Growing Venture Solutions

Hello - I'm Evelyn and I have recently joined GVS as a designer and usability tester. I have been working as a freelancer for the past seven years, and now that my daughter is entering 1st grade I am excited to be spending more face time with grown-ups!

My first task as a designer with GVS was to design a site for Greg's book: "Cracking Drupal". This was also my first real-world experience theming for Drupal and with some help, it was pretty simple.

I began by chatting with Greg about what he wanted the site to do and how it should look. I also gave him a simple design worksheet to complete with questions such as "Who is your target audience?" and "How do you want people to describe your site?" (If I could ask only one question, this last one would be it.) Greg wanted the site to draw on the cover of the book, and wanted it to be elegant, streamlined and easy to navigate.

Book Cover: As a starting point it was an obvious choice to take the book cover and modify it into the header and footer. I pulled the color palette from the cover as well, and added a burnt orange accent to offset the strong blues and blacks. In general I try to avoid black text on white, so the body copy and some headers are actually a dark blue.

Elegant: I always strive for elegance. By elegance I don't mean just "tasteful, refined or dignified" (Oxford American Dictionary.) For me, elegance in web design is integral to good usability. Even grungy, busy sites, when done well, can be described as elegant. So for Cracking Drupal that meant a clear hierarchy and harmonious color scheme taken from the book.

I'm not much for boasting, but I will be honest: Drupalcamp Colorado is going to be amazing. You should do everything you can to attend.

Last year we had nearly 100 people together for DrupalCamp. This year the event is combined with an Ubercamp to gaurantee it will rock your socks off. We have space for nearly 400 people, so we hopefully won't have to cap registrations like last year. Did I mention you should come?

What the Heck is a Drupalcamp anyway?

There's some healthy debate in the community about the purpose of Drupalcamp, especially as Drupalcon becomes a bigger and more "corporate" event. One of the goals with Drupalcamp Colorado is to help provide a bit of a middle ground between the grassroots, loosely organized camps and the ultra-organized, corporate Drupalcon. Partially because the "mountain west" is so spread out and far from other places, this camp tends to be a regional event pulling in people from nearby states. We've structured it with up to 3 simultaneous tracks and plenty of space for Birds of a Feather gatherings to support everyone from new-user to hard-core designers/developers.

Registration and Session Submission Are Open

We just opened the camp site for registrations and session submissions. We've got a strong showing of Ubercart session proposals, which makes sense given that this is also an Ubercamp. Session submission is open for about the next 3 weeks. Then we'll have some time for voting, and the final list of sessions will be announced about 2 weeks before the camp itself. Already there is a solid list of compelling sessions from some great presenters.

I've been involved in a handful of issues on drupal.org. According to a search for issues where I participated, it's about 3,300 issues. That's a lot of typing. A lot of that typing was on duplicate issues where I probably wrote variations on the same words. Unfortunately when I'm feeling rushed through issues I can be a little less friendly to people than is ideal. Fortunately there's a little tool that can help make this less tedious and provide more thoughtful messages to the people who submit these bugs.

MyWords for Firefox

So, you install the MyWords plugin for Firefox, do a little configuration, and you're off!

Here's a quick screencast of how to use and configure the plugin.

Increased Productivity with MyWords for Firefox from Greg Knaddison on Vimeo.

My thanks to Sun for recommending the add-on!

This past spring there was Drupalcon DC, a truly amazing event by all counts. As we debated sponsoring Drupalcon we decided to go a different route: sponsoring the many camps that we hoped would happen in Central and South America this year. It was clear from the DrupalCon South America BOF held in DC that there was a lot of interest from South America to organize Camps as well.

So, given a need and a desire to help grow the community, we've made some great initial contributions towards 4 camps. If there are any other camps in the area that people are trying to plan this year please let us know so we can support your camp.

Drupalcamp Brazil, Drupalcamp Centroamerica

For the Drupalcamp Centroamerica Felix Delattre (xamanu) decided to use the money to provide scholarships to cover transportation and attendance costs for people from around Central America. We are happy that the money will help 2 people attend the camp who otherwise would not be able to: Eduardo Garcia and Isaak Ordoñez. Felix did something right: in it's first year the camp is over 100 attendees.

We can support your Drupal site, but first let’s make it right

When we first offered formal Drupal Support services we expected clients would know their site fairly well and need help with advanced administration and/or doing “new” things. In practice, we’ve quickly learned an important lesson about the diversity of Drupal site owners. Some are virtuosos, and need our help with very complex issues. Some have an existing site with major deficiencies, perhaps built by a vendor who is no longer in the picture. Some need some tutoring in Drupal basics, or even the concepts of dynamic websites.

So we have learned to sort out from the start whether clients will need a more intensive initial phase that includes a site review, an assessment of how well administrators and users understand their Drupal site, and quite possibly a detailed site tune-up. Here is how the technical side went with one client …

We've been slowly growing as a company over the last few months - it's worth taking some time to acknowledge the changes.

