Drupal

Zack of CivicSpace made two posts recently. One about what the community needs to do (or if anything needs to be done) to ensure the long term development of Drupal Core. The other is about the costs of forking and how consultants should estimate a line item for "roll changes back into the core" into their bids. The goal on the second one is long term supportability for the client, and partially ensuring core gets the mods back even from all the "busy" consultants in the world.

In a post today, Chris Blizzard discusses the way "IT" workers are viewed and asks why open source contributors exist in the places where they exist (and don't where they don't).

I've thought about this a bit and my own personal take on this based upon some maps I've seen like the map of contributors/mentors in the Google Summer of Code project (which is a really neat project if you hadn't heard of it). Basically, if you look at the countries with large numbers of participants you'll notice that the countries are more likely to have participants based upon 1) the wealth of the country 2) the "tech focus" of the country 3) relative level of "safety net" policies in the country. There are a few outliers and that's understandable in any sampling.

I've had fun with stupid spam in the past, but this was basically just as good in a different way.

I just got a call from an aplus.net autodialer - they didn't actually talk to me, just played me a voice mail. I rarely go over on minutes, so I wasn't too worried about the time, but it's my cell phone for crying out loud.

Now, she was offering me website development and hosting solutions, which is great, because I do that myself. So, this is a company that is active, relatively large, and probably offers competitive rates - a competitor worth investigating. And, what do I find? They charge more money than I do for far less quality or service. Sweet. Thanks, aplus, for the phone call so that I know a good place to point my customers before I give them better service, better websites, better hosting, and for less money.

UPDATE: A couple months after this call I got a call from a live human at aplus who asked if I was interested in their services. I said, "no thanks, I provide basically all the services that you do for less money." She said "ok...well...do you do search optimization" which I said, "well, yes, I do but I don't believe that 'optimization' can be an add on product and instead should be built into the site from the beginning." Her response was that they would "guarantee first page placement in the results without modifying my sites" which I can only imagine would land me in one of Matt Cutt's posts about people who are suckered into buying SEO in a way that just doesn't work. No thanks, guys.

Project re-Duplication? Well that's a crazy idea that people would not only duplicate a project, but re-duplicate on top of that. Except that it happens all the freaking time!

Project Cooperation vs. Competition

Zack from CivicSpaceLabs has done a comparison of Moodle and Sakai.

Either one of those projects could/should easily be integrated/absorbed into other Content Management Frameworks which is his kind of his point today.

Already done with your Drupal Install

This has been covered in plenty of places, so I won't rehash it. The canonical review of installation is provided in a Drupal Handbook article on installation. There are also easier ways to getting Drupal installed like using the Drupal managed service from Bryght which installs everything for you.

Introduction to Using Drupal

Ok, now it's installed, now what? Well, this is more of a description of the process that I have followed than a recommendation, but here goes...

Start with the Settings

The first place to explore is the Admin > Settings. Most of the items in here are self explanatory. If not, try out different settings and see how your site changes. Worst case scenario is that you just redo the installation - which wasn't that hard anyway, right? Plus, you could use the practice.

The first things I change on a new site:

• enable clean urls - which depends on certain php settings, but is really useful to make clean-linking from outside of your site
• Error reporting - to the screen and the log for now, but change it to just the log when your site goes live
• File paths may need tweaking - but that hasn't been my experience

Drupal Modules

Next, it's time to experiment with the "modules". Now, don't let the name fool you, there are some "modules" which are included in Drupal core and are not enabled. These are considered core modules and it is the very rare case that you will find a bug in a released version of these core modules. These modules are documented in the Drupal handbook page on core modules and features.

Bug and I are going to be busy this year. In the meantime, I found this somewhat funny post and proposed t-shirt.

An entry by Neil Drumm caught my eye today.

His basic summary of how to be a good member/developer in an open source project. Sure you can sit around and read the Cathedral and the Bazaar if you have a few hours to get a good basis and understanding. However, the points Neil makes are short and if you grasp the ideas and their implications, you grasp how great Open Source can be.