drupal
We pulled off another successful Western Mass Drupal Camp. We watched the weather with some angst and agonized over whether to exercise our snow date -- They had been predicting up to 6 inches of snow. But in the end, it looked like the snow would mostly happen while the camp was going on and be finished in time to have the roads clear by the time people left, so we decided to push ahead with the camp on schedule. We ended up only getting around 3 inches and, although it probably depressed attendance a bit, we still had a substantial turnout and the camp felt very successful.
Last year, as we got close to the camp, there was angst over the organization (or lack of organization). I think many of the organizers had worried that they would get sucked into becoming responsible for everything, so we had all circumscribed our participation to particular things: I just did the venue and tried to put on blinkers with respect to everything else. But, amazingly, it all came together and just worked. This year, we had the same experience without the angst. We learned a lot from last year and the organization of this year's camp showed it: it was almost seamless and quite low stress. Still, we had all been very busy over the past few days getting all the details nailed down.
I attended three sessions. Two were very practical ("CSS and Drupal" and "Drupal Multisites") while the last was more intangible ("Shaping Drupal"). The practical ones were well attended -- packed, even. They were great and I learned something in both of them. The last didn't draw a large crowd (although I thought it was among the most important of the sessions at the camp: benjamin melançon led a discussion asking how do we maintain the Drupal community to keep the project moving forward? Drupal has been wildly successful, but principally due to people leveraging what the community has already built. And although Drupal use has skyrocketed, the growth of the Drupal development community hasn't kept pace. He didn't offer answers -- he just asked the question, although he did point to a handful of projects where people are actively trying to build the development community and help people move from just using Drupal to supporting it. I'm glad to see the question being asked.
I spent a good bit of my time trying to foster and organize the informal side of the Camp. Last year, we had reserved the Computer Resource Center (CRC) as a "Birds of a Feather" space, but it went almost unused. This year, I tried to organize a "showcase bazaar" and "genius bar" and get people to sign up. The "showcase bazaar" didn't attract anyone, but the genius bar went much better. There were almost constantly two or three people coming in with questions and experienced developers helping them actually work on stuff. I helped someone fix and update their instance of Drush and got a nice comment on twitter. (Note: I'm really not a drush wizard -- It was just old-time unix hacking: she had an alias in her .bash_profile that was invoking a different version of drush than the one on her $PATH, but it puzzled me for a few minutes until I figured that out.) It was really fun to watch over the shoulders of people fixing other problems as well. I learned as much or more doing that than I did in the formal sessions. We still need to find more ways to make the informal sessions work more effectively.
One challenge is where the CRC is located. I was involved in the design of the ISB and I advocated for having the CRC located adjacent to the cafe space on the atrium: it was the single thing I wanted most in the design of the building. My goal was for there to be a seamless flow from a completely informal space (the cafe), to the more formal CRC, to the most formal attached computer classrooms. This would enable people to hang out in the cafe and, when they thought of something they wanted to work on, to move into the CRC. Instead (probably due to my low status), they stuck the CRC off in a corner of the building on the third floor: you practically can't get any farther from the cafe space than that. This means that people hanging out in the cafe, decide to just work there, since it's too far to get to the CRC. Every time I visit the ISB, I have a little pang, because I'm reminded of all of the things we wanted, advocated for, and worked on (like the problem-solving auditorium, the team-based classrooms, ubiquitous wired networking etc) that didn't make it into the final design of the building or were otherwise thwarted. It doesn't help that everyone always talks about how wonderful the building is. It is a wonderful building -- one of the nicest on campus, but it still reminds me most of my failure in leadership.
At the end of the day, I walked around and locked up all the rooms, I pulled down our signs and erased the blackboards. We got the tables put away and cleaned up the trash (mostly). And then I went home. I decided to skip the after-party -- I was exhausted. I sat with Tom in the car for a long time talking about what a strange place the University is and how, in spite of its flaws, it's a wonderful place to be doing Drupal.
I had gotten as far as installing Drupal 7 a couple of times in the past year, but over the holiday, I tried to actually set up a Drupal 7 site for the first time. I was surprised to find that the ecosystem still doesn't quite feel ready for prime time.
