbatical himself. I’m feeling much better now - it’s good to be back.

What next?

Number one - I’m open for contracts again, please let me know if you have some migration work that needs to be done! Drupal shops, I’m happy to subcontract and let you focus on design and site-building while I get your clients’ data moved over into their new site.

Contribution-wise, I’m keeping my eyes on the migration-related issue queues and helping out a bit where I can, but I’m not going to take on nearly as much as I had before. I’ll probably budget, say, one half-day a week for this for the time being.

I had a couple of overly-ambitious, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink blog posts covering various migration techniques in the works when I stepped aside - I’ll try to extract some of the best bits into smaller and more targeted posts.

Finally, I wasn’t completely idle technically during my sabbatical - I took the time to play around with a few different ideas (some migration-related, some not). I’m pursuing one avenue in particular - more on that soon!

DrupalCon Nashville

I procrastinated on making a final decision about attending DrupalCon this year. Just at the point I finally committed to going, I got a lucky break when I saw QED42 tweet they had a spare ticket and snatched it up (thanks again, for the ticket and for the beautiful shirt!).

As always, it was good to catch up face-to-face with so many Drupalists - especially this year, when I haven’t been active online. Among many others, I had some quality time with Dries, which I haven’t had since I was at Acquia, talking about some of my tech efforts above. And borrowing his hat:

Dries let me wear his hat (and took the picture) pic.twitter.com/VqbrN0bdi2
— Mike Ryan (@mikeryan776) April 10, 2018

With camps and cons in recent years, while the tech sessions are most enticing on first glance, they generally cover things I can learn best by digging in and doing back in my home office. So, I tend to attend more “soft” sessions - those focusing on community and self-care. This time, that included (among others) You Matter More Than The Cause (Jeff Eaton) and Growing Our Tribes: Creating Sustainable Micro-Communities in Drupal and how you can help (Shannon Vettes). Eaton’s talk in particular spoke to me (I could have used it a year earlier!) - the expectations that volunteers of a valued community have of each other, and of themselves, can chew them up. I felt badly about “abandoning” the migration initiative as we approached core stability, but I had to step away. Eaton says:

If a cause can’t live without you suffering for it, then that cause may just deserve to die.

Fortunately, the migration initiative did not deserve to die - heddn and quietone and many other contributors got the migrate module to stability, and are well on the way to adding migrate_drupal to the stable modules list. Yay!

Main takeaway: “You are not consumable fuel.”

I did make it to a couple tech sessions, though, notably Entities 301 - Entities Elsewhere (Ron Northcutt). This was about leveraging swapping storage backends to represent external data as native Drupal entities. This was of particular interest to me, since while we normally think of the Drupal migration system as a means of importing external data into the Drupal database, it should be recognized that the architecture permits us to design destination plugins which write to an external source - another database, or PUT operations on a RESTful API (no, I haven’t yet had occasion to write such a destination plugin). But, if you were to define an entity type using external storage, you wouldn’t have to do anything special to use migration to populate these entities - just use the general purpose entity plugin:

destination:
  plugin: entity:my_remote_entity_type

One more thing…

Thinking about online engagement, and also about security (like the occasional emergence of -geddons that take advantage of potentially any open form submissions), I had an idea - why not use Twitter as my commenting system? I.e., embed the tweet promoting a post at the bottom of that post, and people can comment by replying to the tweet.

Advantages:

I can now disable account creation and comment creation on my site (I’m leaving the comment module in place here for the sake of past comments), improving my site security.
Commenters don’t have to worry about my site’s security if they’re only engaging with Twitter.
Vetting user accounts and reviewing comments for spam are now Twitter’s problems, not mine.
More visibility for commenters - their responses to my blog post will be seen by a lot more people on their Twitter feed (more of whom are predisposed to hear what they want to say) than they would on my blog site.
More visibility for me - other people’s responses on Twitter will help bring attention to my blog posts.
In practice, these days when you tweet a post you’ve made, you’re likely to get more discussion about it on Twitter than you do on your site anyway. Why split the threads?

Disadvantages:

This would exclude comments by people without a Twitter account. I don’t think this will have a big impact on my lightly-visited blog, but this would be more of an issue with higher-traffic sites trying to be all-inclusive.
Replies would not be visible on the blog page. I don’t think this is a big deal, at least for my site. And, there could be a module for that!

For now, I’m doing this manually with a text field below the body using the ckeditor_media_embed module - publish the blog post, publish the tweet, add the tweet to the blog post. If this approach to comments seems to work well in practice, it would be nice to have a module that adds a field to the node form for the text you want in the tweet and at publish time creates the tweet and links to it from the post automatically, virtually eliminating the window where the two aren’t in sync.

