Acquia Podcasts

Voices of Drupal Camp Alpe-Adria 2013

Acquia (Acquia) — Thu, 16 May 2013 00:03:50 +0000

Here are the highlights from a few of the conversations I had with attendees of the 2013 Drupal Camp Alpe-Adria, held in April in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The camp was a wild success and attracted a large, international crowd. I'll post a couple more interviews I did at this event in coming weeks.

Josef Dabernig

Dasjo is an active Drupalist from Austria. He was part of the Drupal Austria Roadshow in 2012 and was part of the podcast I recorded with them at the time.

He gave a great session about mapping with his favorite module – leaflet - in Ljubljana. Check out the video of the session.

I asked Josef about his plans as a DrupalCon Portland Drupal Association scolarship winner: "The people that are working on mapping projects or contributing to the mapping space in Drupal ... are going to have a mapping session at DrupalCon." Should Have Made a Left Turn at Albuquerque: Building Maps in Drupal will be a panel-style discussion so everyone can exchange their ideas, knowledge, and plans for creating interactive mapping applications with Drupal. I'm hoping to be there.

Iztok Smolic

You can find out more about the co-organiser of Drupal Camp Alpe-Adria 2013 on Drupal.org and his own website iztoksmolic.com.

When asked "Why did you organise this camp?" he replied, "It was obvious we needed to organise a Drupal Camp in Slovenia." Given that they planned on perhaps 80 people coming, and something like 135 turned up on the first day alone, I guess he was right!

The 2012 Drupal Business Days in Vienna made a lasting impression on Iztok. It was the first time "where I could talk to people about business, but in an open source way. It really surprised me that people are open about 'exposing' their business ideas with other people," the idea that Open Source businesspeople who are technically competitors can still be transparent, and share best practices and more, "That was mind-blowing for me."

Branislav Bujisic

Branislav was proudly wearing a very stylish Acquia Insight t-shirt on the first day of the camp. He got it for getting an A+ with Instant Insight for a site he recently built.

He came to Drupal 6 years ago because he needed accessibility in his CMS. He chose one of the only two table-less systems that were around at the time. I guess it was a goo choice, since he went on to say (with a huge grin on his face) "I did the project and now I live working on Drupal ... it's beautiful."

Didka Birova

Please welcome one of the newest members of the Drupal community, Didka Birova from Bulgaria, a student at the Faculty of Computer Science in Ljubljana, Slovenia. As you can hear in the podcast, her first exposure to Drupal seems to have been a positive one!

Voice of Drupal Camp Alpe-Adria 2013

Left to right, top to bottom: Iztok Smolic, Branislav Bujicic, jam, Didka Birova, Josef Dabernig, two "Drupal Camp Angels".

Ljubljana, Slovenia

alpe-adria-voices.mp3

Drupal Camp Scotland 2013 Double-Header

Acquia (Acquia) — Wed, 08 May 2013 17:36:51 +0000

This week's podcast features two Drupal Scots: Duncan Davidson (recorded live in a back alley right after Drupal Camp Scotland 2013) and Brian Ward (recorded via Skype, post-event). Duncan is the Scottish regional manager and UK Professional Services Manager for i-KOS and Brian is a developer at heehaw.digital in Edinburgh.

I apologise for the slight audio deficiencies that crop up in both recordings.

Meet Duncan Davidson

Duncan has been involved in running the Scottish Drupal Camps since the very first one in 2010, which he set up in just a couple of weeks when he found out Addison Berry was staying in Edinburgh at the time.

Duncan echoes how I feel about the Drupal community, "It crosses so many genres of people, their quirks and foibles; it brings a cross-section of humanity together that probably otherwise wouldn't be brought together."

I've been asking people recently about their favorite Drupal modules. This is the interview in which I decided I have to disqualify Views ... sorry, Earl. My excuse is that it is going into Drupal 8's core, so that takes it out of the running. In reality, it's because 7 times out of 10, it is people's first answer. :-)

Shout out: miiCard Drupal integration for online identity verification

Go check out the miiCard and its Drupal Module. It is a Drupal integration with the miiCard API that, according to its makers, lets users "prove their identity to the same level as a passport or driver's licence purely online". The miiCard team is looking for reviews and help to get the module ready for prime time.

Here's a quick intro and a place to find more information about the Mii Card: http://www.miicard.com/developers/libraries-components/drupal
Here's its project/sandbox page on Drupal.org: http://drupal.org/node/1974022
Here's a demo of it in action: http://drupal.demos.miicard.com/

Meet Brian Ward

Brian Ward from Hee-Haw Digital in Edinburgh came to Drupal only about a year ago, thanks to a new manager who, "Was quite adamant about showing us that Drupal was going to be the better way of doing things." He goes on to say that Drupal "is probably the most powerful CMS I've used so far. It's one of the biggest learning curves; I think everyone would agree, but it's easier to do things faster. You can do the complicated things faster than most CMS's. That makes it a good CMS to use in a digital agency."

Brian's favorite module plug actually goes to Commerce, because "it works out of the box and it is really easy to customise."

He also tells a funny story about now being so deep into Drupal that he has even configured a Wordpress site to work like Drupal, "And hey! It was a nice site! But it was the only way it [ed.: his site design] would ever happen. Wordpress is usually an absolute minefield ...".

duncan-n-brian_final.mp3

Project Management: "The Fortune Teller Must Die" meet Shannon Vettes

Acquia (Acquia) — Thu, 02 May 2013 16:38:25 +0000

Shannon Vettes is the Partner Manager at Commerce Guys in Paris; the company leading the way in making Drupal the platform of choice for eCommerce. Among other things, she has the rewarding job of coordinating adding modules and services to the Commerce Marketplace and getting integrators involved in the platform, too.

Talks on project management

I met her recently at Drupal Camp Scotland in Glasgow, where she was the keynote speaker.

She spoke about project management and called "The Fortune Teller must Die."

"The purpose of my talk is to get everyone to realise that project management is practice. It's something that you learn and build over time and not something that you use to predict everything that 'should' happen and control every little thing ... and then blame your poor development team who is trying to do it and failed (!) because you planned it properly or poorly ... Whatever happened, you don't blame them. I gave tips and techniques about doing project management the right way. It's a rinse and repeat job. You don't plan once and be done. I think that is the biggest misconception - or misuse! - of the entire business."

She also uses the funny neologism "firemanism" to describe project management on a bad day :-)

Slides!

The slides from both of her Drupal Camp Scotland '13 sessions are available online:

Shameless Plug!

Shannon wanted to plug three things:

Kickstart distribution

Shannon: "It will change the way you do web development with Commerce"

Commerce Guys: "Commerce Kickstart is Drupal Commerce packed with features that make it more complete, faster to launch, and easier to administer. And like Drupal Commerce itself, it's free, supported by an active developer community, and backed by Commerce Guys' unmatched expertise. Using Commerce Kickstart can take up to a month off of your development time."