At first, I thought it was just that stuff had been moved or reorganized. I spent a surprising amount of time searching for how to do stuff. The interface is quite different. But then I realized that some things that I have come to count on are simply missing, like not being able to select an alternate theme while logged in as a particular user. I still haven't figured out how to get the system to rebuild cached images.
Many D7 modules are also not ready for prime time. The new LDAP module is still unfinished. The ImageMagick ImageAPI Module doesn't seem to work. I saw comments that Themekey and others weren't really usable.
I don't mean any of this to be a criticism of Drupal in general or even Drupal 7 in particular. There are a bunch of aspects to Drupal 7 that show fundamental restructuring the makes the whole enterprise more robust. The Field UI, in particular, is a huge improvement that generalizes how to build forms. Still, I wonder when (or if) Drupal 7 will reach the same level of functionality/stability that Drupal 6 seems to have.
We talked a bit about these issues at our local Drupal users group meeting and the challenge at trying to choose whether to adopt a module for special purpose functionality or cobble together something from the basic underlying components. Calendaring has always been a bit of a challenge. Most people now seem to build calendaring functions using CCK, but if you look for a "calendar" project, there really isn't one. And setting up a calendar with CCK is still a lot of work. It's often hard to know how to do something that won't leave you in a cul-de-sac when the next version comes out. It's a fast moving target.
Western Mass Drupal Camp will return to the Integrated Science Building at UMass Amherst on January, 21st 2012 (with Jan 28 reserved in case of snow). Anyone interested in learning more about Drupal should plan to attend. Registration and attendance is free to the public. There will be presentations and sessions throughout the day appropriate for people at every level of expertise, from beginners to experts. Mark your calendar!
Interested participants may now register to announce their intention to attend, to propose sessions they could present, and/or to suggest sessions that they would like to attend. We are also seeking sponsorships for bringing an outstanding keynote speaker and to provide refreshments and other amenities.
Details are still emerging about the schedule of events. We hope to offer a keynote presentation in the ISB auditorium (ISB135). A welcome-center and exhibition is planned for the atrium. We hope to offer tracks of presentations for beginners, themers and site designers, developers and site-builders, and goal-oriented drupal users. Two innovative environments will be a "Showcase Bazaar" where people can demonstrate tricks and innovatations and a "Code-Sprint Bazaar" where developers can show work-in-progress and encourage participants to get involved. A "Genius Bar" will also be available for people with problems and questions to get expert assistance.
Drupal is the world's leading content-management platform, selected by UMass Amherst to for web-development on campus, that powers millions of websites and applications worldwide. It's free software built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world. Visit http://drupal.org/ for more information about Drupal.
Tom and I left early on Saturday and drove to Manchester for Drupal Camp NH. Tom and I met around the turn of the century when he worked for me in the BCRC supported by our Pew course redesign grant. Since then, he's gone onto graduate school, fatherhood, and other harrowing adventures. He does freelance web design work in the area, but is super busy with babies and work and life, so I don't get to see him very often. We were both looking forward to the drive to actually have some time to talk and reconnect, let alone to share the experience of Drupal Camp.
We arrived right on time and in good order. Check-in went smoothly. They provided a little card you could slip into your badgeholder with the morning schedule on one side and the afternoon schedule on the other -- that was a useful innovation, to not have to refer to some separate piece of paper.
Tom and I intentionally selected different talks to attend in order to get maximum coverage. The first I attended was about Drupal security Hack-proof your Drupal App by ebeyerent. It was fantastic. I'm reasonably familiar with security and Drupal security, but I still learned a lot. The biggest insight I got was to understand that Drupal doesn't vet user input. Although you have "input filters", Drupal generally saves user input directly into the database (with the exception of escaping meta-characters that might allow SQL injection) and then its the responsibility of the themer/programmer to ensure that they check user input on output before displaying it (and there are eight different functions for doing this in particular contexts: check_plain(), t(), l(), etc). Getting this insight alone was worth the trip.
Another great insight I had actually learned from Tom on the way down. We had begun talking about developing for the mobile platform (something I've been meaning to learn more about for a couple of years) and he mentioned that the keyword was "responsive design" and that the modern approach was to design first for mobile, which is generally the most limited platform. This helps focus on the key functionality that the website needs to provide and make sure that its accessible. Later, you can easily add-on a pretty, fancy skin for giant monitors. But getting people to focus on what's important is harder when the primary concern most people have in that context is aesthetics. With this preparation, I went to Jake Strawn's presentation on "Responsive Drupal Today" where he said all this again with many excellent examples drawn from his work on Omega.
