Willy Dobbe - DOP.nu

Symfony camp at DOP

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 01:07:07 +0200

DOP has been hosting the Symfony Camps twice now. The last one was great thought rainy. Symfony btw is a PHP framework, not unlike Zend (but better :-))

See the video on youtube

Dutch Open Projects sponsort de Gvenk Daily op Twitter

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 19:09:57 +0200

Twitter is een microblog tool met sociale netwerk aspecten dat multichannel gebaseerd is, bereikbaar vanuit meerdere media (SMS, RSS, web en o.a. instant messaging). Op twitter publiceerde Gerard van Enk elke ochtend een aantal relevante technische nieuwtjes. De dagelijkse nieuwtjes van gvenk werden professioneler en uiteindelijk werd er een separaat twitter account (gvenkdaily) en zelfs een website voor gemaakt.

Dutch Open Projects ondersteund het gebruik van nieuwe media op creatieve manieren en gelooft in het semantische web waar User Generated Content een vaste plaats heeft ingenomen. Het is om deze reden dat DOP officieel de sponsor is voor het nieuws dat gebracht wordt door de gvenkdayly. Door de gvenkdaykly financieel te ondersteunen wil DOP de nieuwsvoorziening in Nederland pluriformer maken en User Generated Content projecten stimuleren.

Als je een twitter account hebt, volg dan gvenkdaily voor de dagelijkse samenvatting van het ICT gerelateerde nieuws. En je kan natuurlijk DutchOpen ook gaan volgen om op de hoogte te blijven van DOP haar activiteiten. En volg natuurlijk ook onze medewerker bert boerland

Over DOP:
Dutch Open Projects (DOP) wil Nederlandse grootste en beste Open Source webapplicatie bouwer worden. DOP gebruikt voor het verwezenlijken va deze missie de beste tools in de PHP gemeenschap (o.a. Drupal, SugarRCM, Symfony en Joomla!) en investeert in deze gemeenschappen geld en tijd om zo met de beste mensen de mooiste diensten te maken voor onze klanten. Tot onze klantenkring behoren NCR Handelsblad, Nutreco, TNO en bijvoorbeeld de Fietsersbond. DOP is fysiek gevestigd in Leusden en online op http://dop.nu te vinden.

DrupalCon, planes, URL's, 10% and everything

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:50:48 +0200

This story start with a one dollar bill I found the last day during the DrupalCon Szeged 2008.

A dollar, I thought! This must be my lucky day! So I took it with me and decided it was my lucky Dollar. Little did I know.

We took the train from Szeged to Budapest at 10 a clock, 2 hours later we were at the airport and went for a small snack. We had plenty of time, yet - I am not going in details here - it was very frustrating to see the plane leave, to see the gate getting closed, with you at the wrong side of it. It became a very expensive snack, a bit more then a dollar.

We tried to get the next plane towards Amsterdam, it was fully booked. The next one was overbooked. So we got a flight to Vienna and then to Amsterdam. After checking in, going through customs again, waiting 2 hours, we found out it was cancelled. We got rerouted towards Muchen and then to Amsterdam. After 3 hours waiting the plane actually left the ground, one hour late. We missed our connection to Amsterdam and slept at an 4 star hotel nearby. Not that we enjoyed the hotel because we had to get up at 5 AM to catch the next flight. Only to find out ...

...it was cancelled. 28 hours after we left Szeged, we were at home. Most west coast Americans attending the DrupalCon were probably already in bed. It thought me however a couple of lessons. One of them I wanted to share. There was no single airline that was responsible for the chain of events or knew about it. Sabre

(the independent computer network that all airlines use) is great, they can realtime reroute any passenger over any airline towards any destination. Yet, it is not in use a trouble-ticketing system, airline B knew nothing about my history and when failing to deliver they happily transferred me to airline C. Nobody saw my complete chain of events, from A-Z.

This is a lesson I need to pickup; whenever you fail to deliver a service to a customer, try to place it in the chain of events the customer already experienced. It will not make the delivery better, but you will understand the feelings of the customer better.

Now regarding DrupalCon. Here is a small update. I really REALLY liked the conference. I talked to lots of people, attended more sessions then I planned, got active in a couple of BoF's and co-presented one with Larry and Dries. So here is a small update on stuff I found.

It is great to see that the -on the spot during DrupalCon Barcelona- made up number of 7% female is broken!

With 10% of XX chromosomes during the Con we do represent the number of females on Drupal.org versus the number of males. Sure, it should have been 50%, but as the great Rop Gonggrijp once said, if you are female and want to become a computer geek, you better start electrocuting your Barby when you were 5 years old. And not many girls do so hence the ICT sector could use some more females. With webchick being the co-maintainer of D7, the Open Source community also shows there is no glass ceiling for females.

But hold on, we might have hit 10% XX chromosomes, but can you see what is wrong with this picture?

