What Makes Websites Work? Bringing Information Architecture into the Drupal Development Process

Zoey and I had the opportunity to co-present a session on information architecture and the Drupal development process at DrupalCon in Barcelona this past week. Ron helped us prepare conceptualize the presentation which we gave on Friday in the PickTeck room to a fairly large crowd. There were many good questions from the audience, and some conversations that continued throughout the day. As I get ready to head for the airport, I wanted to post the slides for folks to...

“Drupal Simple Tested”

Earlier today I, and a few others from CivicActions, attended a session at DrupalCon on building a Drupal Specific QA team. The presentation really focused on the existing resources for testing, simple test, selenium, etc… After the presentation was concluded, the floor opened for comments and questions and Jeff Micolis from DevelopmentSeed suggested requiring simple tests for all modules. Angie Byron of Lullabot countered that that could reduce participation and new submissions by increasing the barrier. I then suggested that instead of stifling innovation by requiring simple test, why not create an icon that indicates the existence of a simple test for a module and put in on project page for modules that have a working simple tests. Users could then filter by only modules with simple tests (conversely a user who wanted to write a simple test could filter by all modules without one). So let’s create a “Drupal Simple Tested” icon! Little drupal head with lab coat and stethoscope. Other ideas that came out of the session were: Hold quarterly “Drupal Bug Fix Days” (maybe move them around regionally, like North American Bug Fix Day, and European Bug Fix Day. Ask Geo DUGs to adopt a module and keep the issue queue...

CivicActions Session Proposals for DrupalCon Barcelona 2007

A number of CivicActioneers (my self included) have proposed sessions for the upcoming DrupalCon in Barcelona (September 19-22). Almost the entire team will be traveling to Spain a week early for our 3rd annual European Fall Retreat, so we’ll have plenty of time to polish our sessions and get input from the team. Here is a quick look at the sessions we’ve proposed: In Code Review is not just for Standards, Doug Green will talk about the coding standards, the coder module and how to use it to assist with upgrading your modules, performance, security and code compliance. Owen Barton will demonstrate how to set up yourdevelopment environment with free software in his session covering installing GNU/Liunx OS, LAMP stack configuration, the Eclipse IDE, CVS and SVN version control systems. We have been talking a lot about what we call “the free development environment” here at CA as more and more of our team members make the switch ditching proprietary OSs and going with GNU/Linux. Zoey Kroll and I will talk about how to integrate Information Architecture into the Drupal Development Process. Ron Akanowicz who is our other Information Architect will not be able to make it to DrupalCon, but will help with the preparation for this session in which we will show a variety of Information Architecture deliverables (like wire frames and site maps) and then show the websites that resulted from them. We’ll talk about some best practices from our experience. Jonathan Hendler has proposed a session on Semantic Search introducing the newly released Semantic Search module which integrates Drupal with RDF stores. Jonathan will talk about...

Microsoft Doesn’t Get ISO Label

Looks like it is Microsoft day here on the CA blog. Just heard that Microsoft did not get ISO certification for Office file formats. This is great news for OpenOffice.org and other free and open source “office” applications. From the Market Place story above: Microsoft has suffered an embarrassing rebuff. The company has tried for two years to win the prized “ISO” label for its Office file format. ISO stands for International Organization for Standardization. When applied to software, the label certifies that this is an open system that will always be available. There have been some recent campaigns to get governments to require open file formats and as the referenced story quoted Maija Palmer of the Financial Times, “They don’t want to be dependent solely on one company, like Microsoft, to be able to access their, you know, citizens’ records in the future. So they would like to use software that would be open, accessible, usable in the future.” And this is at the heart of the Free Software movement. Should people be held hostage to a single software vendor? Or should they be free to take their hardware and their data and go elsewhere? Obviously at CivicActions we believe in the latter scenario where open standards and free software allow individuals, organizations and governments the most freedom. To learn more about free software, visit The Free Software Foundation. They are currently running a campaign called Free Software Free Society to call attention to the threat Microsoft Vista, in particular, poses to computer users, the environment and society writ...