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Drupalcon Day 3
So, I didn’t recap right after, so I’ll guess at what my impressions were right after. I learned a lot about Drupal Project Management and Process Management.
It was very helpful to see how other companies do their project management… even if they weren’t using drupal their methods are so effective! So I was doubly happy when I found that our methods are very close to the methods. What methods you ask? Well they talked a lot about waterfall vs. agile development… the great debate. Where you start one task and you don’t start another until the previous is complete (waterfall) and agile where you start one task.. if you get stuck go work on something else… and do iterations of changes, tasks overlap in the timeline, etc. They say waterfall works great for old school sites with site maps and exact hierarchical structure. But realistically websites today (and especially dynamic sites built with drupal) are not hierarchical. Pages and articles link to each other in all different ways. There’s probably a primary and maybe a secondary navigation… but that’s it, the rest is a cloud. So it seems the best way to do this… (which we do, yipee!) is first stage planning, second stage design AND development. That’s right not design finalize and stamp of approval on design and then start development. We design and develop at the same time. That way while developing we say “hey, wait that doesn’t work the way we thought… it has to work this way… um, designer, can you change it so we can style it when it works like this?”. It goes through iterations of what works back and forth with designer and developer.
Another helpful tip, more interestingly enough… don’t show the client anything until the wireframe stage… don’t talk to them about content types, CCK, workflow and other drupal mumbo jumbo. It will only have them trying to speak your language (incorrectly) and create a communication divide. Talk to them in “real-world language” and then go back and talk drupal with your team. Don’t teach them more than they need to know… with the client less is more. Deliver wireframes to your client, deliver mockups to your client and deliver alpha site to your client. Never deliver an unthemed site to your client. We learned this one… it can terrify the poor client and they can lose trust in you. They don’t understand CSS and theming. All they see is something they didn’t want… whether it functions the way they asked or not! This was one minor mistake we had with our last client, but luckily the client didn’t overreact and only said uhh… can that all be on the same line and can’t that look like this? Which created extra time spent on communication and reassurance, but it could have been avoided… if we only showed the alpha and not the prototype to the client. If it were a different client it could have gone worse though… much worse.
Another interesting debate in these project management/process sessions was number of mock-ups or wire frames to show a client (as in different mock-ups or wire frames). Some people said you should only show one, the one the design/dev team agree on. Some said you should show many. I agree with showing many… but before I wasn’t convinced really in one direction or the other… though in practice we show many (3-4). Most times the design your team prefers (though maybe not unanimously) is not the design the client picks. But this isn’t a bad thing… because a client does not always know how to say what they need but they can point to it. You may not realize it when they pick the less desireable design but later in the process you will learn you did the right thing because the client picked it for a reason. When showing only one design, the client may be fine with it, but later may feel like you limited their choices and didn’t really hit on what they were looking for.
Drupalcon Day 2
Today’s highlight was Drupal + Flash. I had 2 sessions at the end of the day on this. One with Drupal + Flash and one with Drupal + Flex. The idea is to use Drupal as a backend for Flash projects. It’s genius! Separating content from presentation even further. Even more, it’s very simple. It uses the Services module in drupal to use AMFPHP (AMF = Actionscript message format, PHP = PHP). So Drupal will manage the flash connection to it with a session id, which keeps it secure. It uses flash’s NetConnection functionality and it’s rather simple. The most difficult part for me would be the PHP, just because I don’t program PHP, but drupal would need to respond to flash comments with the hook_service() command and custom functions that flash calls would be defined in here. Drupal can pass node titles, bodies, any CCK fields, taxonomy terms, and even files! Oh and the drupal login? Yea, flash can handle that too. It’s really quite impressive. You can build an entire flash front end website with Drupal as the CMS backend where a client can maintain the content. That’s pretty impressive! Travis Tidwell led this session and I must say he made it very simple and easy to understand for both experts and novices alike.
Flex can do something very similar. I’m not as savvy with Flex, just because it deals more with the backend programming that I try to stay away from. It uses the Services module in Drupal as well and can feed your Flex application with Drupal data. The code is shorter using MXML but I’d rather stick with what I know and what I’m good at… the design stuff with Flash. Not enough room in my brain for Flex.
Another good session I saw was on Scaling Drupal. They talked about how to make your site faster as it gets larger. I was very happy to see everything they mentioned we use. From tools to techniques… we covered most of it. Load testing (hp load runner, openload, jmeter), foxyproxy (never used this one), ySlow, standard drupal core caching, memcache, block cache, gzip, boost module (never used this either), Cacti (never used this), js aggregation, load js at bottom of pages, css aggregation and now CDNs which we’re looking into.
I found it amusing that almost everyone (well not everyone, but the majority!) has macs. It’s great that developers are now using macs… of course boot camp and vmware fusion/parallels has helped so they can run windows at the same time. Even if they don’t know it… the usability in the macOS is so stellar it may impress upon them how usable their sites/modules etc. could be… or maybe they’re just code monkeys 
Here’s a screenshot I took during one of my sessions… Yes, that’s 108 computers on the wifi network and only 6, yes SIX windows computers, the other 102 are macs 
There was a funny keynote today on “Is Drupal Moral?”. The speaker, David Weinberger, a philsopher, was pretty funny. His powerpoint was fantastic too.
Drupalcon Day 1
Unless you’re a big web technology nerd, you can just ignore this post, it’s mostly for my benefit later next week to remember what I learned this week.
Today’s sessions were somewhat productive. I picked up a few tidbits of knowledge. The highlight was probably Apache Solr. Somehow this technology missed my radar completely. It was my first time learning about it and there’s a module for it in Drupal. It’s based on Lucene. Basically Apache Solr is a wrapper around Lucene. It’s the coolest search ever!