In the third session, nothing grabbed me, so I went to the code-sprint room and spent some time trying to hack on the Nodewords module. With the guest wireless, I couldn't use ssh to get to a server so, instead, I spent most of my time installing apache, mysql, php, drupal, and nodewords and, at the end of the hour, had only gotten to the point of configuring the module and looking through the issue queue. I tried applying a user-submitted patch for one issue to hack on it a bit, but it didn't apply cleanly and I didn't have time to sort out what was wrong. It was unfortunate to not get any actual coding done, but still good use of my time.
Lunch was great: pizza, salad, etc. There was plenty of food and lots of snacks later. There wasn't any Coke Zero, which I would have preferred, but lots of bottles of water.
I went to Christina Inge's presentation on Analytics and Usability. The presentation was a little basic for me: too much time on why you should care about analytics, installing the google analytics module, and signing up for an account. I could have used more in-depth tricks on actually using the data. But I don't know how representative I was for the audience: the audience might have needed the more basic info.
The last presentation I attended was Why Drupal Projects Fail. This didn't really hold any surprises, but was a good reminder that the key issue is one of expectations. No matter if you think the project is a "success", if you violate the stakeholders expectations, the project will be perceived as a failure. Managing expectations requires good communication, transparency, and honesty. Good reminders.
Tom and I skipped the last presentation and tried to head home. We had been watching the forecast, but the storm was ahead of us. After a few miles, it became clear that the intelligent thing to do was to go back and find a hotel for the night. We got back to the conference in time for the closing plenary. We each won a prize in the raffle: I selected a copy of the Drupal 7 book and got the available authors to sign it.
On the way to the afterparty, we reserved a room at the Radisson and then spent a pleasant couple of hours at Milly's Tavern -- a great microbrew in Manchester. I tried the IPA and the Hopzilla: excellent bitter beer.
By the time we headed to the hotel, the snow was already several inches deep. As we approached the hotel, we found the roads barricaded by the police due to an event at the Arena that was across the street from the hotel. We drove all around the block looking for a way to get up to the hotel -- nearly getting stuck once or twice. Eventually get got in and spent a reasonably pleasant night in the hotel. I tried to check email and found that the servers were down. I was able to reach my home server, which helped me sleep a bit better.
The next morning, I foolishly decided not to breakfast before we left the hotel. I was eager to get going and didn't want a giant buffet breakfast, thinking that we could pick something up along the way. But it was clear once we got going that no place along the highway had power. Trees were smashed down everywhere. Tom thought we were driving through giant stands of birch trees, until we saw it was just wet snow coating the north-east sides of the tree trunks. Power was out along the Masspike too. At the second rest area, we found a McDonalds that had generator power -- they were only serving coffee and a few food items, but we got a bit to sustain us.
In Holyoke, we stopped at Tom's house. The snow looked to be around 1.5 feet deep, where it was in the shade. Many streets had downed branches and wires, but Tom's street was not too bad. We had to park on a side street, but we were able to get up to the house and touch base with Kirsten and the kids. They hadn't lost power. In a bit, we got back in the car and headed for Amherst.
There were no working traffic lights. Crazy people were driving right through them, rather than treating them as a 4-way stop. Insane. The power was off everywhere. A few business had generators, but whole the valley looked to be shut down.
At home, everyone was OK. The power had gone off around midnight, but there was no damage to the house or even to most of the trees. The cherry tree looked undamaged. Our azaleas were a bit smashed, but looked like they might recover. There was some water in the basement, but it hadn't yet gotten to the hot water heater (the first serious concern). Since then, we're just waiting for power.
After a long cold, night, we went for breakfast at Kelly's in shifts. Lucy and went first and confirmed that they were open and serving food. Alisa got the rest up and brought them a bit later. Afterwards, we headed for the BCRC to charge up our devices and get some connectivity. It's still going to be days before power is fully restored in Amherst, but we're not in some isolated cul-de-sac and we hope to get power back sooner rather than later. It's been quite an adventure.