Commerce Marketplace

Shannon: "It is loaded with awesome apps, with more being added all the time, and they are all free!"

Commerce Guys: "Everything to improve and strengthen your online store."

Turbo tickets

Shannon: "quick, cheap, reliable support for Commerce"

Robert Douglass announces Turbo Tickets

Commerce Guys: "When you submit a Turbo Ticket with a specific question about a Drupal Commerce-related development challenge, a Commerce Guy expert will provide an answer within two business days."

shannon_final.mp3

"Now I break other people's modules!" Meet Angie Byron, Part 2

Acquia (Acquia) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:54:49 +0000

In this episode – "Meet Angie Byron, Part 2: The Return of the Webchick" – we cover how Angie got into the Drupal project, how to hide under blankets, and how to break other people's modules.

In part one of this conversation, we talked about the state of Drupal 8 as of spring 2013, what's gone into it so far, what we can expect from the next major point release of Drupal and the fact that Angie has the best job description ever: "My job is to make Drupal awesome."

Newbies have it hard: a comic

Angie's first experience in the Drupal developer community was so intense, she felt she had to capture it in a drawing. If you can scroll all the way back to November 2007, you'll find this http://webchick.net/node/9. In typical webchick style, she's used this experience to learn, teach others, and improve the Drupal project over the years since then: "That experience taught me a lot about the culture of Open Source and being respectful of people's boundaries and it also taught me that we need to treat newbies better."

Thank you, Robert Douglass

Rob, thanks for getting Angie into the Google Summer of Code working on Drupal. I officially owe you a beer for this one. Here's the Quiz project still going strong, the module that Angie wrote under Robert's mentorship way back in 2005.

In case you didn't know

I recently sat down at Acquia HQ with my friend and colleague, Angela "webchick" Byron. She is a Drupal core co-maintainer, book author, Drupal Association board member, public speaker, equality advocate, and all-around powerhouse contributor. Angie works with Drupal Lead, Dries Buyteart, in the Office of the CTO (OCTO): "My job is to make Drupal awesome. We figure out together what's the biggest thing holding Drupal back right now, and whatever it is, we just tackle it."

angela_byron_apr13_part_2.mp3

"My job is to make Drupal awesome": meet Angie Byron - part 1

Acquia (Acquia) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:34:10 +0000

I recently sat down at Acquia HQ with my friend and colleague, Angela "webchick" Byron. She is a Drupal core co-maintainer, book author, Drupal Association board member, public speaker, equality advocate, and all-around powerhouse contributor. Angie works with Drupal Lead, Dries Buyteart, in the Acquia Office of the CTO (OCTO): "My job is to make Drupal awesome. We figure out together what's the biggest thing holding Drupal back right now, and whatever it is, we just tackle it."

This is part one of a two-part conversation. Here, we discuss the state of Drupal 8 as of spring 2013, what's gone into it so far, and what we can expect from the next major point release of Drupal.

We touch on many of the improvements and initiatives that are going to make Drupal 8 great:

SPARK: improvements in the authoring experience for "victims of Drupal" :-)
WSCCI - web services: "write once, publish to any channel"
MOBILE: including responsive front end- and admin-themes in core
HTML5: simplifying and future-friendlifying Drupal markup
The Twig templating framework: replacing PHP Template Engine in Drupal 8
Symfony integration: aka "proudly found elsewhere" and "getting off the island"
- Getting off the island: Larry Garfield challenges the Drupal community to learn from other projects and technologies
- "Symfony2 meets Drupal 8": Announcement by Fabien Potencier
- Drupal 8 and Symfony 2: notes by Dave Nugent from a talk by Fabien Potencier at DrupalCon Denver 2012
- Learning Symfony / Drupal 8: overview by chx
- You got Symfony in my Drupal 8!: Symfony components in Drupal 8, overview by Geoffrey Roberts at Cross(Functional)
- Drupal 8 and Symfony - All you need to rock!: Symfony training at DrupalCon in Portland 2013
D8MI - multilingual initiative: including install-to-finish in your native language!
VDC - Views in core: adding Drupal's most-used module, a powerful query-builder UI, to the core
CMI - configuration management: improving staging and deployment in Drupal 8
SCOTCH - blocks and layouts everywhere: unifying how pages are built in Drupal 8
We also worry if we've forgotten something ...

angela_byron_apr13_part_1.mp3

"In accessibility there is usability": meet Vincenzo Rubano

Acquia (Acquia) — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:57:20 +0000

If you can, I would like you to make a donation to this IndieGoGo campaign to help Vincenzo Rubano DrupalCon Portland. What's this all about? Read on.

FOSS is your license to make a difference

Lately, some people on the web have been making arguments like "It doesn't matter if a CMS is open source or proprietary. It's about features and service. I promise my (proprietary, license-fee charging) CMS will do what you need. Nobody cares about the rest." I call BS.

I say being free and open source is important. I say it matters that we are an open source project. I talk to a lot of people around the world explaining business reasons for using Drupal and Free and Open Source Software, but there are other reasons that are just as important.

Vincenzo is making a difference

This reminded me why: Vincenzo Rubano is an Italian high school student who has been blind since birth. He uses Drupal to run his own website, titengodocchio.it (translated, "Ti tengo d'occhio" means "I've got my eye on you."), a website to promote accessibility on the web and in software. On that website, he keeps a blacklist of other websites and software applications that are not accessible.

He doesn't leave it at just pointing fingers. He also writes reports on those sites and apps to help those developers who are willing to improve their software. How's that for motivation? How's that for making a positive difference in the world?

There's more: The welcome and support he received from the Drupal community quickly turned him into a contributor, too. He works with accessibility maintainer Mike Gifford testing patches and submitting bug reports. "I started looking at the issue queue for open accessibility issues and I decided to see if I could give a hand to the community, to contribute back for giving me this great product."

Could he do that with a proprietary CMS? I don't think so. The GPL is our license to make a difference. Every improvement to Drupal benefits everyone using Drupal for whatever reason to whatever end.

Why accessibility matters

Many of us in the Drupal community support accessibility for pragmatic and idealistic reasons. Accessibility helps win us government and other contracts. It underscores our commitment to inclusiveness, transparency, and information freedom. Vincenzo has a more compelling argument:

I think that every website, every program, or any content that is not accessible to blind users is just a discrimination. This is the reason why I started my website; to help to fix this problem and stop this discrimination.

Decide for yourself – Help if you can

Listen to this young man yourself in this podcast. If the 19-year-old high-school senior and accessibility activist can be with us in Portland, I believe not only that he will benefit greatly from the experience, but also that Drupal and the web will, too. His fundraising project is off to a good start, but let's get him over the finish line.

Make a donation at IndieGoGo. I already have.