It has result biasing; so for instance “sticky” articles can have higher weights (or lower), articles with more comments can have higher weights (or lower), etc. It also has advanced features that let you exclude content types or apply weightages for content types, even CCK fields weights! It lets the user sort by relevance, title, date, etc. in a block. It also lets users filter by content type in a block. It has a “More Like This” block that finds articles with similar keywords and suggests them to users. Like Google, it also has “Did you mean ***** ?” functionality. I guess sites like Netflix, Cnet, Citysearch, Stubhub, Gamespot and AOL use Apache Solr. It takes a dedicated server though and some configuration… I’ll have to investigate this further. Right now I’m sold on all the bells and whistles and the magic they performed at the session.
It was my first time seeing Dries Buytaert (creator of Drupal) speak. He’s an excellent speaker and kept the crowd engaged with his awesome slides during the keynote. He gave a great history of Drupal and how the community keeps doubling year after year.
I sat in for an Organic Groups session and it was sadly not as great as I hoped. It mostly confirmed everything I already learned on my own last week. Although, it did give me a [possibly] better idea for subgroups I need to look into (taxonomy).
On a side note, the convention center is not a safe neighborhood at all. My hotel is a nice historic hotel about 2 blocks away, but still it’s a bad neighborhood to walk through. Here’s some pics I took while rushing through to safety armed with my pepper spray! (haha… dramatic enough?):
Belkin Pays for Perfect Consumer Ratings
“A Belkin representative has been caught offering money to anybody who posts a 100% positive review of certain Belkin products on Amazon.com and other e-retailers. The bozo even used his own name.”
A Busy November!
I just got back from San Francisco. Was stuck in that airport for almost 6 hours because our flight was delayed. Shortest flight I’ve ever taken only 50 minutes and longest delay I’ve ever had. The only people that probably had it worse are the people in the plane that was circling over the SFO airport for over an hour.
Beside the craziness of the flight. Adobe MAX, the purpose of my trip was fantastic.. I’d like to highlight some parts but not sure where to even start. My favorite in the sneak peaks was probably the video searching software. You can select a face in a video and hit search to find the same person in other parts of the video. Your search results are clips of the video starting at the point in the playhead where that same person is. Of course like any search the results aren’t all what you want, you’ll get faces similar to the face you chose.. which could also be good. Another cool feature is it takes the speech and converts it to text, so you can search for a word that was said in the video.. by a person in the video or a narrator anything and it will find other spots in the video where that word was said. I’ve never seen anything like this and never thought about it.. so it was probably the most impressive to me.
My second favorite was an application for testing webpages. It will show how your webpage will be displayed in all browsers, Safari, Firefox for mac, Firefox 2 or 3 for PC, IE 6, 7 or 8. I saw this as a huge time saver because I develop on a mac a lot at home and I have to run Parallels sometimes just to test for PC browsers. There’s even onion skinning to view different versions on top of each other to see the differences.
So yea after 3 days of at least 10 hours of Adobe lecture I was burnt out.. but cool stuff. I gotta go to San Francisco again. I didn’t have time to see everything in daylight, but Paul and Kim were gracious enough to be my tour guides for a few days It’s such a beautiful city! I didn’t expect it to be so East coast, old world architecture. Maybe because I’m used to LA and Vegas on the West coast. Josh and I will definitely be back within a year!
New iPods!
iPod Nano (looks a lot like the old iPod Mini)
Photo application…
I was feeling creative in an actionscript3 programming sort of way and I created a photo gallery application in flash that loads images with XML. I must admit as far as design goes, I was inspired by famewhore’s website. I love the simplicity of it!
A couple years ago, I never would have thought I’d ever have the desire to do actionscript coding in my free time at home. It was so frustrating to me as a designer, but I feel I’ve accomplished a lot in the last few years! I hope it makes me a more well-rounded web designer
Tracking packages with Google!
Did you know you can just copy and paste a tracking number into google (or your google toolbar if you have it) and it will track your package? It’s like magic! It know FedEx, USPS, UPS, DHL.. you name it!
ipod touch!
Josh and I were at an Apple store on Sunday and checking out the ipod touch that I’ve been pining for as well as the macbook air… not so much pining for that one. So we went to a few websites with safari, checked out the mail and music … and it was pretty sweet. Typing on it was easier than I thought. Some people prefer tactile response with real buttons.. but I gotta say the touch screen was pretty impressive. Spur of the moment Josh bought it for me I still need to get a case to protect it. I’m still in that common new-ipod-fear-of-dropping-it stage because it’s so dang slippery! It’s a lot thinner than I thought too, especially for 32GB.
I think the biggest draw back for people that prefer the iphone is that it’s only wifi not like the iphone that can use GSM networks for web access. So I started a list of places that have wifi in my town and there’s quite a few.. every Panera bread has free wifi, a few hotels nearby, almost every coffee shop that’s NOT starbucks or coffee bean/tea leaf has free wifi (Peet’s coffee, Java ‘n Jazz, etc.). Even the golf clubs in town have free wifi. Who knew?!
An iphone was just not for me because I spend way too much time on my iPod and usually kill the battery pretty quickly.. so with all the features on the iPhone that can kill the battery even faster i’d be phone-less quite a bit. iPhones cell phone plans also start at $59.99… which is far far more than I can afford or would like to even spend on a cell phone bill… (I’m at $25/month right now and doing just fine).
Overall I’m very impressed with the iPod touch on day 2 of owning it… Google maps is my favorite application. I’m a little bummed that all the free 3rd party webapps require internet connection. For those that don’t require internet, you will need to “jailbreak” your ipod, which would void the warranty and could have unexpected results… which is too much of a risk for me after all the money that was spent on it!