I got an email from one of technical staff in another department wanting to consult with me about setting up a streaming server. When we met, he explained that the faculty in his department were doing "class capture" and wanted to set up a server to provide access to the video files. We mostly talked about the technical issues involved, although I couldn't resist at least mentioning the pedagogical underpinnings.
So-called "Class Capture" is stupid. If you're teaching in such a way that a video recording of the screen is useful, then you're doing it wrong. The time the students and faculty are together is incredibly special and can be used much more effectively than as a memory dump by one person. In particular, you can have students discuss problems in small groups and report out to the larger group: class capture doesn't work for that. You can have students work on group projects. You can have students actually do things and not just sit there. If you do anything interesting with the class time, class capture doesn't work: it would be pointless. To do class capture in an environment like that, you'd need a team of camera-persons and sound persons. And an editor to provide a comprehensible stream of footage. Class capture only makes "sense" if you have someone lecturing. Sigh...
I pointed out that I understood that the poor tech couldn't make faculty choose different pedagogy and that he needed to just make something that would work for them. I showed him an approach that I thought would work. I pointed out that you really only need a "streaming server" if you want to provide live feeds and that for posting files, you could probably get away with just posting video files (probably .flv, transcoded using ffmpeg) and a player like flowplayer. I pointed out that you could put a pretty front-end on it with Drupal, but he said that people just needed to embed their videos in their course websites, so that probably wouldn't be necessary.
We also talked a bit about hardware and OS: he suggested getting a tiny Dell computer and using Windows. I pointed out that you probably wanted more reliable hardware than that, but he said that his department was notoriously cheap. It turned out the only reason he was talking to me was that they'd looked at purchasing some kind of video streaming solution that cost $5000. If money hadn't been an issue, they'd have just bought it, I guess. Sigh...
A system for badges for life-long learning, based on previously-established Department Learning Goals, driven by student applications, and implemented in Drupal, could encourage students to align their own learning with the Goals. In addition, it could provide a much-needed impetus for building improved assessment of learning.
The Biology Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has fostered revolutionary pedagogy and pioneered team-based learning approaches in lab and in lecture. With funding from Howard Hughes, we built innovative introductory and upper-level biology laboratory courses. With support from the Pew-funded Program in Course Redesign, we developed on-line resources to support in-class small-group problem solving. With funding from NSF, we've developed cutting-edge model-based problem solving activities for use with clickers.
About ten years ago, the Biology Department adopted a forward-looking set of Learning Goals that has been influential in the redesign of existing classes and the design of new ones. Acknowledging that, while the curriculum defines the depth and breadth of disciplinary knowledge, the Learning Goals can establish a vision for the skills and perspectives that every Biology course should foster and develop in students. The Learning Goals in many ways encapsulate scientific literacy and an appreciation for life-long learning from a biological perspective.
While the Learning Goals have been influential, both in terms of curriculum and course design, the Department has not established assessments to monitor and evaluate student progress toward the goals in any centrally-reportable way. That's not to say that the assessments don't happen at all: they're simply embedded in courses with no mechanism for sharing them or their results. Finding ways to share the outcomes of assessments would help the department substantially, both by providing information about the Department's mission to help guide further efforts, but also to enable the department to communicate our mission to outside constituencies. It has been difficult, however, to build the necessary consensus among the faculty to accomplish the work. I believe a system based on badges could solve this dilemma.
I propose a slightly subversive mechanism to turn the problem on its head by enabling students to request badges through submission of an artifact from a course or experience (a project, paper, photograph, video, examination, etc) and writing a brief statement that explains why it merits receipt of the badge. By creating a student-driven system, the incentives for faculty could be inverted: the student requests will drive the system and provide the information about where the learning goals are already being assessed.
Badges will be aligned with the major learning goals and perspectives with four levels that students could potentially achieve for each badge (one for each year of study). Ideally, the instructor of the course and another faculty member would be required to certify that the work submitted represented progress above and beyond the level the student had previously achieved. In very large courses (some Department courses have more than a thousand students), this could be unrealistic, however, and course TAs might be needed to manage the requests.
By encouraging students to achieve the Leaning Goals directly, they will develop increased familiarity with the Goals and begin looking at their assignments and activities with an eye for how they could potentially meet Goal and earn badges. This will undoubtedly give students greater appreciation for how the Learning Goals articulate with class goals and with the Goals the faculty have for students in the major.
