Jerad Bitner Making the best things!

There has been some discussion in recent days regarding Object-Relational Mappers (ORMs), Drupal, and why the latter doesn't use the former. There are, actually, many reasons for that, and for why Drupal doesn't do more with the Active Record pattern.

Rather than tuck such discussion away in an issue queue, I figured it better to document a bit more widely.

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A little over a year ago, as we were putting the finishing touches on the Lullabot Learning Series, we needed a quick-and-easy way to sell our video downloads and DVDs. We took a look at several of the options out there and Matt ended up stumbling across Shopify, who's tag-line is "E-commerce made easy". Their solution is fully hosted and they claim "setup within minutes". And sure enough, within mere minutes Matt had set up a working site. Within a few hours, it had a Lullabot logo and mostly worked the way we wanted. It took us another day or two to wire it up to our shipping warehouse, and to Fetch, the company which we used for our digital downloads. Overall, it was a quick-and-painless solution.

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Have you ever needed to remove a JS or CSS file in certain conditions such as a custom themed page? In Drupal 6 that has become a whole lot easier.

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We’ve talked through the ’strategy’ behind the proposed D7UX Information Architecture (IA), now let’s take a look at it in detail. What goes where.

Let’s go through each major section in turn:

Content

The ‘Find Content’ page, showing a searchable, sortable, filterable list of all the content on your site is the ‘landing page’ for the Content section of the site. From this page you can also choose to Add Content (although it is suggested that for Content Creators this also be shown as a Shortcut on the Toolbar).

Different types of content can be filtered into different tabs, as comments are, for example, on this page. You may also wish to provide separate tabs for content such as Products (if you have Ubercart running), or Events or Projects

Structure

This section of the IA groups together tools used to ‘build’ content for the website which both have and create a User Interface (UI), including:

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At last I can announce the release of my new six-hour video series from Lynda.com, "Drupal 6: Online Presentation of Data", which you can check out with a free one-day pass. (Of course it's also available to anyone with a Lynda.com subscription, starting at $25/month for all-you-can-stand training in over 600 topics.)

I first talked about this course in January and was able to implement at least one suggestion from your comments (about creating calendars). There are also videos about mapping, charting, and preparing data for tabular export, all built on a foundation of CCK and Views.

Since Lynda.com's audience is mostly graphic designers, the course starts out with an in-depth description of data structure: As you know, data planning is at least as important as implementation! And it's an essential subject whose subtleties elude most beginners.

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I've been on the go so much that I haven't had the mental space to sit down and articulate a lot of the cool stuff that is going on. A few weeks ago I took part in a new open source conference, Writing Open Source (WOScon). The conference was born from conversations Emma Jane Hogbin and I had last fall, and she took the ideas and made it a reality in Owen Sound, Ontario. It was very small but packed with awesomeness, from people to ideas to food. There were quite a few exciting ideas for the Drupal community which will get written up and worked on down the road a bit. Lots of folks have written up summaries* of the event itself, but that single event has started something quite a bit bigger. The last day of the conference we transformed the conference website into a new community site and started a new Twitter/identi.ca hashtag for #wosdocs. We've started a new open source community to focus on documentation. That may not sound exciting to lots of people, but it is, even if you aren't a "writer" and here's why.

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Designing an Information Architecture (IA) for Drupal is an incredibly challenging project - essentially you are trying to design an IA that allows just about anyone to do just about anything. Flexibility is very often the enemy of good design - people make good and fast decisions with fewer options not more - but how do you choose the right options so that they work for as many people as possible? Tricky stuff.

To give you a sense of the breadth of the scope - we need to design for both:

• people who use Drupal every day (efficiency & capability is key) and people who are brand new (evaluators & learners - does this make sense to me, does it appeal to me, will I be able to use it to do what I want?)
• Verity, the content creator (ref: Who Is D7UX for, very limited set of tasks but very frequent use) through to existing power users/developers (know Drupal inside out and don’t want the UI to get in the way)

In devising the proposed information architecture we have applied the following principles/philosophies/guidelines:

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This is the first in a series of posts discussing the proposed information architecture (IA) for D7UX.

Before we get into too much detail, be sure to check out this great video that Roy Scholten (Yoroy) posted recently that helps explain some of the key features and rationale of the IA and how it relates to the current Drupal information architecture.

Yesterday we took the beta-wraps off of Acquia Search, and I followed up with a post about why Acquia Search matters for site visitors. We're still having some good discussions in the comments and the Twitter-sphere, but today I want to talk a bit more about the technical details. How does Acquia Search work, what does our infrastructure look like, and why is it a great deal for site owners?

Acquia Search is a hosted search service based on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The way it works is that Drupal sites push their content to the search servers hosted by Acquia. We index the content, build an index, and handle search queries. We provide the search results, facets, and content recommendations to your Drupal site over the network.

