Wayne Eaker - Drupal Developer in Ann Arbor, Michigan

DrupalCamp Ohio 2012

wayne — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:56:13 +0000

This past Saturday I made the drive down to Columbus for DrupalCamp Ohio. It was a well-attended and well-managed conference. Despite being on the OSU campus, attendees were bright and interesting people. The highlight was the keynote by Angie Byron (webchick), and I attended these great sessions:

The State of Mapping and the GeoSpatial CMS in Drupal 7
by Brandon Morrison

This presentation was an overview and demo of the Geofield module, and how it works with related modules like Geocoder, OpenLayers and Leaflet. This system seems like a more flexible and modular approach to what the Location module does on Drupal 6. I'm really excited about this. I just need a client who needs some maps.

Hacking Open Atrium: adding Features within the Contexts of your Spaces
by Steve Mokris

Most of this presentation was an overview of the Features, Context and Spaces modules. I use Features and Context regularly, but Spaces is a module I haven't tried yet. After seeing how quickly you can build and export Open Atrium "features" with Spaces, it's definitely something I have to try. I don't use Atrium, but Steve says most of what he showed will work in a more generic Organic Groups environment.

Drupal as a CRM Platform
by Michael Haggerty

This session was an overview and demo of the CRM Core suite of modules. While it's not fully featured at this time, it's a very impressive beginning. The initial release only support storing information about Individuals, Organizations, Households and Activities. Noticably absent are membership and event tracking. But, everything is built using Drupal 7 entities, avaiable in Views and exportable by Features. Depending on the needs of an organization, it might be easier to build a membership/event ticketing system on top of this than try to customize CiviCRM or another more fully featured solution. One other missing piece is the lack of an emailing subsystem. However, I agree with the presenter that bulk email is probably best done with MailChimp or Constant Contact, rather than from your web server.

The main headwind for this suite seems to be competition from other CRM on Drupal projects like Drop CRM and RedHen CRM. CRM Core looks like it will be the first one with a release, though. So, that should give it an advantage. I asked if Trellon, who are behind this, would be helping to coordinate activities of coders trying to work in the CRM Core ecosystem building additional modules. Unfortunately, I didn't get a straight answer, so my guess is no. A missed opportunity, I think.

Responsive Design is Easy
by Rajeev Singh

An overview of what Responsive Design is and how you can achieve it with Drupal. I knew what it was, having used the Omega base theme before, but I did not realize just how simple it was to make it work in your own themes from scratch. I will definitely be trying this out soon.

Overall, I had a great time and will definitely attend next year. I hope that we can coordinate DrupalCamps a bit better next time so that DrupalCamp Michigan isn't on the same day.

Wordpress vs. Drupal - A Panel Discussion

wayne — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 21:53:47 +0000

I had a good time speaking as part of a panel discussion this week at Lunch Ann Arbor Marketing. The topic was Wordpress vs. Drupal.

Here's the video of the event:

Festifools 2011

wayne — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 22:52:03 +0000

It was frigid on Main Street in Ann Arbor today, but the rain gave way shortly after it started and the puppets were great.

Wrecking the New York Times Paywall

wayne — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 21:51:14 +0000

After reading a Mashable article on how trivial it is to avoid the New York Times paywall, I decided to implement the "delete the URL variable" method as a Chrome extension.

Download my "New York Times Paywall Wrecking Ball" Chrome extension here.

Don't feel comfortable installing extensions from random people like me? No problem, it's super easy to rewrite it yourself:

You can download the code as a text file here.

Worms HD for iPad

wayne — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:40:50 +0000

Worms HD is the iPad version of the classic PC game. For the uninitiated, Worms is a turn-based projectile combat game where you direct cute worms to destroy each other using both realistic and fantastical weapons. It's a fun game that works well on the touchscreen platform, but it would have been nice if Team17 had at least brought a few new features to this retread of the classic.

Graphics and Audio

The graphics are cartoon-based, just like the original series. In fact, it looks like they are using the exact same image sprites they always have. They are certainly not the best the graphics I've seen in an iPad game, but they're pretty good, and they certainly don't detract from the experience. The soundtrack and effects, again, appear to have been pulled directly from the original game. There's a decent variety of worms voices, but I think they are all the same as I remember from the PC game. It would have been nice to throw in a few more modern voices in here. It's been over a decade since these were recorded, and these worms are still saying the same phrases, such as "Dan Marino class." Isn't he the guy in the Nutrisystem ads?

Gameplay

Gameplay is one area that has been changed to fit the touch-screen environment. It works well, for the most part. Touching either side of the screen makes the worm walk, tapping makes him jump, and double-tapping makes him backflip. Somtimes, the detection of these three gets misinterpreted, occasionally with disastrous results for the worm. The most difficult manuever is certainly using the Ninja rope, which requires the use of on-screen arrows, often which don't align with the rope, meaning you have to press an arrow pointing away from where you want to go. It's confusing at first.

Gameplay options are limited in this release. You can play a random single-player game or work your way through a series of challenges. (fixed single-player games of increasing difficultly) There is multiplayer, but it's pass-and-play only, which is a major disappointment for a game on a network-connected device like the iPad. Playing over the internet or at least between two iPads in the same room seems like it should be there. This would have been pretty easy for the developers to implement.

Is it Fun?

Despite the fact that this is a retread, I still find the game fun after all these years. Firing the bazooka perfectly into the wind to reach an enemy behind an obstacle is still exciting, and the challenges are difficult enough to hold interest. You can replay this game a lot without getting tired of it, with the exception of the worm voices. They become tiresome after awhile. Thankfully, you can switch the voices of your own team, so at least you can rotate though them when you get tired of one set of voices. Overall, it's still a game I've played, at least a little, almost every day for the last three weeks. Worth the $5 I paid for it.