So my first commit to the Drupal contributions has been made! WooHoo! I partied hard that night :) No, it’s really not that big of a deal, but I’m excited as it takes me one step further into Drupal development and being more involved in the Drupal community.

Photobooth fun on Marti Gras

So Marti Gras weekend was great! I’m so fraking sore form Wii that it’s not even funny. Well maybe a little bit funny… Snugs and his wife were in town as well as Dave, so we all hung out at Dana’s, drank, and played Wii for 8 hours straight! It was a blast, a good time was had by all. This video is of Dave and Dana boxing, but we bowled a hell of a lot more. We almost all hit pro by the end of the night (3am). Too bad for Amy, who hurt her leg earlier in the day and was not able to bowl very much, but she did pretty well sitting down, even on her Vikoden! We also played with my Mac’s PhotoBooth program, hilarity ensued.

I’ve started a project on drupal.org to contribute a module that will allow loading of new themes into Drupal from a compressed file (zip, gzip) that is either on your local hard drive, or from a web URL (curl support required?). View Project on drupal.org

It’s a basic idea and I’m hoping to get some feedback from the Drupal community on how best to execute this. The idea came about when a friend of mine mentioned that he had introduced his brother (a Joomla user) to Drupal and got some feedback from him on what he thought Drupal was lacking.

The first thing mentioned was the weight system. Joomla uses a system similar to that which is implemented in the Views module where you can hit and up or down arrow to resort content. I heard mention that someone has been working on a module to do sortables with Drupal’s new jQuery library, but it looks to be a 4.7 implementation so far.

I’ve not really seen much discussion on drupal.org about a theme installation interface, so I figure since it would help convert users and there is some good interest at least outside the drupal community, it may take some hold.

Update: Due to more commitments then I have time, I’ve discontinued any work on this module. My regrets.

I took a walk in the woods yesterday as it snowed. Here’s a photo log of it.

The family side

I spent the week of January 15th in Providence, RI with a group known as Lullabot learning the ins and outs of Drupal. I’ve been working with Drupal for a while now, about 2 years in fact, and had learned quite a lot on my own by reading the Drupal Handbook and hacking the core (which really is a no-no, but a great way to learn). When my buddy Dave told me about the workshop Lullabot was having, I looked into it and convinced Shawn to get work to pay for it and let me go for the whole week. Since my Aunt and Uncle live near Providence, I asked them if I could stay with them and it just so happened that the week was filled with birthdays! Two of my cousins and my Uncle’s birthdays were that week. What luck! Carmen and Frank were more then happy to have me up for a week and I was so glad to get to spend some time with them. I lived with them for a summer when I was 17 and I’ve missed them ever since.

The technical side

The Lullabot workshops, however were the real reason for the trip (since work was sending me) and I was not disappointed in that fact at all. They were fantastic! I knew quite a bit about Drupal when I arrived, but soon learned how much I really didn’t know. I like to compare it to a huge puzzle that I had been putting together all by myself, not really knowing where all the pieces went, but I was getting them together on my own yet out of order. These workshops really helped to put the pieces I was missing into place and really helped fill out the whole picture. I learned in that one week what I had been missing and felt as though I crammed two months of learning on my own, into one week. My brain was soaking up the information like a sponge and it felt great! I wanted more and by the end of the week I felt like crying, knowing that I would have to leave and would not be able to maintain the rate of information absorption I was getting. I felt inspired, awed, and humbled by the amount of knowledge the Lullabots bestowed upon us, knowing that there was even more that could just not be taught with the time that we had. My only real consolation in that, was the fact that Drupal is open source and these were the people that had put enough time and effort into the creation of Drupal that they actually felt like they had an ownership in it. Maybe ownership si not the right word, but more like the feeling a parent might have towards a child, a very bright, intelligent, and well liked child. And with that realization, came the revelation that I too could have that as well! But it would take much time, effort and learning before that could ever be me. Now, I’m not one for New Years resolutions, and yes I know it’s already the end of January, but I submit to you now my New Years Revolution: I will contribute to the Drupal community as much as possible this coming year and will hopefully find that piece of mind in knowing that I’ve contributed to the greater good in a project that affects so many geeks lives. And I say geek with the utmost admiration and respect, because not only do I categorize myself as one, but because so many of the people I’ve come to respect categorize themselves as one as well.