Your site's data is protected in transit by SSL and by HMAC authentication in the Acquia Network. Plain english? The data is encrypted so anyone snooping in the middle can't read it and the request is authenticated which means that the Acquia Network knows you sent the request you claimed to, and you know that messages received from the network are legitimate.

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Update: drupal.org search indexing is stalled. There are many many D7CX pledges in the queue. Thanks all!

Drupal 7 is going to be a phenomenal release. The code is miles ahead of Drupal 6, and the D7UX work is poised to bring us a giant leap forward. I really think we are going to make a major difference in CMS land and in the world in general with this release.

In order to make the biggest possible impact, we need most of the top 40 Contrib modules to have full Drupal7 releases on the day when core Drupal 7 is released. Our failure to accomplish this for Drupal 6 was devastating. So, let's turn our attention toward #D7CX - Drupal 7 Contrib Experience.

I want to collect pledges from maintainers to support the #D7CX effort. A pledge consists of writing a statement like below at the top of your project page on drupal.org. Here are my three pledges ...

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Jono Shuster, the ED of the Entrepreneurial Standards Forum (http://es2f.org) did a session on Entrepreneurs and Drupal. These are my notes from that session and the marginal video I took during the presentation.

Jono started his comments by making an observation about the Denver Boulder User Group (DBUG) - half of them are entrepreneurs. He made the connection that Drupal and entrepreneurship is a natural fit. That led him to propose this presentation.

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I've submitted a proposal to Drupalcon Paris. It is titled Build A Community Site - No Coding Required and is focused on new-comers to Drupal. When a person is looking to create a small community site or blog, there are different options out there ranging from Wordpress, to Joomla!, to Blogger, to Drupal.

When a new user approaches Drupal, there is often a sense that the software is overwhelming. In truth, when you break Drupal down, much of it is fairly simple and straight forward to develop a basic site.

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Talking for two days straight during Utrecht Ux sprint ruined my voice, but it did accomplish an important thing: Somewhere on Sunday morning, Dries, Mark, Leisa, Bojhan and me finally got to a point that we knew and understood that we were talking about the same thing. And that this thing, the d7ux framework, might actually work, too.

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We are loving the Drupal context module here at ComputerMinds, it puts a lovely user friendly formal front end onto creating context's for your site, something we had previously been doing with various snippets of code. If you haven't come accross the context module before then I fully recommend you have a look at this post http://www.developmentseed.org/blog/2008/apr/09/context-ui which explains all ...

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Why will the visitors of your site care about Acquia Search? For a while now, I have Acquia Search installed on my personal site. To understand what Acquia Search can do for your site, have a look at what it has done for my site. While I have a very simple Drupal site, you should be able to experience some of the benefits of Acquia Search.

For example, search for "Drupal" on my site (use the search widget in the sidebar) and you can see the facets that allow you to filter the results by topic, location and industry. Using these facets, it should be pretty easy to find all the Fortune 500 Drupal sites that I blogged about in 2009, for example. Facets make search faster, making it very easy for your visitor to drill into results and to find what they are looking for.

Screenshot of Acquia Search's facet-based navigation as used on buytaert.net.

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The deadline for winning one of four Drupal-related books that we're giving away will be here before you know it.

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Because she is amazing, Ann McMeekin has prepared for us a guide to designing accessibility into themes - it’s useful far beyond this project so we’re sharing it here and pls feel free to pass it on to other who might find it useful. You can download a PDF version of this document here.

Before You Begin

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We've covered Acquia, which delivers commercial support for the powerful Drupal content management system a number of times. Acquia also delivers its own distribution of Drupal, and the company's co-founder (and also founder of Drupal) Dries Buytaert has now announced that the company has come out of beta testing with its version of Acquia Search. It's available at no cost as part of every Acquia Network subscription. If you're looking for a free, open source tool to run a web site, and need solid search and inexpensive support, the one-two punch that Drupal and Acquia offer may be just right for you.

According to Dries' post:

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I learned a lot from another three months doing Drupal. Here's a summary:

• I learned how to write low-level design documentation. I used to hate doing this because I was much happier prototyping things in order to figure things out, and writing in a word processor instead of a code editor seemed slow. Also, laying out images was a pain in both OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Word. The key breakthrough was that after a lot of iterations, I finally got to a document that had the level of detail my project manager wanted. Once I knew what he wanted, it was easy to write documents like that. In fact, I did one better–I filled in lots of details in the validation section of the design document, and I used that for test-driven development.
• I smoothed out more of the kinks in our deployment process. Always testing our update scripts with update.php's access check set to false helped flush out assumptions about user ID. Our regression tests came in handy, too.
• I practiced more test-driven development. And I loved it! =) Yay yay yay yay.
• I learned JQuery and the ins and outs of Views+Calendar. We customized our calendar implementation extensively, and it doesn't look half-bad.

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