typo(s), tendency and text

A team member from Siruna presented his companies solutions to a bog problem: Making useful, light and flexible mobile websites in Drupal.

The problem is that there are so many different cell phone models out there, with different screen sizes, colour capabilities, browsers. The networks differ from being very slow to very fast. Which leads to 35% less likeliness of completing a task with mobile browsing than otherwise.

• So it is important to deliver relevant content adapted to these situations automatically. Mobile tools need to be able to:
• Detect the device
• Switch to the adaption for this model
• Aggregate functionality and content to this situation, and
• theme it accordingly

Then the presentation went on to demo open.siruna.org and OSMOBI (which is in alpha) and to show how it is possible to make mobile websites automatically using Siruna's service, supporting the Garland theme and colour picking module.

Another talk that I have been to was about how to communicate design and workflow on a new site in its planning stage, by Roy Scholten. The presentation basically promoted the method of building paper models and sketch on the computer only at a very late stage.

It was interesting to see some of the paper modules, one of them made into a "screen"cast of how the site would act if the user started clicking on buttons.

Ægir is a drupal install combined with several modules and drush that helps installing new drupal sites, maintaining existing ones, backs up and rolls back to earlier version of a site. With Ægir you can package a certain site buildup with modules and themes, and reproduce it as often as you need it. It provides you a web gui to do all these tasks, so there is little knowledge needed beyond structural knowledge of "what happens if I click this button".

The biggest hold-up for me is that you need full root access to the webserver, which I don't have. But it would certainly make things a lot easier. If we could develop and package a good solution for libraries in Norway, we could make it easily reproducable and accessible to other norwegian libraries.

Tim put the different methods for connecting to and between social networks in relation to each other and explained what was good, bad and ugly about them:

• OAuth
• OpenID
• The Hire
• XRDS/simple
• Activity Streams
• OpenSocial

The talk was not so much about Drupal. But the point was that all those connecting methods were either very useful or very appliable. Tim argued that it was the main interest of nowadays social networks to have a centralized and locked-down user base and to own their data, and that therefore the interest of social networks weren't that big to build good open connecting methods or protocols.

Usecase: Compagnie des Alpes
Tourist attractions with their own branding, i.e. Parcasterix

One directory per site in /sites/*

Hosting: 2 apache servers and 1 MySQL

page views per day in the 100.000s
stable & dev/maintenace cost effective
code for all sites go in /sites/all/

different mysql-tables, admin-account is replicated through all tables (how?)

Boost module?

Although I got up really early, I missed the first minutes of the OpenAtrium presentation. I had a look at an OpenAtrium install earlier this summer when I quickly installed it for seeing what it is like, and it looked pretty nice and useful. If you customize Drupal for your needs, it is a process that takes time, more or less depending on how good you know Drupal and how much you know about what you want.

OpenAtrium is supposed to be an Intranet-like collaborative platform to share Documents, calendars and project/task-data. It is supposed to connect members of a group or a team at work. It looks appealing and it seems to serve its purpose from the beginning. It is one of the few approaches to package Drupal into a product, to download and serve from the beginning.

The talk showed its features, and also adressed the problem in Drupal development/site/feature building, where you have the very centralized repository of core at drupal.org, and the contributed modules, too. But when you want to make packages and built more features around them, there is no existing infrastructure to do so.

What was now implemented by pingvision, who took OpenAtrium by developmentseed in use, was a feature server, that is supposed to provide this function. It didn't get very clear, is this actually solves the problem, or if it is just a temporary workaround. It seems to me, that if OpenAtrium already steps out of the cvs/drupal.org way of working - using git and github - why not make the full step and host everything in open git repositories?

It is difficult to analyze the development of Social Media while it is happening, and the speaker, Chris Heuer, did not try to claim he is an expert. He tried to make a point that we are all constantly learning, about and via Social Media.

Describing all companies as Social Media companies (referring to their communication needs with their own channela, and probably also back channels), he stated that this was the way the Drupal community should see their end users and shape their products likewise. To fit the PR needs of companies.

I don't believe in this approach. Of course, the way in which capitalism and the web changes, one could say, that every entity in human society is its own company, and this is at least somehow the reality for many people that get identified as such, and self-identify like it.

But there are not only companies, and I don't see why Drupal should build their architecture in a way to fit this ideology. In social media use there are so many different realities. There are some with hierarchies, some with less hierarchical components, some without. Social realities on the web are fractioned in services and applications, and peole use them very differently.

This is where drupal has an advantage of having a core that is - with work and effort - configurable to meet the needs of different entities. Schools, libraries, self-educating efforts, non-profits, interest groups. Narrowing it down to market and companies doesn't really help the development of an open framework in Drupal to build social media.

Day one of the DrupalCon Paris 2009 started with a round-up of recent development on Drupal 7. Dries Buytaert, the initial coder and starter of the Drupal project, explained first how innovation seems to go in recurring curves that go up and down, but eventually go all up in the long run. He quoted Schumpeter, Saffo the Gartner hype cycle, and showed his own graph of how he feels Drupal development is happening.

After the DrupalCon weekend there will be a code freeze, and the rest of autumn will be used to refine the new features that have been taken into Drupal, and to do better documentation and allow for localization of the new Drupal release.

He also rose the question whether Drupal should be a framework, a product or a service, and opted himself for making it possible of being everything. A CMS framework for those who need the possibility to highly customize their publishing work, and a service to those who want to use modern web technologies with a certain amount of control, but don't want to set up all by themselves.

Drupal 7 looks like it is going to be even more customizable in terms of content types (CCK module goes as Field API into core), and üprovide a better layer for theming.

I have attended an unconference before, but never a BarCamp. Since Thomas brevik, Jannicke Røgler, Magnus Enger and I are organizing an unconference about libraries and Free Software in november in Bergen, it is especially interesting to me how those are methodically organized.

The 4. DrupalCamp Paris was organized with two white boards and one welcoming hosts who explained and motivated the attendees to write their topics into the time slots in the tables on the two white boards. Someone set up a microphone, and one talk topic was explained by the person having the talk. No others, but that was part of the productive chaos that followed. What was clear before, was which rooms where available.Everything else, which topics would be discussed or talked about, was unclear. The attendees brought their topics with them.

I scheduled two meetings by writing them on the white board. One for Drupalers from Norway, Sweden and Denmark. And one for people who use Drupal for libraries. But first I attended a meeting about the integration of the wave protocol and Drupal. It was a very interesting chat about possible social implications of this different way of communicating, about how Drupal could authenticate against a wave server, and what use case there might be.

The meetings with both the Swedish Drupalers and the librarian Drupalers were also very interesting. I got a lot of ideas of how to do different tasks, and discussed several ways hat I already knew about, but which are complex.

I would say that the BarCamp approach is very good to get to know people and discuss topics with a high comfort level regardless of how much one knows about the topic. But some things could be easily done to improve the experience. Mark the space for the discussion groups. If it is noisy, get up some molton-curtains between those spaces. (I could not even understand what I was saying at some points, let alone what the swedish people were saying in swedish.) And round up what was discussed and how people can get in touch afterwards. Make blank wiki pages to use as a form, or hand out forms on paper and copy up a booklet to give to the participants. But, well, there is always room for criticism and improvement. It was very nice, and now i have talked to some people and the awkwardness of not knowing anyone is now over.