There are several places where the student badges could be used to confer privileges and opportunities to students. The website itself will offer a feed where new student badges are posted (at the discretion of the student). Another place where the badges could be leveraged is the Biology Undergraduate Research Apprenticeships application program where students already apply online and their badges could appear when their application is viewed. Changes to the Honors College will also necessitate the Department managing an admissions process for Honors students and the badges could appear when this determination is made.
Minimally, this system would provide a wealth of information to the Department regarding where the Learning Goals are being practiced and implemented effectively. One potential outcome of this system would be that faculty might begin redesigning their courses and assessments to facilitate student badge applications: faculty might feel some pressure to redesign their assessments if their classes yield few or no applications for badges.
I believe this can all be built with tools already available and in use in the Biology Department: We have extensive experience using Drupal and we've already started using the user_badges Drupal module (for Science Scouts badges). This module does not currently support the Mozilla Open Badges initiative, but I have already begun trying to organize a group to put in a subsequent proposal to extend the user_badges module to support it and it seems like a good platform to start with. Students would submit the material on-line and, via the workflow module, the faculty members would be notified to evaluate the submission, and assign the badge.
If other departments or entities on campus were interested in pursuing similar badges, it would be easy to replicate or centralize the infrastructure for the badge system. The General Education group and the new Integrative Experience program have similar kinds of learning goals that badges could be developed for.
For nearly ten years, I've been trying to convince the Biology Department to embark on a process to assess the Learning Goals we developed and adopted without success. If a system of badges could get students to start identifying where we're already doing these assessments and provide the mechanism for sharing the information centrally, it would be a transformative step in moving the department forward. But the biggest winners would be students taking greater control of aligning their education with the Department Goals.
Submitted as a proposal to the Digital Media Learning Badges for Life-long Learning Competition with Tom Hoogendyk & Coherent Bytes listed as a collaborator.
About a day after I had set up the Facebook Integration stuff, they decided to give up trying to support Drupal 6 at all. They just pulled that whole tree of the module. So I switched to using the Facebook Connect module instead.
I've rarely found it to be worthwhile trying to track commercial software. Facebook provides an SDK, but stuff changes quickly and all of the modules that were written against the 2.0 SDK won't work as of Oct 1. In both cases, there were patches that theoretically made stuff work with the new SDK, but that's not particularly reassuring.
I was eventually able to get the Facebook Connect module working. I ended up having to go into the source and touch it at a couple of points. It wanted to have registrations open to create accounts, so I hacked that to not be so fussy. It also ended up pointing at a spot where you got an "access denied", so I set it to just go to the "dashboard" when it was done. It now seems to work reasonably well.
Ha! I finally figured out how to remove that horrible video from the Welcome block without having to remove the whole block. I had gotten to used to the idea that when you do something in Drupal, the answer is nearly always some pointy-clicky thing. Instead you have to edit a text file: profiles/openatrium/modules/atrium_features/atrium/atrium.block.inc and comment out the lines that begin "$video". Once you do that, you still have the helpful blocks with the links to create content, but no stupid video sucking up the whole screen. Sanktan Merdon! That took me hours to finally figure it out!
I've setup Open Atrium with Facebook Integration (I had to comment out the link in settings.php to include the fb_url_rewrite.inc -- none of the purl managed links seemed to work while that was included. I'm only really interested in the Facebook Connect stuff, but that *seems* to work pretty well, even without the url_rewritey thing. It's not thoroughly tested, yet, but what I've seen so far is quite encouraging.
I'm planning to use it for my North Star Teens class on Building a Computer. I asked them what they wanted to use and they were somewhat ambivalent -- they didn't want to do it directly in Facebook, but weren't sure if a blog or a wiki or what would be the right thing. I think Open Atrium will be great -- especially now that I've figured out how to get rid of that video! The video is cute, but you only need to see it once and, after that, it just takes up a lot of prime real-estate.
On August 28th, I received an email from the new president of Esperanto-USA informing me that I was being replaced as webmaster. I was somewhat surprised at this turn of events, but have done what I can to help the new webmaster get up-to-speed with the website as it currently stands and to outline what I had identified as next steps.