10% female, but 99,9% white! I am not the pro-positive discriminating kind of person. But I think I saw 1 (one!) black person during the complete conference. If you want to break barriers, we really should look at this as well. 90% of all people active in Drupal are white males, 10% white females. So, lets make sure that the next DrupalCon will be more representative for the population using Drupal! After all, Open Source is there as the big equaliser; there are no secrets (only information that you dont have).

Some other thoughts on the DrupalCon. I really like the talk of Mark Boulton who will be doing the redesign of "d.org", see the video on the Association site. A right balance of humour and content can be very powerful. I loved the story Mark and Leisa Reichelt
pulled together. Leisa is however (see the video) very wrong on one part. And it is a classic mistake to make showing there is still a big gap between designers of code and UI.

Leisa claims that she was amazed to see that most experienced Drupal users typed the URL on drupal.org instead of navigating through the site with a mouse. Now, I am not claiming that the UI of Drupal.org is good, not at all. Mark and Leisa have lots of work to do to make it better navigable and we -as the community- a lot to keep it clean by having some kind of styleguide on how to address the user and a better policy on how and when to promote a story to the frontpage (if there is going to be a frontpage in the classical sense after the redesign).

However, graphical designers only look on how to navigate through a site within the site, this since they are CMS agnostic. What they do not count as usability is the browser chrome, you do not control it as a website and you do not need to emulate the browsers functions. However there is one small part of the browsers chrome that is related to usability; the address bar! It is used by the person on the site just as much as the mouse is, it infleunces the page and hence is part of usability. The fact that graphical designers -and this is not to bash Leisa in any way- do not think of it as usability only shows there is still a huge gap to be bridged between code and design monkeys. The address bar is part of usability and the fact that the functionality of a site is reflected in useful predictable URL's like /node/add shows this. We all have to learn here to help the user navigate what is best for him or her and we should be aware that most some people type faster then they can click: bofhmode]" The world's only useful point and click interface is a .44 Magnum" [/bofhmode].

BTW: someone wants a dollar? Free shiping!

Sign up for the Symfony Camp at DOP

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:03:19 +0200

If you are in to Symfony (think Ruby on Rails in PHP if you like that kind of lingo ) be sure to register for the Symfonecamp.com . A lot of good speakers, and excellent location and lots of fun. See sympfony camp snaps on Flickr. . And be sure to bring 42 towels since the pool is open!

DrupalConSzeged2008 piped

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 01:04:01 +0200

Today I had some time to arrange a ticket and an hotel for the DrupalCon Szegged 2008, pftttt! Just in time. Then I had some time to nerd around so I created a Y! pipe for All Things DrupalConSzeged2008 related (assuming that that would be the tag?). Feel free to run, edit, copy, change my pipe over at pipes, Yahoo! ID !required! You can see geolocated Flickr images, tweets, delicious links and much more in many formats (for example an RSS feed. feedback in the comments please, I'll update the pipe to reflect your thoughts.

And yes, that is the reason I do not program, even the pipe! looks bad and is not that smart build

Gratis iPhone in ruil voor een PHP nerd

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:47:22 +0200

Gratis iPhone? Sure! Als je een PHP nerd kent die wil werken bij de grootste Open Source software implementator (en de leukste!) in Nederland, geef hem dan aan om te gaan solliciteren bij Dutch Open Projects en krijg gratis een iPhone.

Moet de nerd(in) wel aangenomen worden en door zijn proeftijd komen, maar dat is voor een echte PHP freak die graag met Symfony en/of Drupal werkt geen probleem. Grote klanten, mooie vila, leuke collega's en dito werk.

Kom maar op, de iPhone staat klaar voor je, kom maar op!

Forrester brings Drupal in the boardroom

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:27:23 +0200

Selling Drupal. Not a contradiction but not as easy as selling a license of a proprietary CMS. Selling something that is "free" (gratis) seems like an odd idea to many. So how do we get our beloved Drupal CMS spread in a broader range that home blogs, new media sites and the like?

Well, some prospects have functional requirements for their CMS like "It has to start with a D and end with Drupal". Usually there is a passionate user somewhere in the ICT department that convinced some people to go for Drupal. And while this technocratic approach does have its drawbacks, it is a good way to gain more ground and bring Drupal on a higher level.

But most of the time the prospect "just wants a CMS". And since there are zillions of Open Source CMS-es it is hard to choose. Most OSS CMS-es do not have a local "sales" so the company will end up with a proprietary CMS that is years lagging, only have a dozen developers and a couple of hundreds users but with a sales person that is a member of the same club as the CEO.

However, now most bigger companies are moving towards their third CMS implementation, people know what they want from a CMS and people are actually looking for an Open Source CMS and hence an Open Source implementer like my employer is in the Netherlands. And those bigger enterprises all read Gartner, Forrester, MetaGroup and other IT research and advisory companies. I have a very strong opinion about those companies (just echoing yesterdays news for companies that will be in today by tomorrow) but that is a different story. In the boardroom magic quadrants, hype cycles and two by two tables are the goal for any powerpoint wisdom, so if you want to be in the boardroom you have to play chess on the management chessboard; a 2 x 2 matrix.