Thank you.

vincenzo_rubano_portland.mp3

Drupal UX and design ninja Matt Edmunds

Acquia (Acquia) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:38:16 +0000

Matt Edmunds, UX Interaction Designer at Acquia, talks about his 9+ years of working with Drupal ... since version 4.3! This gave us the chance to reminisce about the days when we felt we could keep an eye on roughly the whole project on any given day or week. This was probably not truly the case back then and it certainly isn't now.

His fine art background led him to theming in Drupal. As his art training led him into design, it also created a natural path to User Experience work, aka "UX". Today, he spends a lot of his time simplifying, unifying, and clarifying Drupal interfaces and workflows for the SMB and enterprize versions of Drupal Gardens. A lot of his work flows back into cooperation with Drupal community module maintainers and patches on Drupal.org.

What Drupal Gardens really needs

While the Speak Lol Cats Module has exactly zero bugs in its issue queue, I think my hopes for getting it into the Drupal Gardens codebase are going to go unfulfilled.

Matt is Old Skool

I checked Matt's username, "tinycg", on Drupal.org and he has indeed been around a while. He is d.o user 15024 – I bow down to your Drupal-Ninjaness, Matt!

Video evidence

This also really happened.

output_1-2.mp3

Kyle Browning on the open-sourced Drupal Create iOS app

Acquia (Acquia) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 18:33:38 +0000

Kyle Browning, the Director of Mobile at WorkHabit, talks about developing for Drupal as a mobile platform and the open-sourcing of the new Drupal Create app for iOS.

The evolution of mobile + Drupal

Kyle describes his work as "handling the communication from a mobile phone to a website," and talks about the need for mobile-capable websites and apps that has developed since 2010. The Drupal Create app builds on Kyle's work building the Drupal iOS Software Development Kit and the rewrite of Drupal's Services module before that. "I wanted to focus on making sure that the Drupal community had this as an option; to be able to communicate to their website from their phone."

A dynamic app for a dynamic platform

Drupal Create lets you post content, handles your session data, but it does much more, too. Kyle explains, "You can dynamically change what content you can create from your app, via configuration on your Drupal site. You can reorder your forms, just like you do with the regular Forms API ... Since Drupal is such a dynamic platform, we wanted to make the app listen to the website and 'take note' of how how these forms are built and things like that."

Fly! Be free! Open-sourcing the code

The Drupal Create codebase is licensed under the MIT License, not the GPL as we said in the podcast audio. The MIT license is more permissive still than the GPL, but also compatible with it.

Open sourcing the full Objective-C source code for Drupal Create on GitHub not only puts the code out there for other developers to use and improve on, it can also help people learn how to do their own mobile development. "It'll be great to see what features people in the community add. It'll be great to see what things they hated that I did ... It's going to be really fun to hear from the community what they think about it." At WorkHabit, "we really care about Drupal and we want to give the tools to the community so it can foster innovation inside of itself."

Moshe Weizman, Acquia's Director of Research and Development, and manager of the Drupal Create project underscores that sentiment this way, "We want people to take it and do anything they want to with it." Moshe didn't actually say, "Fly! Be free!" but I pictured him doing so and the image stuck with me.

Acquia's official press release puts it pretty well, too, saying the release of a fully functional mobile-communication codebase "is kick-starting development of mobile content publishing apps for Drupal."

Downloads

Drupal Create codebase: http://github.com/acquia/drupal-create
Drupal iOS SDK: http://github.com/workhabitinc/drupal-ios-sdk
Drupal Gardens iOS app (based on the Drupal Create codebase): http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drupal-gardens/id561249662?mt=8

ios_app_release_kyle_browning.mp3

Meet Erica Ligeski: Drupal training means jobs

Acquia (Acquia) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 19:37:49 +0000

Erica Ligeski, Marketing Engineer on the Acquia.com website is another of the many Drupalists with a non-technical background. Her path took her from performance and dance, to arts management, to total geekery! Just like me, at some point along the way she needed a website for an arts project and fell in love with Drupal. The rest is history.

Acquia U

Erica was one of the very successful first group put through the Acquia U Drupal training program. "Successful" in this case means that all the trainees were hired as full-time Acquians following the course.

More about Acquia U:

Module shout out: ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A

Erica's favorite Drupal module is the Konami Code Module, which adds secret Easter eggs to Drupal websites, just like the one the Konami company added to many of its video game releases.

Drupal Training Resources

If you'd like to know more about this Drupal thing or up your game, here's a few resources that can help:

training.acquia.com lists Acquia's own training courses.
Don't miss Hello Drupal!, an introductory Drupal course free for anyone to download and use!
buildamodule.com offers well-structured, task-oriented, video-based Drupal training from beginning concepts through to advanced coding in Drupal.
drupalize.me is another excellent video-based Drupal resource, containing hours of material covering every aspect of Drupal development.

Free trials of buildamodule.com and drupalize.me are available as part of some Acquia Network Subscriptions.

erica_ligeski_final.mp3

What is Drupal? 4 answers ... and more to come!

Acquia (Acquia) — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 23:18:09 +0000

New shows, new gear

The Acquia podcast crew has been hanging out at HQ in Burlington, Massachusetts this week recording a bunch of new material. The newest member of our team is the appropriately named Deadkitten wind protector by Røde microphones. I can't think of a better one for Drupal podcasts!

New release schedule: Welcome to Wednesday

We're moving our weekly podcast releases to Wednesdays, but we didn't want to leave you hanging this weekend. We have a bunch of great stuff coming your way in the next months, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, here's a few folks at Acquia answering the question, "What is Drupal?"

Thanks Erica Ligeski, Angie Byron, Tim Hilliard, and Kevin Hankens for helping out this week!

No Drupal core was hacked during the making of this podcast.

what_is_drupal_teaser.mp3

Opera: A proprietary software company doing open source right

Acquia (Acquia) — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 16:40:27 +0000

I also thought of calling this episode of our Four Freedoms podcast series "The interesting journey of a company producing proprietary software being involved in an open source project," ... not so catchy. Or maybe "Why business and openness do not have to be enemies." The point is that on February 12, 2013, Opera Software announced that it was dropping its own, proprietary rendering engine in favour of the open source WebKit engine. I wanted to know more about that decision and the consequences going forward. What I discovered is a company with a commitment to open standards, knowledge sharing, liberal licensing, and a long-term history of actions to back those claims up.

This podcast is roughly half of a wide-ranging and interesting conversation I had with with Bruce Lawson and Andrea Bovens from Opera Software at the 2013 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This was recorded on February 26, 2013 on the trade show floor. The recording quality suffers somewhat from the background noise of the other 63,000 people who were at the MWC with us. I couldn't get them to be quiet.

About my guests

Bruce Lawson is in the Developer Relations Department and the Web Standards Department at Opera Software. His elevator pitch: "I evangelise using open standards on the web." Bruce co-wrote the very first book on HTML5 with Remy Sharp: Introducing HTML5, published by New Riders. Contact Bruce at brucel@opera.com. Follow him on Twitter @brucel.