My vision for the website has been to make it the repository for information about Esperanto-USA and its activity -- the primary goal being that people visiting the site see evidence that the organization is alive and active. For that reason, I have avoided creating "silos" where people go for different pieces of information that are disconnected from the main site (where the evidence of the other things going on would be absent).
I've also tried to prevent proliferation of individual sites so that most/all of the management of the site mostly is done through Drupal. I've avoided creating shell accounts for people and having to deal with managing file uploads, unix permission issues, etc -- not because they're necessarily any harder than doing it through drupal, but to avoid multiplying the amount of work that the sysadmin will have to do (ie manage drupal plus manage unix users and understand the potential interactions between the two -- or even worse, understand other CMSes). But note that there are a few, e.g. http://esperanto-usa.org/lk2011 And, as I say, because I want people visiting our site(s) to be exposed to our current activity, and not just the silo that brought them there.
One of the most successful things we did was when Robert Read organized and hosted a "LAN party", where we got 6 or 7 people together in one place to work on the website for a whole weekend. That's how the old pages got migrated (however inexpertly) during one frantic weekend. It might be worth repeating that somehow, when you know what you want to do.
In 2011, I had proposed a thread of the Landa Kongreso to be about updating the website: basically, I envisioned (1) a talk/forum about the website and services available/needed, (2) training sessions on how to get involved and contribute, and (3) a room through the whole congress (staffed by me) with a few computers where people who wanted to work on things could sit together and actually get work done. Unfortunately, when the date of the LK was arbitrarily changed, I could no longer participate. Maybe someone will want to organize this at the next LK.
The key things that I thought that needed to be done were these:
(1) reorganize navigation (less flat, more deep). We have too many top level categories that aren't really parallel and each is only one level deep. We should probably have fewer top-level menus and make them two levels deep, so people can burrow down more quickly to what they're looking for.
(2) combine and update pages. We have too many pages, many of which are similar to one another -- and most are out of date. While updating the site, we should try to merge similar pages together into a single page, to simplify the site and make them easier to maintain/update.
(3) fix, extend taxonomy. The taxonomy system is turned on and allows people to enter terms. Unfortunately, most people don't understand how it works. But we have a big repository of terms that people have used. We should probably migrate those terms into a system where we have a fixed set of terms that people are required to select from when posting stuff. I think a better taxonomy system would make it easier for people to find information and navigate the site.
(4) create landing pages for each of the funds. These would probably be "views" in Drupal parlance, and would each have a summary of a fund, a way to submit requests from a fund, a "feed" of articles (stories and blog posts) that were tagged as being about the activity of a fund, and a link encouraging people to donate to a fund -- maybe even building a purchasing system into drupal so that people didn't have to leave drupal to donate. On the "estraro" side, we would ask fund administrators to post updates about each time the fund did anything -- maybe with an admonition that funds that do nothing for an entire year will be discontinued and rolled into the general fund. It's stupid that we have funds that don't do anything: we should get rid of those.
There are some other resources of which you should be aware. This URL: http://esperanto-usa.org/chkmem.php is a script I wrote that checks members one by one to see if they're a dues paying member and adds the "member" role to them in Drupal if they are. It doesn't remove members who are no longer dues-paying: we have no mechanism to do that.
There are also google adwords and google analytics accounts for Esperanto-USA. You probably need to ask Tim Westover to add you to those, if you're not already in there. We could do a lot more with both of those. Tim used to do a lot, but hasn't been active for a couple of years and no-one else has filled in.
There is also the "retpagxestroj" mailing list. This is a list maintained at dreamhost. You should add yourself to that. You can leave me on or take me off, as you like. The people who are on the list are all endowed with administrative access at the website. There are also a few more people who have administrative access: I was pretty liberal in giving it, thinking that more hands are better. Administrators can do pretty much anything at the site, though, and, although it hasn't been misused you might want to think about it because it's a bit risky -- you may be more risk-averse than me.
The bookstore is its own thing -- it was set up and is maintained by Bill Harris. There are really attractive skins for zen-cart -- the one we're using is pretty ugly and clunky looking. It might be worth spending a few hundred bucks to buy a prettier skin so that the bookstore looked more attractive. Attractive sells. The bookstore needs more reviews -- there's a mechanism for users to write and submit reviews, but there are hardly any reviews in the bookstore.