Thoughts? Reply to the tweet below!

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Use the Twitter thread below to comment on this post:

Back in the saddle again - at DrupalCon Nashville https://t.co/ZIAVaOfeXL
— Virtuoso Performance (@VirtPerformance) May 11, 2018

Drupalcon summary

mikeryan — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 02:44:49 +0000

Drupalcon summary mikeryan Thursday, March 6, 2008 - 08:44pm

This may be slightly out of order, since I've still got a ways to go in blogging my notes on the specific sessions I attended at Drupalcon, but I want to get my overall thoughts and impressions out as quickly as possible.

First, expanding on my comment on Drupal.org - I'm re-entering the Drupal community after some time away, and it feels so right... There are some acknowledgements I need to make:

First and foremost, my ~~significant other~~ SIGNIFICANT Other, Sarah Richards, has been supportive above-and-beyond of the time I've spent Drupaling on top of my day job (and of the constant whining over how little time I have left to do all the other things I want to do). I hope her patience continues, because I have a lot of catching up to do in the Drupal world. And I hope some non-profit working on progressive change out there can use an anthropologist with project management experience (contact me if you can...).

Secondly, Moshe Weitzman, who's been supportive of my individual consulting in the past, and now has invited me to join him in Cyrve. Moshe is a true Drupal Rockstar - I'm a bass player, in a supporting role now but aspiring to the front line - I'm really looking forward to working with Moshe, as well as making my own splash in the Drupal community.

Thirdly, the people at my current day job (especially my boss) have been very supportive. They knew where I came from, and that it was inevitable I would end up going back - and allowed me to attend Drupalcon and work remotely (if you saw me furiously banging away at the laptop (another acknowledgement for Sarah, it was her laptop (Sacre bleu! A web developer without his own laptop!)) between Drupalcon sessions, I was doing my best to fulfill my day job commitments).

Anyway - Drupalcon was a great experience, between day job commitments and the simple fact that generally out of four main tracks there were at any given time 2-4 sessions I was interested in, I only skimmed the surface... It's all too much! I'll be tracking down the session videos and catching up. One special shoutout to pingVision's presentation on the Popular Science migration to Drupal... Moshe and I were fortunate enough to lunch with Kevin and John, lots to learn from their experience...

Thanks to everyone involved in organizing Drupalcon Boston, and.... well, let's skip multiple subservient phrases and just thank everyone who's contributed to Drupal in any way... OK, a special shoutout to Kieran, who by all accounts did an incredible amount of work in making this happen...

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Drupalcon Day 2

mikeryan — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 03:22:15 +0000

Drupalcon Day 2 mikeryan Tuesday, March 4, 2008 - 09:22pm

Popular Science - Case Study

pingVision presented a case study of the migration of the Popular Science site to Drupal. Since I'm joining Moshe Weitzman in Cyrve, specializing in content migration, this was of particular interest to me.

The source content was a combination of Typepad blogs, and Vignette content (1.66GB worth of Oracle data, along with 15,000 images).

to be continued...

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Drupalcon Day 1 continued

mikeryan — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 05:12:53 +0000

Drupalcon Day 1 continued mikeryan Monday, March 3, 2008 - 11:12pm

I made a stab at live blogging with the usability session, but I think it will work better for me just to jot down the random points that particularly strike me at the time, and fill in more thoughts later. Hopefully most if not all sessions will be on video, so there's no need to be a scribe...

Dries' keynote

Skipping some things covered under other sessions (usability, Knight Foundation)... Dries spoke of the thinking that went into identifying the Drupal 7 wishlist. Looks like a good plan to really solidify Drupal's place. Given that the community wants to see an annual major release, we have a decision to make - four months of development followed by eight frozen months, or nine months of development and a three-month freeze. The latter is only possible with testing. Testing TESTING TESTING. A signficant question is (assuming we achieve sufficiently comprehensive testing) - would three months be enough time for the most relied-upon contrib modules to catch up?

An excellent funding suggestion - core contributors pay $1 per test their patch breaks. Who will be giving beer money - and who will become unwilling Major Sponsors?

Dries spent a significant amount of time discussing RDF/semantic web/Web 3.0/insert your buzzphrase here. Afraid I didn't capture much detail, apart from the idea of making Drupal more field-centric rather than node-centric (where fields serve as subjects and objects).