CNet (writing many rtiles about Drupal in a positive way!) has a piece called Forrester calls out Alfresco and Drupal as the top-two open-source WCM systems. This is really /great/ news, instant boardroom Fähigkeit for Drupal. Forrester says so so we need Drupal!

You can read the excerpt of the report over at Forrester:

This document answers frequently asked questions about the role that open source plays in the WCM market.

You have to pay for the real article but even without reading 20 pages about community, functionality etc, I think it is fine to say that Drupal will be a word you can say in the boardroom from now on. "Could you please fill my cup with some coffee Drupal's" for example.

Thanks to Kieran and others who gave input for the report

Dutch Joomladagen / days

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:57:20 +0200

Today I was a guest speaker at the business day of the Dutch Joomla Days. While this might seem odd, the subject of these days is "building bridges". Building bridges towards other CMS-es, other databases, other communities and hence towards Drupal.

I give these kinds of "pro Drupal" talks almost a bi-weekly basis now, where often other CMS-es are present as well. Last week I did one at eduvision where 100+ people where impressed by Drupal. Most often, the "competition" is Joomla and Typo3, both rather popular in The Netherlands (and Germany). While I do think that Joomla is good (enough) for the SoHo market and the audience of Drupal is much broader (from enterprises to personal blogs) and deeper (from video towards for example a resume site), these CMS-es are often compared. So normally, I try to make clear why Drupal is so much better then Joomla; better user management, roles, hooks, CCK, views, workflow, tableless design, multi-site install and almost forgotten but still miles ahead of any other CMS; taxonomy. There are zillion of ways where Drupal is clearly the leader in the field, but leading is sometimes not the same as "fitting".

This time however, I tried not too bash Joomla to much but to start building bridges. We do have a lot of the same problems that we can work on together. For example, we both use the GPL and we both have to protect our assets. Be both have a legal body protecting the community and facilitating the community, in Drupal's case, the Drupal Association.

That is why I was interested in the talk of one other speaker; James Vasile. James works for the SFLC and he is on the board of OpenSourceMatters and helping as a legal counsel for the Drupal Association. Most of the other Board Members of the Association spoke to James on the Boston DrupalCon ut since I was not there, it was good to speak to James during Lunch.

We taled about his passion, RMS, his other Open source projects / customers, how the SFLC is financed and the GPL3 as well as some other things. It is good to say the face you have exchanged mails with and it is good to build a relation between the SFLC, Joomla and Drupal. Communications is all about building bridges.

Drupal and Joomla! against the RotW; the idea

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 20:10:48 +0100

(Panorama view in full)
Since this month I am working over at Dutch Open Projects, an Open Source implementer in the Netherlands that specialises in PHP; zend, symfony, SugarCRM, Joomla and Drupal. Doing both Drupal and Joomla is fine with me, both have a place in the CMS landscape. And the goals of DOP is to offer the right Open Source solution for the customers needs, not to start a holly war of one Open Source tool against another.

Since the headquarter of DOP is located at a very nice place, we often hold x-camps at our place. Dont be surprised that a deer wonders by the swimmingpool out of the forrest behind our villa! Some time ago we had the SymfonyCamp over at our place. And we do have enough room for lots of tents and a BBQ.

See the full symfony pool at fickr.

We are planning on organizing a Joomla!/Drupal camp over a next couple of month. And the use the healthy competition between the two projects and to use the power of Open Source, we had the following idea:

From both communities a couple of dozen people can signup and camp at our place for a weekend. During this weekend both have the assignment to make as many migration tools as possible to migrate from the dominant proprietary CMS-es in the Netherlands; GX, Greenvaley, Smartsite and Tridion towards their CMS. The one who does the most or best wins. And since all the migration code has to be GPL, the Open Source community at large wins as well!

Note that this is only the first idea, we have to get "development licenses" for all these CMS-es and provide demo installs of all these as well. So the final assignment might be different from this one if this one is not practical. Our goal is not to make profit of the camp, not by far. So the entrenance fee will be free or very low. Why do we invest in these camps? To align with the communities, to get exposure but most of all to give the proprieatry CMS users a way out towards freedom. And we hope it doesnt hurt for our recruiting proces; we are hiring!

We try to get many high ranking officers from both communities to (re)present their CMS but there will be room as well for "the soldiers". If you are interested, drop a comment; it will be published within 8 hours. Or you can drop me a line; bertATborlanDOTcm. I will post more information about this "J/D vs the RotW" camp when it comes available.

And yes, our halfpipe pool will be cleaned before this event I hope, so be sure to bring your bikini as well