We're currently using Drupal 6, which is now the legacy release of Drupal. It will continue to be supported until Drupal 8 comes out -- probably sometime next year. When that happens, we ought to be ready with an upgrade plan -- or some kind of plan.
The New York office of UEA is interested in switching to Drupal. I had asked the board to consider whether we should host their website if they were willing to share the cost of hosting (for maybe $5/month). It is simple enough to to set up separate sites that use the same codebase (t.e. "multisite"). That question has not yet been answered.
For a long time, there's been discussed about whether we should translate at least some of our webpages into Esperanto. The majority are only in English. The i18n and l10n modules are installed, but we mostly aren't using them, In my opinion, we don't have enough human resources to keep the English pages up-to-date and it doesn't make sense to double the amount of work. If you want to use the system I've found that it works reasonably well, but it doesn't play nicely with the book module. You will want to move pages that you want to translate from book pages to regular pages.
Finally, the last item I covered when I did my talk at the LK in Washington -- and which I had warned the estraro about -- was that someone needed to be thinking about finding a replacement for me, since I was the only one who understood Drupal well enough to manage and support the site. Evidently, that problem now has been solved. :-)
To be summarily dismissed wasn't really how I was expecting things to turn out, but it was time -- past time -- that someone else took over. I'll enjoy watching from the sidelines.
Tom pointed out that the State of Drupal 2011 Survey is up. It was a pretty tedious survey with long lists of buzzwords that mostly didn't apply or resonate with me. The last bit was just a form asking for general feedback. Here's what I wrote:
I think the biggest challenge in using Drupal is that people often end up having to re-invent the wheel in terms of configuration (setting up content-types, views, etc). Having a large array of pre-configured setups (for education, e-business, one-user blogging, multi-user blogging, etc) would help people standardize on consistent ways of doing things and aid adoption and integration.
I like Drupal a lot, but the "last mile" in Drupal is setting it up for people to use. And I find, over and over again, that different communities set it up differently. It would be great to be able to pick a recipe that sets up most of this stuff for you, both so you wouldn't have to do it yourself -- and so that it would be done in a standard way. It's nice to be able to customize stuff, but it's silly for everyone to have to customize everything because standard tools just aren't available.
The Western Mass Drupal Camp came off without a hitch. I was the "key participant" because I had all the keys. I spent the first hour running around opening doors and helping people get everything we needed. But, after that, I was mostly just a participant: I attended several interesting presentations, I gave my presentation, and then it was over. I ran around to make sure everything was locked up. And then went to the after party at ABC.
It was great to see everyone I knew: Buzz and Tom and Andy and Beth and everyone else. And great to meet so many new people. I'm not as good at meeting people as I really ought to be. My instinct is to go sit quietly in the corner -- I'm much more comfortable there. Luckily, I had people come and join me, so I wasn't just alone the whole time.
The best part was that I think everyone had a good time: And I don't think anyone felt so overwhelmed that they wouldn't be willing to do this again some time. And now that we know we can do it, it might be fun to experiment with some other kinds of activities. Having talks is fine, but it would be fun to have people actually work on projects. You learn a lot more when you actually do something.
We've had snowstorm after snowstorm during the first week of classes, closing the campus again this morning. The snow banks next to the driveway are so high, I can barely shovel anymore. But since the campus is closed and it's still snowing, I can take a few minutes to take stock of the past few weeks. I've been busy.
I've spent the past two or three weeks shepherding the migration of resources on the BCRC server to new hardware. I had wanted to do it immediately after grades were due, back in December, but with everyone's schedules, it didn't happen until early January. Since then, I've been putting everything back together and then building new resources for the spring. It's been an incredibly time-consuming process, but nearly everything critical has been done. At the same time, I needed to get my course set up and prepare for my presentation at Western Mass Drupal Camp.
We had a snowstorm on the day of my first class meeting. It looked to me like the University shouldn't have tried to open in the first place, but they did. I came and worked on getting ready for class. I checked every few minutes to see if class was really going to happen, figuring they'd probably close just after we were supposed to meet. But they surprised me and closed two hours before class. When you're class only meets once a week, missing a meeting is a big deal for the schedule. But I think we'll be OK.