Andreas Bovens, with Opera since 2007. QA Engineer, then Web Evangelist. Since 2009, Group Leader Developer Relations, also Web Standards Group and Product Manager for Opera extensions. You can contact Andreas at andreasb@opera.com. Follow him on Twitter @andreasbovens.

"The web isn't just a mechanism for looking at pictures of kittens"

While we were teasing out the interesting position Opera Software occupies as a proprietary, commercially successful software company that also makes large contributions to web standards, freely licensed online learning materials, and software libraries, Bruce pointed out that the Opera browser, despite being proprietary software, also affects social change and benefits people in developing countries around the world: "I believe that we affect social change using our proprietary engine and will continue to do so with open source. Tens of of millions of Opera users would have no access to the web without [Opera products] because they run on ancient feature phones that are the only things affordable in certain developing economies. The web isn't just a mechanism for looking at pictures of kittens. For many people, the web browser is access to a doctor or medical advice. It is access to the outside world in a closed-off regime. It is a school when you can't afford one. That to me is what we do. That is why I love working for Opera, because we literally bring that about for tens of millions of people every day."

Open wins the web

The old way people thought things would work was to "win the web" with proprietary formats, markup, and more. Internet Explorer and Netscape tried to do that in the early 2000s by "embracing, extending, and extinguishing" ... There was markup and functionality that was browser-specific, some websites only worked in a specific browser. Opera had to create its own, proprietary rendering engine, called "Presto", "to prove that we could be commercially successful using and evangelizing open web standards." This paved the way for using open source, standards compliant code and being commercially successful at the same time. Though it seems commonplace today – thanks to examples like Firefox, Google and many others beyond the world of web browsers (Red Hat, Acquia, Drupal shops galore) – it was a radical idea at the time. Today we can say 'open wins the web.'

"We took the decision that rather than paying engineers to maintain feature parity with other rendering engines," says Bruce, "It seemed to be to us a much better way of using our resources (and to motivate our engineers), to take this open source rendering engine [WebKit], which is great, and then divert those engineers to do really cool sh*t ... fascinating, innovative stuff, rather than constantly playing platform parity."

Giving back from day one

"The day we announced the change, February 13th [ed: fwiw the announcement is dated Feb. 12, 2013], we submitted a small but symbolic patch to WebKit." Bruce describes the patch as being in the "esoteric areas of CSS multi-column support." :-) "It was a small thing, but we wanted to send that message to the WebKit community that we are investing in it as well as using it."

Interestingly, the suggestion to move to WebKit came from engineering and was taken to management. The business case was obviously compelling enough in terms of efficiency and employee motivation that it was accepted and implemented. The old paradigm ("embrace, extend, extinguish") would have held that owning the code, the intellectual property of the rendering engine, would give competitive advantage and that losing control would be dangerous. Now, the ability to innovate faster and concentrate on differentiation wins the day.

Broad adoption is not a monoculture

Following the February 13th announcement, there was criticism that joining WebKit meant that Opera was fostering a monoculture on the web. I don't think those critics are familiar with how things work on the open source side of the fence. Bruce points out that you have, "Competitors working together on HTML5, CSS, [Webkit, Drupal,] sitting down and agreeing stuff that they all take and then ruthlessly compete with. When you have RIM, Nokia, Adobe, Apple, Google, Opera all working together [on WebKit], it's unlikely that there's going to be any one organisation controlling it."

This is a lot like Apple and Samsung cooperating on chip development, but offering competing smart phones. Another example is Sony Music and Warner Brothers Records both contributing and improving Drupal code (Fivestar Module is the classic example) that they need for musician websites, but still competing in their actual area of business: the music marketplace.

Interoperability is key

Bruce continues, "What is obvious to us now is that nobody uses just one browser. My wife uses IE at work, Safari on her iPhone, and Opera on the home computer. It is crazy if a website only works on one or two of those browsers. Not only is it crazy from a business perspective – knocking out a section of people who want to do business with you – but it is also obviously rubbish for a consumer. That was less apparent on 2004. It is obvious in 2013. HTML 5 was designed to guarantee interoperability between browsers. The rendering engine is commoditised."

"If there's a benefit to other people, why not make this stuff open?"

Here are a few of the ways Opera Software has contributed to making the web a better, more standardised place and led the way with open practices. I am in no way affiliated with Opera Software. This list is so long because I was deeply impressed by how Opera operates:

Opera Dragonfly, the Opera developer tools have always been open source.
Materials on dev.opera.com are under a Creative Commons license.
Opera has released Javascript libraries, and documentation under liberal licenses, often only asking for attribution.
HTML5Doctor.com was used by the W3C to work on and improve the HTML5 specification. Opera Software supported Bruce Lawson's work on it.
Webplatform.org ("Your web, documented."): Opera developed a web standards curriculum as an article series that now comprises more than 50 self-study modules. Since it was liberally licensed, it became part of webplatform.org. Opera Software employee Chris Mills gets 50% of his work time at Opera to work on webplatform.org with the W3C, Mozilla, Google and others.
Bruce Lawson also worked with Drupalists team to put together the Drupal HTML5 base theme, Boron (hurray!).

opera_webkit_mwc13.mp3

Robert Douglass talks Content, Community, and Commerce with Drupal

Acquia (Acquia) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 18:17:01 +0000

Robert Douglass, Director of Products at Commerce Guys, the originators and maintainers of Drupal Commerce sat down with me this week. We talked about how content, community, and commerce relate and help each other and why Drupal is the best platform to provide you with the digital elements of your users' experience of your online presence. Commerce Guys, in partnership with Acquia also has the support mechanisms that you need to succeed with Drupal and Commerce: from architecting your site, to training your developers, to the ongoing enterprise support that you would need for a serious store in the long term.

Why is Drupal Commerce so great?

"It's principally great because of the strengths of Drupal. You get the flexibility to create the web presence that you want to reflect your brand with a full-fledged commerce system behind that. You've got this cohesive experience between content, community, and commerce."

Content + Commerce

The majority of the early internet commerce experiences, "just resembled a catalog of products," but it was only revolutionary in terms of the access to goods the internet was adding to a classic shopping model. "But the modern web experience is much richer and people expect a lot more. The way they use the internet has evolved quite a bit. People spend a lot of their time online learning, expressing themselves, figuring out what their tastes are, looking at the world around them and interacting with it. The retailers online who are having success tie into that overall experience, the rich experience that people have with the online world and ways to build brand-recognition and buy in," to turn readers, visitors, or fans into customers.

It's not about 'I'm going to go shopping now, where's the next online store?' Retailers need to "take the customer on a journey that might introduce a concept or an idea (or a trend, fashion, look, or a device) ... in some way that really builds the case for its desirability ... and then offers the chance for retail." You can see this trend connecting the "real" world and the online world, too, with the advent of things like QR-codes and instant downloads and content delivered via bluetooth or near-field-communication from a poster to your smart phone. All of this goes towards creating comprehensive brand experiences and opening doors for people you hope will become your customers.

