Symbiotix

On Fear, Elephants and Letting Go

jpoesen — Sun, 01 May 2011 23:38:00 +0000

The Voice Box
I was an aggressive fat little kid who stuttered and didn't have many friends. Every day at school I was afraid to open my mouth because it would invariably lead to being laughed at.

In French class when everyone had to take turns to read a sentence out loud, I would start calculating when it would be my turn, frantically trying to figure out how to get the damn phrase out of my throat. I'd be blushing and sweating when my time had come and I'd be exhausted when it was all over.

Don't even get me started about oral presentations.

The Blob
I have this thing. Maybe it's a condition. Maybe it's just part of life. I get scared when a big blob of undefined work heads my way. I do love attacking big, new and unknown problem sets, but sometimes stuff just overwhelms me. Threatens to shut me down.

I've messed up things in the past because of that. Totally blew a big Drupal project once, when I found myself too paralyzed to really move forward and too stubborn to ask for help. In the end it cost me much more than a good relationship with a very interesting research institution, but that's a story for another day. Maybe.

Today I'm finding myself at the start of a massive project. Exactly the type of project I wanted to work on when I came to Africa. The kind of project where your work has the potential to change something at the end of the day, to create something new and meaningful. Loads and loads of man days are foreseen; almost all of it as of yet undefined.

Holy. Crap.

The Intern
There's someone I haven't met many times in real life, but whom I consider a good friend. He was recently offered an internship in an awesome team at a rather well-known social network. He's obviously over the moon, but I'm sure pretty soon he'll be entering the oh-my-god-what-have-I-gotten-myself-into stage and start sweating.

The Exchange Student from Cameroon
I have this buddy Big Guy. I don't get to see him too often, with me living in Senegal and all, but that makes our time together all the more special. He's a month younger but he's always been a decade smarter than me. He was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. If he's not scared, I'm plenty scared for the both of us.

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The Lassitude
Years of speech therapy only put band aids on the wound. Nothing really changed until one day when I was 15 or so I saw an interview with a guy whose stutter was way worse than mine. Yet of all things he could have been in life, he was a public speaker. A public stutterer.

Here's what he said: if *you* are bothered by your stuttering and fear the reactions of the world, the world is going to react to your fear. If you are truly indifferent to your stuttering, no-one is going to care.

It took a few weeks to really sink in, but when it did, my stutter as good as disappeared.

In my early twenties I started working as a technical help desk operator, and a few years later I started publicly speaking - and stuttering - at DrupalCamps and DrupalCons. Thing is, most of the people I know have probably not even noticed I still occasionally stutter. And if they did notice, they didn't care. Because I didn't.

The Elephant and the Hydra
A former manager of mine once gave me a solid piece of advice. I didn't really get how valuable it was until much later. He told me "the only way to eat a whole elephant is steak by steak".

I've come to realize a blob is not a hydra. It does not sprout other blobs when you attack it.

We fear what we don't know. The way to defeat a blob is by describing it. By defining what it is. By pulling it from the realm of the unknown into the realm of the known. By breaking it into little pieces and killing it slowly, softly.

The Exchange Student Revisited
I haven't seen my buddy since he told me about his diagnosis. I'm still angry and scared and frustrated.

I'm not really sure how he's doing. He doesn't talk all that much. Real Men and all that.

He's hanging in there though, leading his life, getting promoted, doing an awesome job transitioning from a junior java developer to a project manager and team leader.

I think he stopped caring a little and started munching on some elephant filet.

Local Drupal Communities in (West) Africa: one step at a time

jpoesen — Sun, 23 May 2010 11:21:22 +0000

Just got back from the IDLELO conference in Ghana last week. I've posted my wrap-up on the Bantalabs blog, so head over there for more info.

There are some more Drupal centric thoughts I wanted to share here: more African sites are running Drupal than we realize, but because there is no African Drupal Community to speak of, all this work, these references and experiences are largely invisible. We need more visibility, we need more advocates and we need more community.

The South African Drupal Community is doing very well - I'd love to tap into them and see what we can achieve together.

If you're working with Drupal somewhere in Africa, or thinking about working with Drupal, get in touch. Really, do get in touch. It only takes a few people per country to take the whole continent by storm. Let's start small, though. Let's cover our bases, think this through and make sure we pool our resources as much as possible.

As the Wolof proverb states: Only step by step can you get a monkey out of the bushes.

