Drupal

This post is first and for all about my experience on the R&D management conference, but it builds up to a story on Drupal too.

Today I've finally written out one of the exercise on drupal. It is a simple drupal module tutorial to show the interaction between users. The exercise introduces hook_menu, hoop_perm and hook_comment. The text is but a draft, tomorrow I'll check if my students can make sense of it.

By following Dries Buytaert (founder of Drupal) on Twitter I've got to this very interesting blog dreamweaver is dying It's a great story for a my WSDB course so I've made a blog for my student on the course-side.

DrupalCon was again a great experience. Reflecting on it, I'm mostly surprised by the relation with RDF in some of the tracks. There was the session on Training and Certificates that wants to create an RDF for curriculum. Another interesting session was about Hacking Climate Change with Drupal and the Semantic Web I made a discussion-post about the RDF for curriculum in groups. This blog will be about the other session.

I've just noticed the new spam on my site. It has become more polite, really sneaky basters ;-)

Several comments appeared that encourage my blogging, but it stayed vague, like:
- Entirely wonderful thank you - just what I needed!
- This is really helpful! Thanks.
- This is great! Nice blog.

But... when you click on the username, then you notice ... it's spam! Damm, I thought: 'Finally some people who are interested in my blogs!'. Well, I'll better have the 'Update module' active.

P.S. See you at Drupalcon if you go.

A month ago Kristof took contact with me as he was interested in FP7 for a semantic web code sprint series. We had a great talk later and I've been checking the FP7 themes with supervision by the national contact point. I only scratched the surface but that is already huge. I've made a summery list on some of the themes in a post for Drupal research with the intention to get an FP7 BoF together. It may get more structured if we can figure out what we want to do.

Yesterday a whole day Drupal @ FOSDEM. The krimson team has been covering the recording, but its a bit to soon to see the castings online. I'll probably make some more blogs when they get online, however Dries asked for feedback, so I'll give mine. He did a combination of the Barcelona talk and he's recent blog on the long term future of Drupal. The second part was a recent thoughts and clearly meant to open discussion. Here is my opinion.

In Dries State of Drupal presentation (September 2007) There are two aspects that made whant to make this long blog. I'll use he's "dirty little secret to get noticed" as outline. As introduction I like to give a critical path related to the "8th ranked killer feature: Improved node access system". However I will not address how to solve the path. I see a big problem with not being a part of the coding collective. This blog is about a lost bee who can't find its hive ... here we go.

I wanted to manage my subscription today and got a bit lost in the long list. => http://drupal.org/project/issues/subscribe-mail

As I have been implementing some js/jquery to deal with to long list it seams appropriate to make a small demo on how the list could be implemented with this jqselect script => http://www.mixel.be/files/demos/jqselect/psm_example.html

For one of our modules called "node_access.module" (yes, the function and table exist, this is an expansion of it) we wanted an advanced multi-select. My college Wouter has created a pragmatic implementation 1/2 year ago. In the last weeks I finally got the time to refractor it.