Community + Commerce

"When people say 'community' or 'social engagement', what they're really talking about is the ability for a person to communicate with others – your tastes, your activities, express who you are – and take this natural desire to define who we are and interact with our friends and to let the natural buying signals percolate out from that."

"If I check in somewhere, there can be two reasons I do that: either I want people to be able to find me or I want people to see where I've been so they can ponder my exquisite taste." :-)

Referring to Drupal's wide-ranging integration with practically every aspect of today's social web from Pinterest to the Open Graph and beyond, "Most eCommerce systems are still struggling with the concept of how they get to content management to begin with and don't have social functionalities built in. Drupal's got that built in. Drupal is inherently social. We've always been at the forefront of every new innovation on the web like that." If you are running Drupal and have the Open Graph enabled, it allows you to be in control of what check-ins to your locations, stores, or events look like on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and so on. "That's a really great example of how being able to control your content, and being able to tie into communities can aid the commerce experience."

What else do I get choosing Drupal Commerce?

"Drupal is an optimal collaboration platform, community platform, sharing platform ... People build all sorts of sites on Drupal that utilise user-generated content. There's a natural fit for user-generated content to lead to situations that can end in a purchase." Being in a virtual group of friends and peers getting excited about something (music, clothes, books,) is a more conducive environment. If the platform is able to facilitate this dialog and introduce the right product and the right moment during the conversation, there's a higher likelihood of it actually converting than by using intrusive methods. We're not talking about ad placement, "To even call it ads at that point would be to misrepresent the possibility. If you are able sell a CD or a book, and you are also able to facilitate a discussion about that CD or book. People can come either to buy the CD or discuss it or after they've discussed it, then they have the opportunity to buy it. This doesn't need to be a function of advertising; one leads to the other. For all of the things that people are interested in marketing, that's a win." That discussion on your site is great for search engine optimisation, too, and, "It helps consumers make informed, confident buying decisions that they'll be satisfied with in the long run, therefore building trust in you as a merchant."

Where do I get all this in one place?

The 'perfect storm' of content, community, and commerce coming together in an organic way, "You can only get that under one roof with very few systems and Drupal is the forerunner."

Commerce Guys, in partnership with Acquia has the support mechanisms that you need to succeed with Drupal and Commerce: from architecting your site, to training your developers, to the ongoing enterprise support that you would need for a serious store in the long term.

Commerce Guys

Learn more about Commerce Guys' three main products, that can help you bring this story to life:

The free and open source Commerce framework includes the Commerce Kickstart distribution you can install with a gorgeous example eCommerce store.
The Commerce Marketplace has the enabling technologies to help you succeed with Drupal Commerce including payment-, shipping-, marketing solutions
Commerce Guys' cloud hosting for Drupal Commerce solutions is nearing public beta.

robert_douglass_final.mp3

Rebroadcast: Three podcasts on Drupal and government

Acquia (Acquia) — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 14:21:44 +0000

Three great past podcasts this week on Drupal in government. The first (and the audio included directly here) is "Helping the Federal Government solve public sector problems with Drupal" with Acquian Bryan Hirsch, originally from May 2012. Check out the other two I have linked to for other interesting perspectives on this important subject.

How Governments Market Themselves on the Internet

The second is "How Governments Market Themselves on the Internet", originally from April 2012. Alex Gallafent of the BBC examines how countries go about creating their own government web sites to market themselves to their own citizens. Tom Erickson, CEO of Acquia, weights in on how open source software, such as Drupal, has allowed government web sites to be more open for their constituents.

Gov embraces Drupal for web needs

The third, from March 2011, is called Gov embraces Drupal for web needs and comes from Federal News Radio in the United States. Given the massive adoption of Drupal by governments and agencies around the world now, this is an interesting look at the state-of-play from a couple of years ago. The original blurb for the podcast shows just how things have changed in the last two years: "More government departments and agencies - including WhiteHouse.gov - are using content management system Drupal to build a web presence that aligns with their mission goals. When he took office, President Obama called for more openness and transparency in government; Drupal allows agencies to put information online and incorporate social functions like Twitter and Facebook integration, blogs and forums ..."

Listen to all three!

And check out the original podcast notes:

bryan_hirsch.mp3

Meet Heather James: Building Bridges to Drupal

Acquia (Acquia) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 21:38:50 +0000

Heather James, Acquia's Manager of Learning Services, has been in and around Drupal since the version 4 days. She says people new to Drupal "have an easier time at this stage coming to Drupal" than they did 6 years ago. Nonetheless, her early experiences learning how to use Drupal are still reflected by the questions people ask learning Drupal today. This, combined with her excitement about Drupal's potential and her background as an educator, motivated her to become a Drupal trainer. She is passionate about education ("When you're teaching, you're building a bridge from what people know to what they don't know.") and says about her job at Acquia, "I feel like I have a patron who helps me do the things I like to do, which is get out there and teach people."

This podcast was recorded in June, 2012, at the Oxford Drupal Education Camp.

Hello Drupal!

Heather is the proud maintainer of Hello Drupal!, a free course (download the course and trainer materials here!) designed to "help us communicate the basic concepts of Drupal to the type of person who would come to a Drupal camp without knowing anything". She can often be found giving this and other courses at Drupal community events. The group in Ireland who put it together in its initial form (including Heather), called it the "n00b nursery", but somehow that name didn't catch on.

The course is designed to be presented to mixed (skill, knowledge, and experience levels) groups of people interested in Drupal. Once they have done either the 90 minute or 3 hour version of the course, they're "qualified" to really benefit from other sessions at a Drupal Camp, for example. They will then know enough of the jargon and understand what is going on under Drupal's hood to take it from there.

Other Drupal training courses Acquia offers include "Drupal in a Day", "Drupal for Project Managers", "Drupal in a day for Developers" (for people familiar with other frameworks, languages, or systems to get started with Drupal), and more.

Heather writes (great stuff) about Drupal

Heather writes regularly about Drupal training, Drupal in education, building teams, and more. She's been writing a new, killer blog series recently called "Drupal How-To". Go check out these excellent posts:

Drupal How-To: Basics, Tweak the Defaults for Adding Images to Your Site
Drupal How-To: Get Inline Images on Your Drupal Site
Drupal How-To: Responsive or Adaptive Images
She's done a bunch more good blog posts, too.
Follow @hjames and @learningdrupal on Twitter to keep up with what Heather is up to.

Meet Mark Sonnabaum: Performance fanatic

Acquia (Acquia) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 20:14:12 +0000

Mark Sonnabaum, performance engineer at Acquia, comes to open source on a straighter path than some ... despite his university degree being in music composition! He was a systems administrator at the University of North Texas and chose Drupal – in the Drupal 4 era – as the replacement for a mish-mash of legacy, static systems at the university. Today, he is a contributor who has made significant improvements to how Drupal performs for all of us.

This interview was recorded in 2012. The recording was not made under ideal conditions. Apologies for the audio quality.