Mobile Application Development with Drupal

jpoesen — Mon, 10 May 2010 12:18:41 +0000

Date:

May 20, 2010

Location:

Accra, Ghana

Event:

IDLELO

Introduction to Drupal 6, CCK and views

jpoesen — Mon, 10 May 2010 12:15:43 +0000

Date:

March 20, 2010

Location:

Dakar, Senegal

Event:

DakarLUG

Drupal.org Redesign Sprint II

jpoesen — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:07:23 +0000

Date:

February 9, 2009

Location:

Paris, France

URL:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/18519

Local project organizer

On Drupal, Open Source and Moving to West Africa

jpoesen — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 13:41:52 +0000

As some of you already know my time as project lead and trainer at af83 came to an end last December. Their Drupal team will continue to be lead by the more than capable Damien Tournoud (@damz), one of the most prolific core Drupal contributors out there.

During my time in Paris I had a blast co-organizing DrupalCon Paris, helping grow the French community and being part of the team that founded l'association Drupal France et Francophonie, the French Drupal Association.

It's made me realize that community work is what makes me get up in the morning: the connecting, the building, the learning. It's awesome to witness and a privilege to take part in.

It won't come too much as a surprise then, that we decided to move to Senegal (West Africa) to continue the work started in Paris: to support the use and development of open source software (and Drupal in particular, of course) throughout West Africa.

This work will be funded through three channels:

Edulogos vzw, a Belgian educational non-profit my wife and I have been running since 2007
A Senegalese non-profit that's being set up as we speak
Bantalabs, a social profit start-up with offices in Paris and Saint-Louis (Senegal)

I'm particularly happy we can finally unveil Bantalabs. Co-founder Simon Elliott and I have been preparing this venture for months - defining the core goals, fleshing out the business plan, connecting with higher education institutions and building the site.

We're really excited about this new chapter in our lives. We have high hopes and ambitious plans. We're going to have a lot of fun.

Feel free to follow us on twitter: @bantalabs, @mrsimonelliott, @jpoesen.

FOSDEM 2010 Drupal Dev Room - Call for Talks

jpoesen — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 23:55:23 +0000

Yes, it’s that time of year again: Brussels is gearing up for the annual Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting. This year Boris Doesborg managed to secure a Drupal Dev Room, so we’re celebrating the Drupal Dev Room’s third Birthday. Yay!

To the point: the Call for Talks ends January 23rd, so if you’ve always dreamed of talking about Drupal in front of the geekiest, Europeanest audience ever, you know what to do!

Not quite the talking type but feel like contributing none the less? Then the Views 7 beta themed Drupal Code Sprint is where you want to be.

A huge shout out to Boris for taking the lead in organizing the Drupal Dev Room this year, and to chx for initiating the code sprint!

Wherein We Muse Over a Case Study of a One Day Wordpress-to-Drupal Conversion

jpoesen — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 00:52:37 +0000

A sad tale of neglect

We’ve been running a small educational non-profit – Edulogos – for over three years now. Until recently edulogos.org has been little more than a Wordpress blog with a few extra pages and an off the shelf theme. It was one of the first sites we installed on our then brand spanking new Dreamhost account and we were happy with the results.

Over time however, teaching and project work got in the way of publishing much content. Maintenance was neglected and the limits and drawbacks of Dreamhost became a detractor for giving the site the love it deserved.

We decided it was high time to redesign the site and move it over to Drupal to give it room to grow. Like repotting a plant. “Liefde en substral”, as they used to say in our home country.

The road to Drupal

Knowing how data migrations are seldom without incident, we prepared for the worst. Surprisingly the migration was over before we got to our second cup of coffee that morning. The rest of the day was spent selecting and tweaking a theme and setting up some notification functionality.

We kept the new theme and functionality as simple as possible and used only a small number of tools and contributed modules:

Tools used:

git and Github (version control and deployment)
wordpress_import (Drupal module)

drush (command line Drupal toolkit)

Contributed Drupal modules:

admin_menu

Theme:

summertime

Module download and installation

Using Drush is not required, strictly speaking, but do yourself a favor and get to know it. Drush is a command line tool that lets you do a variety of very interesting things much faster than doing them click by click through your file manager and Drupal administration interface.