Steve Harley

Steve Harley joined the team last September and has been getting up to speed on code and community ever since, posting a monochrome print friendly Druplicon. I've known Steve for a while and worked with him on projects related to our neighborhood in Denver. Steve's role is primarily as a Drupal generalist, though he obviously has some skill as a designer which comes from years in the publishing industry. Most recently he worked on desktop development with Filemaker, Python and other scripting tools.

Ezra Barnett Gildesgame

After working with Ezra previously, it is great to be able to work with him again. Ezra is a Drupal generalist and proud maintainer of several modules on drupal.org. He joined the team last November and has already co-taught Denver area GVS trainings along with other development and support work. Most recently before GVS, Ezra worked as an independent consultant to Flat World Knowlwedge.

Dave Reid

The Growing Venture Solutions team has expanded over the last 6 months to add two new members. In the face of increasing demand for our services we are now looking to hire new people to join the team.

We are hiring two people. These descriptions are for the ideal candidate, so if you have some of the qualities and are looking to expand in these areas then please still contact us.

Website Designer With a Strong Usability Focus

Most of our projects are heavy on development, but our goal is to be a full service shop. We've satisfied this need so far by working with contractors, but now we want someone to join the team. One of your tasks will be to help polish our site (we've started work on this, but it would be unfair to keep you out of it). You'll also work with our clients on identity, user experience, and wireframing. And if you're interested you will help with some sales work.

Drupal Generalist: Site Builder, Developer, Support Engineer, Trainer

EDIT: This position is now filled.

We provide many services around Drupal: building sites, writing custom code and enhancing modules, providing support to our support clients, and providing training services. If you are a "Drupal generalist" interested in providing at least some of these services that's great. A resume is less interesting than a solid record of contribution to the Drupal project - please provide a link to your drupal.org user profile.

Locations and What it's like to work with Growing Venture Solutions

We like to think we're a pretty special company. The best way to describe us is a hybrid between being a freelancer and an employee. For more details, see this description.

As Drupal developers and themers, we spend a lot of our time referring to the Drupal API Reference which provides great information about functions to use and how to write code for Drupal. It can be a little daunting to look at that site if you are a new user: what are you searching for? what areas should you explore? For more seasoned developers there are times when api.drupal.org is not as useful: what if you are offline or just want a quick overview of the functions you use most often?

So, we built up this cheat sheet to provide a guide of important functions new users might not know and also to give a quick reference sheet for more advanced developers.

Download the Drupal API Cheat Sheet

You can download the cheat sheet in pdf format which is linked to api.drupal.org in case you need more information on a specific function.

After gathering suggested functions we had some room on the card and debated: more functions that are less valuable or some related topics. We decided to go for some related topics and added just a smidgen of Linux Command Line fun with useful commands and cvs tips. We also included the tiniest form example to get folks started down the road to awesome forms using the FormAPI.

Drupal has some pretty amazing features to handle aliases and aliasing. They are also commonly misunderstood. This article is an attempt to shed some light on how URLs and aliases and redirects work in Drupal which, with the help of some contributed modules, automatically turn a Drupal site into a TinyURL-like service.

It All Starts With the Menu System

Most modules in Drupal have a hook into the menu system which allows them to declare paths to which they will respond. For example, the node module's hook to the menu system allows it to respond to requests for "/node/".

Clean URLs vs. ... Dirty? URLs

Drupal responds to the "q" parameter from the URL. http://growingventuresolutions.com/?q=node/1 tells Drupal to serve up the page for "node/1". Ever since about 2003 Drupal has used features of the web server so that http://growingventuresolutions.com/?q=node/1 can be "rewritten" to http://growingventuresolutions.com/node/1. This is the so-called "Clean URL" which removes the main query parameter from every Drupal page request. Sure, there are still some page requests like for the second page in a list of nodes but they are much less common.

Ever since Drupal 6.x, if your web server supports clean urls then they will be enabled during installation. This is great.

Internal Path vs. Path Alias

Quick update: this data misses out on any files added since Drupl 6.0 was created. With the new database and testing systems, that's a lot of files! So, these need to be updated to include that data...this still gives a good idea of people who worked on everything except for Tests and DBTNG

Let's face it: we're human and nothing gets our blood flowing like a little old fashioned competition. During the release of Drupal 6 I helped out to analyze the code and provide some statistics about the release. I published the method and the data that found some pretty interesting information:

• There were about 206 contributors when measured this way
• The top 10 individuals were credited in almost 40% of the patches
• People who only were credited on 1 or 2 patches still provided just over 10% of the code for Drupal.

Recently someone asked me to run statistics again for Drupal 7 so far. Thanks to the very detailed nature of the fine Drupal 7 maintainers (webchick and Dries) the commit messages give us all the info we need to see who has been involved in the code that is ultimately committed.

Drupal 7 Contributors So far

So, who are the current leaders in the race towards making Drupal 7 the most tested and usable release? Here are the top 5 individuals. As you can see these 5 people were involved in almost 25% of the patches.