Knaddison.com

Ah, it’s that time again. Time to plan for summer concerts. A quick review of all the craptastic concert calendar sites shows me too many artists coming to town this summer. Who should I see?

• ColoradoInfo.com which is pretty disorganized…but seems decent.
• Westwords Concert Search which is just plain overwhelming
• DenverPost.com Summer Concert Calendar
• Boulder Daily Camera less complete, easier to digest, not Boulder focused (odd, that last bit)
• Denver Botanic Gardens Concerts which are, at least somewhat, already sold out!
• KBCO Concert List which should be awesome but, is kind of hard to navigate. What’s up with the website, guys, 3 clicks to get to the concert list?

Aaron is a relatively famous SEM/SEO and has obviously built a lot of sites. After he migrated his main site, SEOBook.com to Drupal and then even made a optimistic prediction about the future of Drupal I was curious about Aaron’s experiences and wanted to see what he had to say about the process and why he likes Drupal. He was kind enough to respond with these answers.

1. What initially motivated you to migrate seobook.com from MovableType to Drupal?

I originally used MovableType, but I wanted to create a site with premium content and permissions based access. The Drupal premium module facilitated that quite well. Plus my developer really liked Drupal and saw it as being extensible enough to do everything I wanted (integrate with our affiliate program, create a structured online training program , offer page by page control of premium or regular access, allow me to offer free snippets on some of the premium content, integrate with vBulletin forums, and integrate with the Paypal IPN).

2. What CMS (or mix of CMS) do you use as the basis for new projects?

Honestly most of my projects usually come in a couple waves. A small mini-site using flat files or server side incles, put up so I can start promoting it right away, and then as I decide to grow it out I typically switch off to Drupal or Wordpress on most sites. The really easy small and bloggy type projects get Wordpress, but Drupal is used on the more complex ones.

3. Was anything about Drupal particularly hard to get used to? Hard to migrate to? Anything particularly easy and beneficial?

I use a lot of firefox extensions. You might call me a power user. Yeah, that’s right, powerful.

Here is the list of my favorites. They are broken down into extensions that make Firefox better, those that make my general life better, things for “geeky stuff” and things for my life as a web developer/sysadmin/competitve webmaster. Yeah, I’m competitive. My stable of sites is better than yours!

Enhanced Firefox

• Cute Menus - humans recognize colors and images faster than words.
• Download Statusbar - I want the information compact, in an overview, and readily visible. I hate new windows.
• Flashblock - I hate flash. It’s amazing how much better the internet is without flash.
• Google Gears - Since I’m in places without internet pretty regularly, it’s nice to be able to get my Google feeds in an offline mode.
• PageStyle2Tab - again, humans recognize colors and images faster than words.
• Image Zoom - Firefox lets me zoom text, image zoom lets me zoom images. Duh.
• Locationbar2 - Prettify the URL bar. Also happens to make it safer by clearly identifying the domain and downplaying the importance of subdomains (i.e. the phisher phavorite ebay.com.shadysitestealpasswords.com/enter-username is clearly visible as “www.ebay.com” as a subdomain of “shadysitestealpasswords.com”. Whoohoo!

Enhanced Life

The coolest thing to stick on your blog this days (since the release of Drupal6) is a series of screencast videos about Drupal6. Below are some of the videos about Drupal6 and the HTML you need to embed them into your blog. This page should make it easy for you to help spread the word about the Drupal6: Just pick your favorite video (or 3) and post them to your blog.

Note that for the first three videos they are “cc-by-sa” which requires the attribution link be to MasteringDrupal.com while the third is by Addison Berry of Lullabot.

New Features in Drupal6

Whey even bother with an upgrade? Well, the New Features in Drupal6 video should help get you excited to upgrade.

Let’s say that you live in Denver and you have an old bike that you’re getting rid of. Or, let’s say that you don’t really like our petroleum-economy. Or, both! The solution is, frankly, quite simple: Derailer Bicycle Collective.

As you can read from their own website, the organization is based on the idea that

because bicycles are the most affordable, sustainable, efficient, healthy, environmentally friendly, FUN, and liberating form of transportation and recreation, the Derailer Bicycle Collective aims to teach and share knowledge about bikes and bike maintenance to anyone and everyone

Good enough for me!

What I couldn’t believe was the feeling at the place. It felt like I was in the middle of the revolution. Working poor who need bikes to live their lives, bicycle aficionados, and a handful of folks in between all getting together to build a better world one spoke at a time. Literally. Before the doors even opened there were at least 30 people chatting about what they were going to do that day to get themselves rolling on a bike or help someone else build a life rolling on a bike.

While the rest of this post looks back at 2007, I’d like to throw some attention to the security presentation at DrupalCon Boston.

2007 was a busy year for the Drupal Security Team. That’s not to say that Drupal is unsafe but that security requires a lot of work. The nature of the work makes it hard to communicate exactly what is going on. So here is an attempt to share some information about the past year for the security team.

Releases, Reports, and Discussion

The team issued 37 Security Announcements (SAs), representing more than 100 patches released. Each SA requires at least 1 patch and 2 reviews (review before the patch is made to find other security holes and a second review to ensure that the hole has actually been fixed). Most issues involve multiple patches and multiple reviews. Each also requires the SA to be written and reviewed, the patches to be committed, release nodes created, published, drafts copied from security.drupal.org to drupal.org, and flipping publish/status bits on a few nodes around our infrastructure. All of that work was done 37 times last year or approximately once every 10 days. For comparison, 2006 totaled 32 SAs.

For each issue, there are more problems reported which turn out not to be issues. See Howto report a security issue and My Site Was Defaced (“hacked”) What Should I do Now? for more information about how to report issues properly and with sufficient information. You can get a sense for the amount of discussion of security related topics and also of false reports based on the volume of emails to the internal mailing list:

Individual mails to the security team:

At the DrupalCon Barcelona one of the panels I lead was about (Dis)Organizing Local User Group Events. I still haven’t decided what to talk about at the upcoming Boston Drupalcon but I’m sure it will be Roxxorz. I’ve been roped pursuaded into discussing SEO in Drupal and Userpoints. Personally, I think Prediction Markets are interesting enough to merit their own presentation (now to see about getting them ready to demo).

Now, that plug out of the way, what I really want to discuss is a problem that faces most Drupal User Groups.

Local User Group Two Hump Problem

About 2 years ago I started reaching out to folks in Denver to start the Denver/Boulder Drupal User Group (DBUG for short). From the first meeting it seemed clear: the skill levels were grouped around two distinct and competing centers:

Lots of people were still trying to figure out how to pronounce Drupal - we knew them from the second they showed up “Is this the drooo-PAWL meeting?” And then there was a nother group at the other end, the “Yeah, I just patched the form.inc so I could thrombulate the widgetizer.” There were relatively few people in the middle or at either extreme.