The road to contribution

If his job got him involved in building an early Drupal distribution – a rarity at the time, unlike today – multisite infrastructure and more, it was the community who then pulled him to becoming a (significant) contributor to Drupal. DrupalCon D.C. in 2009 opened his eyes to "how much there was to learn" and there's been no stopping him since then. Mark was a co-maintainer of the command-line Drupal toolkit, Drush, with Moshe Weizman. For those of you unfamiliar with the powers of Drush, go have a look: it saves you a lot of clicking around the Drupal UI to make configuration changes and more, putting real control of Drupal at your fingers on the command line, right where developers prefer to have it.

Performance, performance, performance

Mark's real passion as a developer is performance. As the maintainer of the Drupal XHProf Module, he is on a crusade for developers to include performance in their fundamental mindset and approach ... and have XHProf on at all times! XHProf is a PHP performance monitoring library developed by Facebook, which, according to Mark, should be a part of every developer's toolkit, just like a good debugger.

As a performance engineer, Mark works with other engineering teams at Acquia. His work on Enterprise Drupal Gardens led to performance improvements of 50% across the Drupal Gardens platform and him becoming a Drupal core contributor. Many of the performance problems he discovered, turned out to be core issues in Drupal. The fixes for those have turned into Drupal 7 and 8 core patches and improvements.

Working at Acquia

Mark says about working at Acquia, "I never lack interesting problems that need solving."

Credits, thank you's

Additional voiceovers provided by Francesca Ballarin, Victoria McGuire, and Oliver McGuire. Thank you!

mark_sonnabaum_final.mp3

Is PHP Secure? "It is if you do it right" says Anthony Ferrara

Acquia (Acquia) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 18:16:32 +0000

This is part three of a conversation I had with Anthony Ferrara – PHP core contributor, security expert, and Senior Architect at NBCUniversal – at the PHP BeNeLux '13 conference. In part one of our conversation, we talked about open source as an ethos and how it affects business. In part two, we talk about what the Four Freedoms mean to us as IT and web professionals, and the growing impact and influence of open source software.

Anthony Ferrara is a prominent member of the PHP community and creates many free tutorials and materials "to help people understand complex topics in simple ways". His blog, about PHP, security, performance and general web application development is at blog at http://blog.ircmaxell.com/ and his YouTube Channel is here: http://www.youtube.com/user/ircmaxell.

"PHP is as secure as any other major language"

"The first fundamental misconception about PHP is that people think PHP isn't secure. That is absolutely not true. PHP is as secure as any other major language. The problem with PHP is also the problem with every single other language: you can write insecure code in it," he underscores his point, "but that's a fundamental problem in every single programming language. The job of security is not up to the language. It's not up to the tools that you use. It's up to the people that use the tools. Even the best tools can be misused and lead to major security issues."

Rails, Java, Javascript and other languages have all had vulnerabilities over the years. "If you find a language that has not had a vulnerability of some shape or form, I'll show you a language that hasn't been used."

Developing securely

Every single developer need to think about security when writing code. This doesn't mean being a security expert, but everyone should be aware of security and best development practices.

Using many of the PHP frameworks and tools that have come out in the last few years, "It actually becomes quite easy to do security and not have to think about it." This can lead to its own problems, of course: "If you depend too much on those tools, those tools become weak points." Anthony suggests being pro-active with your tools and I'd add you should never trust them blindly. If you do, you lose one of the advantages of working in open source, the freedom to study and understand your code.

Fixing vulnerabilities in PHP and elsewhere

Anthony describes how newly discovered vulnerabilities get reported and handled in so-called "white hat" and "black hat" scenarios. The "white hat scenario" involves someone discovering a problem and reporting it responsibly (privately) to the security team, giving them a chance to fix it before releasing the technical details of the problem.

The dangerous scenario is when a vulnerability is discovered by the security team in the aftermath of a security breach of some kind. "You have a black hat, a 'bad guy' who finds that vulnerability and they start using it to attack sites and we learn about it after it's already being used in the real world. That's when you can tell the difference between proactive and reactive projects: The proactive project will be able to identify it quickly, get a fix, and get it out there and then communicate the level of severity and get the problem fixed in the real world. Rails, Drupal, and PHP core do this very well."

The security equation: everybody is part of it

The project maintainers or security team are only half of the equation. As Anthony puts it, "A project can fix a vulnerability within five minutes of it being reported and release a new version, but if nobody upgrades for six years, what good is it?" It comes down to cooperation between the project security teams, "who we trust to handle these issues appropriately and release the new versions," and the developers, system administrators, and users also have to "play their part", drop everything and fix the problem right now."

Open source gives you reason to trust

"I think that's the amazing thing about open source. There still needs to be a level of trust, but in open source, it's not blind trust. We trust people are going to do things the proper way, but when they do it, outside experts can also come in and look and ready and verify what has been done." Or they can say something still needs work, it's not fixed yet. "We can work [together] to get things done better. With proprietary software, they release a fix to a security issue and you update, you think everything's fine, except when five days later another black hat comes along and finds another vulnerability in their fix."

In an open source project, I can check a new security patch myself and even help to improve it if I find a problem with it. "You hear rhetoric from time to time like, 'Well anybody can read the source code so anyone can find a security vulnerability and therefore open source is less secure.' In reality, if that were true, that would mean security through obscurity" ... think of an ostrich with its head in the sand ... "is really good." Security through obscurity is not security at all. With open source software, you don't have to trust obscurity ... The beauty of it is that there are so many people out in the world who are doing it, that in practice, you tend to find that the number of critical vulnerabilities is reasonably low.

What makes for good security?

Anthony defines software security by how quickly a security team responds, is the response appropriate to the severity of the issue, and are the issue and fix communicated effectively.

"All software is going to have a vulnerability the same way all software is going to have a bug. The amount of money and work it would take to produce bug-free and vulnerability-free software ... borders on infinite."

Open source projects' issues, "tend not to be major breaches ... For the most part, the security issues we see in Ruby on Rails, Drupal, or PHP tend to be harder [he means difficult to actually exploit in the wild] and not as critical as the public may think."

Drupal: a study in good security practices

Anthony specifically praises the responsiveness and responsibility of the Drupal security team. Here is an infographic and article that explains how that team works in detail: Keeping Drupal Secure - How the world's largest open source CMS combines openness and security. You can see Anthony's description of the security fix process works reflected in this.

Security Related Resources:

Credits, thank you's

Music for this podcast by Podington Bear. Used by permission. Thank you!

Additional voiceovers provided by Campbell Vertesi, Francesca Ballarin, Victoria McGuire, and Oliver McGuire. Thank you!

php_myths_anthony_ferrara.mp3

Trickle-down & ripple-out: the 4 Freedoms with Anthony Ferrara

Acquia (Acquia) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 18:11:13 +0000

PHP core contributor, security expert, and Senior Architect at NBCUniversal, Anthony Ferrara and I sat down to talk at the PHP BeNeLux '13 conference. In part one of our conversation, we talked about open source as an ethos and how it affects business. In this part, we talk about what the Four Freedoms mean to us as IT and web professionals, but also the growing impact of open source software outside the world of software developers.