I'm really excited about Drupal Camp. I think it was Kelly Albrecht who first proposed organizing the camp. My main contribution was to organize the venue: I made a pitch to the dean and the chair of Chemistry to let us use the new Integrated Science Building at UMass: we've basically taken over the entire building for the day. And it looks like the weather will push on through today and we'll have good weather tomorrow for the meeting.
I'm presenting How to Say L10n and i18n in Drupal. I tried to come with a topic where I thought I might be more of an expert than most of the people there. My knowledge about Drupal is broad, but shallow -- I'm not really an expert in anything. But I think I'll know more about localization and internationalization than most of the people there and will be able to say something interesting about how to do it, having recently gone through building libroj.bierfaristo.com as a multilingual site. At least, I can identify the basic tools and some of the pitfalls.
At the last Western Mass Drupal Group meeting, there was discussion about organizing a "Drupal Camp" -- a kind of regional conference where people can get together and share experience with using Drupal, but with a particular focus on helping people get started. A group of us at UMass Amherst were interested in trying to hold the camp on campus in the new Integrated Sciences Building and today the Dean expressed support. So now I need to mobilize the troops. It should be fun.
The other day, I decided to try installing the twitter_pull module and found that I was a full major revision out-of-date with my blogging software. So, over the long weekend, I spent a couple of hours updating and retheming my blog. I decided to use the Newswire theme, which I've been using at E-USA for a year or so. It's a really solid theme. I rejiggered stuff a bit. It's not perfect, but it's probably close enough.
The semester is coming at us fast. Early in the summer, the plan was to replace the BCRC server. In the end, for various reasons, we didn't quite make that happen. For the past few days, I've been sorting out how to build resources for the fall on the old server. Making good progress.
Yesterday, I finally wrote a new script that builds an instance of drupal for a course site using symlinks from a template and runs the database dump, .htaccess, and settings.php through sed to rewrite the course specific parts. It works perfectly except for setting the name and slogan of the site. Upon reflection, I think I'm going to install drush and then call drush after the site is built to set those.
As if I needed another project to work on, I decided to involve myself when the department wanted to have digital signage. I've been skeptical about buying one of the closed-source solutions, since I've heard nightmarish stories about trying to support them on other parts of the campus. They wanted to show a video on one in the ISB and several faculty spent hours trying to make it work before they got me, with ffmpeg to begin systematically exploring the fileformat/codec space until we found one that would work. Stupid. We bought an inexpensive LG display and a MacMini and are planning to use this recipe. Basically, you create a unique URL at your drupal site that presents content with a special theme optimized for your display.
The recipe is really cool. I showed it to Tom to see if he would be interested in working on the special theme. He was super excited because the Dean's office has been interested in solving the digital signage problems they already have.
I've run into some roadblocks. Apple just rev'ed macmini line and so the hardware architecture is completely new. I tried using our existing macosx install and it wouldn't work. I explored putting ubuntu on the macmini and found that the macmini hasn't been out long enough for ubuntu to work on it either: I couldn't even get the installer to boot. I expect it will be fixed in a few weeks, but that was frustrating. So I went back to macosx and built a unique radmind image to support display machines. All the machine has to do is run either plainview or firefox in kiosk mode.
I also ran into a bit of skepticism from the chairman who wondered why we couldn't just use Powerpoint. Sigh... He's concerned about getting faculty to contribute and review content. I pointed out that the person who's probably going to enter most of the content is already putting up the announcements on the website and this will just become an extension of that. If they had to pull all the information out of powerpoint slides to make announcements, it would be more than twice as much work.
I've got my Esperanto course basically ready to go. It's always a challenge to guess how much time outside of class students will be willing to invest. I've aimed at 2 hours. I've outlined 4 tasks to do each week that I estimate will each take around a half hour: 2 lessons at lernu and two chapters from Bonvenon en nia mondo. I think if they actually do everything, by the end they should be pretty fluent in Esperanto -- I guess we'll see.
The writing class I've taught often enough that I'm not worried about it. I still haven't come up with a good theme for the writing class, though. I usually try to come up with some kind of unifying theme that ties all the activities together: invasive species or something. I've been thinking about doing this one about models. When we have to do our final research project in late November, it will be warmer to study a model, rather than try to collect data in the field. I also need to think up a good object for them to investigate during the first day...
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