Now, some random thoughts I jotted down during the talk:

In a non-Drupal migration project I was involved in, we had production and test environments running in parallel - in different stages either bulk loading production data into the test environment, in others doing parallel data entry. I have some softly-formed thoughts on getting a head start on Drupal 7 in this way - setting up a Drupal 7 version of my site, and trying to replicate from the current (Drupal 6) site. Besides getting that head start, I would expect to learn a few lessons to apply with Cyrve - how do you cut over from old to new without having a big blackout period on new content? This is a question that's often neglected until D-day approaches...
Apropos of nothing - my passport is long expired, time to renew it so I'm ready for the next overseas Drupalcon...

Drupal and the Knight Foundation

I have notes from a couple of other sessions, but it's getting well past my bedtime and I wanted to skip ahead to this. Last October I submitted a Drupal-based proposal to the Knight News Challenge - and got shot down. But, not only did Lisa Williams and Ben Melancon do better - the Knight Foundation people were impressed enough by the Drupal submissions they received that they are issuing a new challenge for Drupal-based community services. Stay tuned...

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Usability

mikeryan — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:38:16 +0000

Usability mikeryan Monday, March 3, 2008 - 08:38am

Report from formal Drupal usability testing at the University of Minnesota Libraries

The target for this round of testing was "sub-admins" familiar with other content management systems. They were exposed to Drupal 6 with CCK. Eye-tracking data was gathered, and we saw the animated results - not very pretty.

The first challenge - to build a form with a few fields. The first place they go - Site Building. Logical, enough, but that's not where we put "content types" (whatever the hell those are). Frankly, I would have expected the term "node" to be the one making users go "Whaaaa?", but apparently "content types", "story", "book page", etc. were enough to trip people up.

Once people finally reached content type creation, the eye-tracker showed that people just didn't see those essential tabs along the top. I tend to agree with comments from the audience that the Garland theme's very untablike rendering of form tabs probably contributes significantly to this problem.

Tasks 2 & 3 - creating a user account with appropriate permissions, and classifying content, went considerably more smoothly (although the fact that the subjects were library staff certainly helped in the taxonomy area).

Task 4 - No one made it here.

It's interesting that people use the initial front page as a step-by-step tutorial - and they blow it away when they create their first node, which is disconcerting.

Help proved unhelpful - it's not searchable, not task-oriented, and there's no glossary.

The admin panel is overwhelming. This is no surprise.

People click on everything to see what's available, so hiding fieldsets isn't as helpful to newbies as one might expect.

Drupal 6 usability improvements gone wrong:

Teaser splitter
Menu settings too prominent
Lose context when looking for help
Password security checking - rating the password strength as it's typed means it always starts out red, which is alarming to users.
Admin page organization
Collapsible fieldsets - open them up (or not - it's still helpful to experienced users to just fly over the ones they know they don't need to open).

We should be targeting Drupal 6 contrib and Drupal 7 core for improvements based on this experience (limited as it was - small sample size, one particular target role).

See the Usability group for details. How the rest of us can help: plug specifics from the detailed results into project issues (titled in the form- "Usability UMN: "). Also see <a href="http://groups.drupal.org/node/9252">User Experience Goals Draft</a>.</p> <p>A couple of my own usability thoughts:</p> <ul><li>Wizard block - the first time someone attempts a new task (and it goes without saying there should be some task-oriented help to get newbies to the starting point), start a wizard in a sidebar to lead them through step-by-step, with a Close (x) button to easily dismiss it.</li> <li>Node form - put less commonly-used fieldsets in a sidebar by default - clicking them opens a popup window. Drag-and-drop fieldsets between the content area and the sidebar - and remember for the next time a node form is opened (perhaps per content type?).</li> </ul><p> </p> <p> </p> </div></div> </div> <div class="field field-node-field-tags field-entity-reference-type-taxonomy-term field-formatter-entity-reference-label field-name-field-tags field-type-entity-reference field-label-above"><h3 class="field__label">Tags</h3><div class="field__items"><div class="field__item field__item--drupalcon"> <span class="field__item-wrapper"><a href="https://virtuoso-performance.com/tags/drupalcon" property="schema:about" hreflang="en">Drupalcon</a></span> </div><div class="field__item field__item--drupal"> <span class="field__item-wrapper"><a href="https://virtuoso-performance.com/tags/drupal" property="schema:about" hreflang="en">Drupal</a></span> </div></div> </div> <section rel="schema:comment" class="field field-node--comment field-formatter-comment-default field-name-comment field-type-comment field-label-above display-mode-threaded comment-bundle-comment comment-wrapper"><a name="comments" id="comments"></a></section> </article> </main></body></html>