Anthony Ferrara is a prominent member of the PHP community and contributes a great deal of tutorials and materials "to help people understand complex topics in simple ways". His blog, about PHP, security, performance and general web application development is at blog at http://blog.ircmaxell.com/ and his YouTube Channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/ircmaxell.

Opportunities and trickle-down

"When I was working on the Joomla project, open source gave me the tools to advance myself, it allowed me to contribute back, to be mentored and to learn, to gain experience in a non-professional setting that I can directly apply to a professional setting. Without those freedoms, I would have never have gotten the experience to be nearly as valuable in a professional context as I am today."

"I can talk about how my life as a developer is improved by open source, how my tools are incredible because they're open source, but at the end of the day, I think it's really more about how the world benefits from open source. That's the most powerful concept: Yes, it helps tons of developers that Drupal is open source, but at the end of the day, developers aren't the ones using most of these sites." The general public doesn't know "or want to care" how sites are built. "They shouldn't even know the word Drupal, because what matters at the end of the day are the experiences that are built for them. Open source allows us to build better and faster experiences for the end user." Anthony says the benefits to developers of using open source "trickle down" to the end users in better experiences on the web.

The perception of freedom v. actual freedom

Open source software touches many people every day and most never realize it. You are likely to encounter a product of the Four Freedoms in one or more of the following kinds of systems today: GPS navigation systems, 'smart' phones, ATMs (bank 'cash machines'), network routers, entertainments systems, and much more.

"The sheer usefulness of open source" means that we can install different versions of the operating system on our phones if they run an open source OS. "Ten years ago, the mass public had zero idea that something like this was possible. Even today, most people don't know about Linux, but they know that they can jailbreak their iPhone. That is the perception of freedom when there isn't any. So when you go to platforms like Android, Firefox OS, [or Ubuntu], and you see these mobile phones, the Four Freedoms are making an impact on everybody's lives in a meaningful way. I think this is going to continue to grown in the lives of every day people.

Open source and innovation

Open sourcing innovations lets others recognize your good ideas, put them to good use, learn from them, and improve on them. Inspired by your idea, someone else might make something else new; "innovation begets innovation" as it were. "Amazing things happen because there are people putting in time and effort and then saying 'Do with this what you will.' Open source is saying 'I value my intellectual property, but I want people to benefit from it.' You can sell it, of course, that's a valid use case; but by sharing it, you're allowing other people to benefit and build upon it." When others build up on your ideas, you can often benefit from their improvements as much or or as they have benefitted from your contribution, too!

"The chances of me creating the next huge innovation are relatively small ... the next breakthrough, Web 3.0; the chances of me doing it by myself is almost nothing. But the chance of us as a community doing it, through sharing, through concepts and ideas, the seeds can start from anywhere. It is humbling to think that anybody can be a part of this."

Chris Hartjes, aka "The Grumpy Programmer" in his keynote speech at PHP BeNeLux '13 made the point that even scepticism, criticism, or presenting problems is helpful in open source since others can use that information to make improvements.

The Four Freedoms are a multiplier. They allow us to multiply our ideas by the thousands of people working with us in our open source projects.

Credits, thank you's

Music for this podcast by Podington Bear. Used by permission. Thank you!

Additional voiceovers provided by Campbell Vertesi, Francesca Ballarin, Victoria McGuire, and Oliver McGuire. Thank you!

anthony_ferrara_4f.mp3

Meet Anthony Ferrara: The only people who win are everybody.

Acquia (Acquia) — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 18:07:23 +0000

I met PHP core contributor and security expert Anthony Ferrara at the PHP BeNeLux '13 conference. He is a Senior Architect at NBCUniversal on a team that works a lot with Drupal. In this first part of a three-part interview, we sat down to talk about open source as an ethos and how it affects business. In the next two parts of our conversation, we talked about the consequences and practice of the Four Freedoms that define open source software, and the security of PHP as a programming language. I'll be releasing those soon and updating the links here, too.

Anthony is a prominent member of the PHP community and contributes a great deal of tutorials and materials "to help people understand complex topics in simple ways". His blog, about PHP, security, performance and general web application development is at http://blog.ircmaxell.com/ and his YouTube Channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/ircmaxell.

The slippery slope to open source

Like many open source contributors, Anthony got his first small hit of open source (helping a friend with a website, in his case), then went a little deeper (built his own website). The point of no return was probably when he figure out how to fix performance limits on his site and gave the code back to the open source project in question, Joomla. Once they saw his code, the platform's maintainers asked him to come in and help. "In about 6 months," explains Anthony, "I went from releasing my first bit of open source code to becoming a core contributor to a major open source platform." He worked on security, maintenance, and performance for the Joomla project for a few years. Antony has now been a PHP core contributor for roughly two years at this point, but also advises and contributes to other open source projects, including Drupal 8.

Experts are made not born

To make a meaningful contribution to an open source project, you don't need to be a "rockstar". Good ideas and honest efforts make a real difference. "There is so much work to be done. The people doing the bleeding-edge stuff don't usually have time to do other stuff. Even if you started with a platform yesterday, you can make meaningful contributions." Beyond code there is still so much to do: quality assurance, testing, bug reports and validating bug reports by reproducing the problems. "People underestimate how much of a help that all is," and the impact that kind of help can have on a project. It's not about being a star,"The people who are 'famous' weren't famous a year ago. The reason they got famous was because they went forth and put the effort in. They stood up and said: 'I'll do that'. They're not some complete genius who the community picked out and said, 'That's the guy we want to follow.' It's because they have put in that time, that effort, and they have earned that respect." Experts are made not born.

Open source and proprietary coexistence

"I use a variety of things from open source video editors to programming languages. I'm a huge supporter of Linux. Until recently, I only owned Linux computers. I recently had to adopt a Windows machine, but not out of choice ..." he says while making an inscrutable expression. "I am a huge believer in the open source movement, but I am also a believer in open source and proprietary living side-by-side. I am not a zealot; I am pragmatic. One example is large data. When you get to extremely large database sizes, it doesn't make sense for the open source community to spend time and effort trying to support that when there's maybe only a couple hundred users in the world who need that kind of scale. In niche markets, proprietary software can be a benefit to open source projects by alleviating some of the burden of edge case support."

Now that companies like Red Hat, Acquia, and Canonical offer commercial support for open source projects and "s long as the corporate backing and the open source project play nice together, the only people who win are everybody."