In this case, we used Drush to download and install Drupal 6.15 and the modules and theme listed above:

cd /var/www
mkdir edu
cd edu
drush dl drupal 
cd drupal-6.15
drush dl trackback pathauto rules mollom twitter views admin_menu wordpress_import summertime
drush enable trackback pathauto rules mollom twitter views admin_menu wordpress_import

Again there’s nothing stopping you from downloading individual .tar.gz files, unpacking them, moving them to sites/all/modules and cleaning up the archive files. You’ve got to admit though, that drush dl and drush enable are a pretty sweet deal.

Migration and site construction, step by step

1. Export from Wordpress
As per the wordpress_import instructions, we went into our Wordpress admin interface, exported our content into an xml-file and saved it locally.

2 Import into Drupal
We made sure Wordpress_import and its dependency Trackback were enabled and made our life a little easier by installing Admin_menu – we’re suckers for dropdown menus.

Wordpress_import takes a previously generated Wordpress export file and imports content into nodes, comments into, well, comments and categories into taxonomy terms. Users are created on the fly too, if they don’t already exist.

Knowing how tricky data migrations can be, we were pleased the data import went flawlessly. Granted, the old Edulogos site only contained a good hundred content items, one user and maybe a dozen categories, but still. Kudos to Yann Rocq for a tool that works as advertised.

3. User friendly and search engine friendly URLs
We enabled Pathauto so our blog posts and other content items get nice and tidy urls like /blog/monday-pancake-day instead of /node/42.

4. Avoiding comment spam
Though captchas are an ok solution, we really like the way Mollom attacks the problem. Mollom is a free anti-spam service that will analyze the contents of comments and present the user with a captcha if and when it thinks a message might be spam.

The only thing we needed to do here is create an account at http://mollom.com, generate a set of API keys, enable the mollom module in our Edulogos site, enter the keys and select which forms we want Mollom to protect. In our case it made sense to let Mollom protect the comment and contact forms.

5. Automatic comment notifications
Wouldn’t it be nice if content authors would be notified of new comments? We thought so too. Enter Rules, a marvelous module that allows you to set up specific actions that need to be performed automatically under certain conditions when certain events (triggers) occur.

We set our notification rule up like this:

trigger: after publishing a comment
condition: no specific condition

action: send mail to author of content that received the comment

Action configuration screenshots:

6. Twitter integration
We wanted to promote our twitter account (twitter.com/edulogos_vzw) and show our latest tweets in the sidebar. Walkah’s Twitter module does exactly that. Actually it does much more than we need, so we know there’s some nice functionality waiting for us when we’re ready.

We just wanted to display the tweets of one single twitter account in the sidebar. We entered our twitter credentials and then went to the block administration screen, only to find no twitter related blocks for us to use. After a couple rounds of clearing the cache, running cron and refilling our coffee mugs, inspiration hit us and we turned on the Views module.

Lo and behold, a ‘user tweets’ and ‘all tweets’ block magically appeared. We put the ‘all tweets’ block in the right sidebar, and Bob’s your uncle.

Making her look all nice and purdy

In terms of visual appearance we weren’t going for high originality. We just wanted a nice and clean, professional yet simple design. The Summertime theme fit our needs nicely and we spent the rest of the afternoon tweaking the css, playing around with font sizes and making the Twitter block look nice.

Taking her out and showing her to the world

Everyone has their own way of deploying a site, whether it’s through FTP, SSH, a version control mechanism or a homegrown script. We used git, a distributed version control mechanism, together with Github, a git repository hosting service. How we fit git and Github into our workflow is a story for another day.

A cap, a cap, our kingdom for a recap

We’re very pleased with how we migrated our old Wordpress site to Drupal, picked and customized a new design and added new functionality – all within a single day and 8 to 10 coffees.

We were able to keep the number of contributed modules to a minimum and didn’t even make a view for the front page: since we had only one content type, we just use the default front page (http://example.com/node). We’ll have a lot less spam comments by using Mollom and we’ll be quicker to respond to comments now we have automatic notifications in place.

Finally, the code is now under source control and we have a script in place to deploy from Github and restore an hour-old database backup whenever we want, but more on that later.

If you’ve got any short-but-sweet redesign/redeployment stories to share, leave a comment!

Theming in Drupal 5

jpoesen — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:28:11 +0000

Date:

August 1, 2007

Location:

Leuven, Belgium

Event:

Client training

CCK, Views, Module Development

jpoesen — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:27:30 +0000

Date:

October 1, 2007

Location:

Brussels, Belgium

Event:

Client training