SteamedPenguin

Allie Micka of Advantage Labs is presenting "Why Drupal?"

Drupal has many millions of dollars of development money involved. Lots of developer mass.

Drupal gives developer the advantage to be able to hand off projects to the next developer. It also makes maintenance easier for you.

Current issues being addressed in Drupal:

• Internationalization
• OpenID integration
• handling media
• scalability
• permissions
• usability studies and improvement

Drupal is empowering:

Experienced administrators can build applications without programming knowledge.
Gain a rich foundation to start from.

Making it easier for client to edit information:

Permissions help you lock down the interface
WYSIWYG is possible if you need it
As users become more proficient you can upgrade them

Developer, developers, developer
Lots of preexisting functionality
Extend functionality, don't create it
Thousands of really smart people will help you

Advantage Labs likes to use install profiles.

I am preparing myself for a presentation on using the Zen theme for Drupal. I could, and should, use another site to play around with but I tend to use and abuse SteamedPenguin because it is handy and because it is easy for me to work with an actual product rather than having to create a design to be populated. When I do web development I prefer to have the actual content before starting to work. Content is still king, right? Creating designs from scratch has zero appeal to me because design is supposed to follow from form not the other way around.

In playing with Zen on SteamedPenguin I desired a graphical representation for this site, something that had been lacking for several years. Looking for graphics of penguins that are licensed freely really pushes you towards using a representation of Tux the Linux mascot. This posed a problem for me as using software like Gimp or Krita isn't a core competency. While looking through the Wikipedia article on Tux I saw the very pretty and shiny Crystallized Tux. I saved the image and opened it up with Inkscape.

I made two small modifications to the original image. I inverted the line that makes the penguin smile and flipped it so that the contented smile turns into a curl is displeasure. Next I created two areas with the Bezier tool to conform to the upper curvature of the eyes so that the open, happy look turns into a scowl.

I am sitting at Advantage Labs this evening for the monthly Twin Cities Drupal Group meeting. Gabe Ormsby is presenting for Friends of the Mississippi River today.

I am sitting in a mixed group of people, most of them are developers of some sort or the other. I am holding down the fort for the hobbyists since I am not doing anything professional.

The presentation wasn't exactly Drupal specific, at least until the end, but that is quite OK. It was interesting to see the process of development laid bare as it makes it easier to apply to Drupal.

The subsequent discussion was a bit high-level which might be due to Gabe's high-level approach which might be a bit difficult for people unfamiliar with the terminology to feel comfortable discussing.

If you haven't heard yet, Dries Buytaert of Drupal fame and a crack usability team are converging on Minneapolis to make Drupal better, stronger, faster.

While this is cool and awesome, even better is the meet and greet that is going to be held at the University of Minnesota's Campus Club on Monday, February 25. The time is not completely set, but it'll be in the evening.

Check out the the Twin Cities Drupal Group RSVP announcement and put your name on the list like the cool kids did.

You really can't go wrong here. You get to meet Drupal core developers, module contributors, and Drupal-related service providers. Come one come all, but put your name on the RSVP list so we don't overwhelm the Campus Club.

I haven't been a Drupal user for a long time. It has taken a while to get comfortable with the software itself, then to get comfortable administrating Drupal installations. The most important part is that it has taken me a while to communicate with the Drupal community, whether this is other Drupal uses, Module developers, or the Drupal admins themselves.

Today I spent some time between classes submitting bugs to various Drupal Modules which feels good. First it keeps exercising those communication muscles, especially the small ones that are specific to filing bugs. The other benefit is that it forces me to come up with solutions to problems with software that others have generously created. This makes me a partner, even if limited, instead of just a recipient.

After closing down comments and trackbacks I am cautiously opening up the ability to trackback and comment again. Drupal is coming through for me again and the wonderful Drupal module contributors are supplying the magic juju to keep spammers at bay.

I've been using the http:bl drupal module that plugs into HTTP:BL from Project Honeypot and it kicksass. It helps me blacklist and greylist IP addresses that look spurious or come from known spammers.

I also use the wonderful spam module by KernelTrap's Jeremy Andrews.

Whatever is left over goes to the Akismet module, although truth be told, after the http:bl and spam modules there isn't much left for the Akismet module to handle.

So now visitors can comment and trackback without moderation. Welcome.

drupal.org has user accounts to which one can add data, like gender, country, work field, etc. While fixing up my entry, I noticed that Palestine was missing from the country drop down. Sadly, this is an all too common occurrence that is usually the result of ignorance, not malice. While part of me wants to be angry all the time I recognize the need to be diplomatic. To attempt to remedy the situation I filed a bug report against the drupal.org website.

Aside from seeking self-discipline in the face of anger, I also wanted to communicate effectively. drupal.org is geeky software, maintained by fairly geeky people. So in writing the bug report I used the most neutral language available so that I can get what I need. Many geeks, while passionate about their own fields, can be charitably described as politically ignorant. The same skills that makes geeks really good problem solvers in the technical real, also make for really terrible people skills. I am generalizing a lot, and simplifying to boot, but not grossly I hope.

To make an analogy: problem solving humans is to problem solving technical issues as quantum physics is to Newtonian physics. Where in the former, particles can have multiple states, in the latter particles are or aren't. Humans and their multiple states interact in very weird and non-predictable ways making problem-solving them very tough and not necessarily rewarding. Filing socio-political bug reports with geeks can become interesting if the parameters of the exchange are not controlled.

One option I had in filing the bug was to feel angry, disappointed, and hurt. Expressing those "quantum states" makes no sense for an exchange system designed to filter these out. Especially when the person on the receiving end is not prepared to deal with those quantum states. The other, better option was to express myself in the most minimal fashion: how to find the bug, expectations for success, result. The result of writing the bug report in such a manner was to have the bug fixed in less than eight hours. That is a quick and speedy resolution to a problem. While the resolution of my bug doesn't address the quantum states of anger, disappointment and hurt, it addresses a cause of those states, opening up a path for those states to change. Anger, disappointment, and hurt can, and will, fade. With the passing of these states I am left; a Palestinian on drupal.org.

Now that I set up Drupal with the OpenID Module I started to play with the login mechanism and discovered some bugs. The OpenID module uses some JavaScript to hide the OpenID login field by default. When you click on the "Login with OpenID" the regular login fields are replaced by a singular OpenID field. This seems to work in every browser, except the one I use. I tested Firefox and Opera and the JavaScript doohickey works, in Konqueror the picture is different.

The sidebar login interface was the most broken, but none of the logins really worked well. The difference was that that steamedpenguin.com/user worked a bit better in that the JavaScript allowed me to enter data for a microsecond longer than the sidebar entry. For the most part I would click the "Login with OpenID" button only to have my login input disappear. This left me only with a button that said "Log in". This looks good, but does nothing. When clicked, the "log in" button goes to a URL that doesn't exist. To quote Borat, "Excellent....... NOT!"

After recognizing that that this was most likely a JavaScript issue I decided to do some futzing around the module. My goal was to disable the calling of JavaScript. This was easy, I deleted the openid.js file as well as the call to the file from openid.module. After that steamedpenguin.com/user logins work like advertised. For some reason the Login block still had issues with JavaScript. Instead of worrying myself about why and how I just disabled the login block. Instead of using the login block, I added a link pointing to /user.

SteamedPenguin now accepts OpenID authentication. The Drupal module is still rough around the edges, but should work most of the time.