Building better with open source

The difference in approach between proprietary and open source software is highlighted by where the investment is made: "If you go with a proprietary product, you spend a large amount up front and then you have to use it [as is]. Whereas if you go with open source, you don't spend nearly as much up front, but you'll spend a little bit more over time [for ongoing work on the product], but that little bit more that you're spending is directly attributable back to you because you're making it do exactly what you need as opposed to changing what you need to [match] what the [proprietary] tool does."

ferrara_1-of-3.mp3

Meet Moshe Weitzman: Developer Tools, Product Development, Drupal History

Acquia (Acquia) — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 13:46:49 +0000

Moshe Weizman is Acquia's Director of Research and Development in the Office of the CTO. Over the years, he's built many of the development tools that have been instrumental in Drupal's growth and success. Now, alongside his ongoing contributions to Drupal itself, he works with Acquia's product teams from conception, through architecture and prototyping, to helping coordinate ongoing development.

Moshe is Drupal.org user number 23 and submitted his first patch to the Drupal project in October 2001, about nine months after it had been open sourced. He's taken his Drupal activities from a hobby, to a "nights and weekends" secondary income, to a full time occupation since 2007. Moshe joined Acquia in 2011. This interview was recorded in 2012.

Moshe's contributions to Drupal

"I had heard about open source, I had read about it in a magazine," explains Moshe, "and thought it was pretty neat. I looked at the Drupal files, got bold, and decided to change a string in there (a string of visible text), saved it, and reloaded the page. I had changed Drupal at that point! That was pretty exciting." He obviously got a taste for changing and improving Drupal if you look at a selection of the massive number of contributions he's made to the project over the years:

Maintainer of the Drush project, the excellent command line interface for Drupal developers.
Maintainer of the Devel Module, another useful Drupal developer tool.
Moshe created the original Organic Groups Module (for a children's pony show club website for Finnish National Television ... I'm not making this up.)
He started the Groups.Drupal.org website, Drupal's community- and special-interest group-hub.
While running Cyrve, a Drupal data-migration company, he was part of developing and open sourcing the Migrate Module, which helps anyone move content from other systems into Drupal.

moshe_final.mp3

Meet Erik Webb, the southern gentleman helping Drupal projects succeed

Acquia (Acquia) — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 17:24:26 +0000

Erik Webb – aka "Southern Gentleman" within his team – Senior Technical Consultant with Acquia's Professional Services group helps some of the "biggest Drupal users" in his job. In any given week, he might be doing anything from training people brand new to Drupal, to performance tuning and everything in between to make projects succeed. "I helped a Fortune 100 company move their entire web presence to Drupal." At this scale, Erik's job is about how to take Drupal to that next level and making it something that works for millions of people," day in and day out. "The Drupal community is really about trying to make an experience and make something that people want to come back to."

Deep roots in open source

Erik is a long term user of GNU Linux, with a sysadmin background, he's also Red Hat certified. Though he didn't know it when he set out on his road to Drupal, it was a series of logical steps that got him where he is today. "Being a good systems administrator, you know how to program, you know what languages look like, so you pick up PHP. Once you pick up PHP, you write some really ugly applications and you realise other people are doing this, too, so you pick up frameworks. I worked with Symfony and Code Igniter. Then you say, 'well a framework's great, but there's still so much I have to do," and you eventually reach Drupal. Now you can focus on the cool part of the website and you can let all the really basic stuff that you'd have to do all the time, you let Drupal take care of that for you so you can enjoy your job more.

Contributing to Drupal

Since Erik finds himself in many different parts of the United States in the curse of his job, he uses any opportunity to go to local Drupal user groups, meet ups, and events like Drupal Camps: LA, Georgia, Boston, North Carolina and more. "That's what sets the Drupal community apart. You can be out there and sharing source code – and that's fantastic – but at a certain point it's really great to see people, talk to them about what they're doing with Drupal. I don't think there's any better feeling than seeing someone at a Drupal Camp as a new Drupalist and then a year and a half later you see them again and they say, 'Hey, I've been working on this really cool project!' To see all that grow, that's what makes community to me. Not the size or the content, but how we bring people into it and how we mature those people.

"One of the things I love most about the travel in my job is that I get to see so many different people. Being able to connect them, creating a sort of mesh-network, I can bring all these people together. Once they're sharing, then they know someone else, and they can share experiences. I fee like being at Acquia and having the luxury to travel and see all these cities and people, we're in a unique position to be at the center of this kind of matchmaking.

This interview was recorded in 2012.

erik_webb_final.mp3

Acquia Podcasts

Voices of Drupal Camp Alpe-Adria 2013

Josef Dabernig

Iztok Smolic

Branislav Bujisic

Didka Birova

Voice of Drupal Camp Alpe-Adria 2013

Drupal Camp Scotland 2013 Double-Header

Meet Duncan Davidson

Shout out: miiCard Drupal integration for online identity verification

Meet Brian Ward

Project Management: "The Fortune Teller Must Die" meet Shannon Vettes

Talks on project management

Slides!

Shameless Plug!

Kickstart distribution

Commerce Marketplace

Turbo tickets

"Now I break other people's modules!" Meet Angie Byron, Part 2

Newbies have it hard: a comic

Thank you, Robert Douglass

In case you didn't know

"My job is to make Drupal awesome": meet Angie Byron - part 1

"In accessibility there is usability": meet Vincenzo Rubano

FOSS is your license to make a difference

Vincenzo is making a difference

Why accessibility matters

Decide for yourself – Help if you can

Drupal UX and design ninja Matt Edmunds

What Drupal Gardens really needs

Matt is Old Skool

Video evidence

Kyle Browning on the open-sourced Drupal Create iOS app

The evolution of mobile + Drupal

A dynamic app for a dynamic platform

Fly! Be free! Open-sourcing the code

Downloads

Meet Erica Ligeski: Drupal training means jobs

Acquia U

Module shout out: ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A

Drupal Training Resources

What is Drupal? 4 answers ... and more to come!

New shows, new gear

New release schedule: Welcome to Wednesday

Opera: A proprietary software company doing open source right

About my guests

"The web isn't just a mechanism for looking at pictures of kittens"

Open wins the web

Giving back from day one

Broad adoption is not a monoculture

Interoperability is key

"If there's a benefit to other people, why not make this stuff open?"

Robert Douglass talks Content, Community, and Commerce with Drupal

Why is Drupal Commerce so great?

Content + Commerce

Community + Commerce

What else do I get choosing Drupal Commerce?

Where do I get all this in one place?

Commerce Guys

Rebroadcast: Three podcasts on Drupal and government

How Governments Market Themselves on the Internet

Gov embraces Drupal for web needs

Listen to all three!

Meet Heather James: Building Bridges to Drupal

Hello Drupal!

Heather writes (great stuff) about Drupal

Links

Credits, thank you's

Meet Mark Sonnabaum: Performance fanatic

The road to contribution

Performance, performance, performance

Working at Acquia

Credits, thank you's

Is PHP Secure? "It is if you do it right" says Anthony Ferrara

"PHP is as secure as any other major language"

Developing securely

Fixing vulnerabilities in PHP and elsewhere

The security equation: everybody is part of it

Open source gives you reason to trust

What makes for good security?