Drupal

I went to FOSDEM on Sunday. I got up at 6 AM but went to bed at 2 AM (because I still had to review my presentation) … so I only had 4 hours of sleep! I met up with Jo Vermeulen and Tim Dupont at 7 AM in Hasselt’s station. Jo is a PhD student and Tim is a teaching assistant at Hasselt University.
I hesitated at first because both of them have teached me a course either this year or last year, so it’d be a bit weird. But getting to know people is virtually always more fun than pain, so what the heck, I traveled with them anyway!

I’ve got so much exciting good news that I don’t even know where to begin!

I was asked to review a Drupal book, was chosen to speak at FOSDEM, my bachelor thesis proposal will be published as part of a technical communications book, I turned 21 and was selected for a DrupalCon DC sponsorship! If only all of this happened while I wasn’t in the middle of my exam period…

Reviewing a Drupal book

Packt Publishing contacted me on January 7, asking if I was interested in reviewing Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions. It’ll be my first book review, but I’ve always had eye for detail, consistency and clarity in books (I have yet to see the first U.S. college text book that is well written), so I hope it’ll be of use to somebody :)
You can expect the review towards the end of February. What interests me is that it’s targeted at business owners instead of developers, so I’ll do a practical test with my dad, who’s not technically adept.

I keep all my Drupal sites up-to-date by updating a single Drupal core instance and one install profile. And I keep Drupal core and all modules in this install profile updated through CVS. But then a problem poses: what if a file was added to or removed from CVS? Until now, you’d have to manually svn add or svn rm the file. And in the case of some modules (e.g. Views), that’s a lot of files you’ll have to check.

The solution: syncvsvn {#solution}

I’m aware that this probably isn’t the best name, but it gets the job done :).

Suppose you’ve just updated the xmlsitemap module:

I’ve alluded to it before, but now it’s also been officially approved: I’ll be doing my bachelor thesis on Drupal! I will focus on integrating Drupal with CDNs. Yay! :)

Don’t know what a CDN is? It’s short for Content Delivery Network; a network of (static file or streaming media) servers that are located around the globe. These servers all mirror each others’ files. When a user requests a certain file from the CDN, the server that is the closest to the user will serve the file.
By using a CDN to serve the static components on your web site (CSS, JS, images, fonts), your web site will load much faster: the latency will be lower and the throughput will be greater.

So, university has started again. We have to pick “broadening courses”, I chose economy courses (macroeconomics and operational research). In this semester, I’ve got 6 courses, all of which — except for one — come with their own project. The one that doesn’t have a project (macroeconomics) overlaps with other courses, because it’s a trimester course. Painful.

I’m also trying to convince my professors to be able to do my bachelor thesis on Drupal. By that I mean: develop something that can make Drupal shine in a certain area. (More on that in a later blog post!) That costs its fair share of time as well

So — I’m extremely busy for school; pulling late-nighters 7/7.

Next, I’m involved in too many projects outside of school: maintaining my Drupal modules (or at least trying to), table tennis, working for Mollom, working in the local AIESEC committee, maintaining DriverPacks.net, and more.

It’s over. My second DrupalCon. DrupalCon Szeged 2008. I’m posting 2 weeks after date because I had another awesome vacation 2 days after the DrupalCon, to the south of France (in Brandonnet), with friends of the table tennis club.

And it was AWESOME. I met so many new people. I had lots of interesting conversations. Had lots of fun. Saw a different way of life.

I met people I’d been talking to for so long via IRC:

AHAH-powered forms were virtually impossible in Drupal 5 (see the note though). In Drupal 6, this is much easier, thanks to the #ahah property. However, it still is really painful to actually use it.

The flaw {#flaw}

You have to write a menu callback for each AHAH-enabled form item of your form. You have to repeat small variations of this piece of code for each callback:

While working for Mollom, I faced the problem of needing multiple buttons with the same name. In my case, this was an absolute necessity on an advanced multi-step form. Sounds super … easy, right? But HTML doesn’t support this!

Thankfully, the combination of Drupal.behaviors and jQuery makes it easy to create a work-around! jQuery makes it easy to write the necessary code, Drupal.behaviors makes it trivial to ensure it keeps working even when new content has been added to the page (i.e. after an AHAH callback).

You would have a piece of Forms API code like this:

$form['step1']['edit'] = array(
  '#type'       => 'submit',
  '#value'      => t('Edit step 1'),
  '#submit'     => array('subscriptions_create_edit_step1'),
  '#attributes' => array('class' => 'edit-step-button'),
);

// … more form definition code

$form['step4']['edit'] = array(
  '#type'       => 'submit',
  '#value'      => t('Edit step 4'),
  '#submit'     => array('subscriptions_create_edit_step4'),
  '#attributes' => array('class' => 'edit-step-button'),
);

As you can see, nothing remarkable about this, except for one thing: we’ve set the class attribute. This is used in our Drupal.behaviors method to detect which buttons this behavior should be applied to.

As some of you may already know, I’m working for Mollom now (summer position).
The reasons for that should be obvious:

• It’s Drupal work.
• I get to work with Dries. No explanation needed here I think.
• I get to work with Ben. Don’t know him? Remember this: he’s really smart and that shows in his machine learning skills and research (he’s got a Ph.D. in that field). He made Mollom’s algorithms outstanding.

So why I was I hired, without even having an interview?
Well, because certifications don’t say much about a person’s real skills. They only indicate a base level. Even college/university diplomas are becoming less valuable. It’s your real experience that matters. And you can see my real experience in my Drupal.org profile. You can tell that I have a lot Drupal experience, and you can find out the quality of my work by looking in my projects’ issue queues and the accompanying code.
That’s what really matters.