Growing Venture Solutions

Greg Knaddison

Growing Venture Solutions

July 2008

Greg Knaddison

greggles

2008/03/05 9:00
DrupalCamp Colorado

Best DrupalCamp Colorado Ever!

The bathrooms...

Big thanks to Denver Open Media.

Big thanks to Aten Design Group.

Do-ocracy
Drupal(Camp) is what you make of it.

tag it: drupalcampcolorado

drupalcamp

(on monitor upstairs)

Lightning!

S5 Presentation Layer.
Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System
(no, it's not SSBSSS nor S2BS3)
(because Eric Meyer said so)

<!--pagebreak--> + words = presentation!

Where are the slides?
Oh...they're already online in a shareable format.

Greg Knaddison

Growing Venture Solutions

July 2008
DrupalCamp Colorado

What is Views 1?
The views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists of content (nodes) are presented.

What is views 2?
The views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists of anything are presented with a kickass Ajax interface.

Questions?

Demo!

Raffle for Komodo
Advanced help
Non-node tables

Session list (and block)
Basic node list
Overrides

Comments + moderation

Image + ajax + minipager = carousel...?

Stump the Chump!

Greg Knaddison

Growing Venture Solutions

July 2008

We're just under 3 weeks away from DrupalCamp Colorado 2008 which will be held July 26th and 27th. We're accepting more presentations and already have several great sessions to vote on.

I want to highlight a few notable things about this DrupalCamp.

Remote Presenters Welcome

Thanks to the work of Kevin Reynen we are welcoming remote presenters to the camp. If you can't make it to Colorado but want to share your message, this is your opportunity.

Great Sponsors and Prizes

I recently saw a comment about Pathauto and started writing a really long reply that seemed more valuable to share here.

Basically one of the questions people have is "Why should I use Pathauto? If I don't care about SEO is there any other reason?"

This is a valid question to me. There is some indication that users don't look at the URL bar. During the Usability testing at UMN we never noticed people looking at the URL bar in the eye-tracking data. But some people certainly do look at the URL bar - people who like "hackable urls" do

Hackable URLs

I use it extensively to create "hackable URLs" that are valuable to a user. A "hackable url" or "index alias" is the feature on a site where you have a post and then users can remove the title down to the previous URL element and get the other posts from that month, one more layer for the year, and one more for that user since forever. See - fun! I even made a movie about it:

Site Credibility Prior to the Click

I frequently get URLs sent to me via email and IM. Compare these two URLs:

http://drupalcampcolorado.org/node/38

vs.

http://drupalcampcolorado.org/content/our-sponsors

Which one are you more likely to click on? Which one helps you understand what content you are going to get before you even get there?

Easy to Remember URLs

Ever quarter I try to munge and analyze the download data. The data for January is now available. Views continues its reign at the top of the module list. Images and WYSIWYG remain popular. Popular themes continue to be dominated by those that start with letters at the beginning of the alphabet.

Most Popular Drupal Modules

Check the presentation formatted version of this page.

Greg Knaddison

Growing Venture Solutions

2008/07/27 14:00
DrupalCamp Colorado

The Pathauto module is a rather popular one for Drupal. In November Pathauto 5.x-2.0 was released which included a restructuring of several features to add new features and enhance scalability. There have been almost 50 bugfixes and features added between 5.x-2.0 and 5.x-2.1. See the release page for full details.

I wanted to blog about this for a few reasons.

Pathauto Configuration/UI Changes

First, there was a change to the UI in the way that feed aliases are handled to better support the use of Views for taxonomy feeds. I've udpated this in the upgrade guide (which, especially for folks upgrading from 5.x-1 or 4.7, should be required reading). There were also several improvements to the UI to simplify it and help people figure out which token is the right one to use. This was a major problem with the 2.0 release so I hope that the 2.1 will be easier to use. There is still room for improvements but...

Comaintainer and Maintenance Status

Second, this release is likely to be the last for a while. Now that this 5.x branch is more stable I plan to spend some time working on the 6.x branch to get a stable release of that. I'd also love a co-maintainer which mikeryan has offered to help which would take the module full circle to its author. I'm broadcasting this here to be a responsible maintainer given that I have less bandwidth in the coming months to dedicate to Pathauto because...

Prediction Market Module

I like building modules.

This is a list of modules which I have contributed code to with the number of commits to each project.

• Pathauto (542 commits)
• Token (59 commits)
• S5 presentation player (50 commits)
• Prediction Markets (41 commits)
• microsummary (17 commits)
• Omniture Integration (15 commits)
• Meez Integration (8 commits)
• Nofollow List (3 commits)
• TextLinkAds.com Integration (2 commits)
• CCK Latitude Longitude module (7 commits)
• Porter-Stemmer (1 commit)

There are many other modules and themes I have built which are not publicly available because they are only used on a specific site.

Examples of specific modules/configurations I have built for private sites include:

• A webservices module that integrates with the CCK Address Field and CCK LatLon modules to get LatLon data for Addresses
• A grant application workflow that validated and moved applications through a review process where different judges would rate the grants.
• User integration between Drupal and a third party user database.