Willy Dobbe - drupal

DrupalJam 6 in Amsterdam

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:36:10 +0100

Friday March 19 (9:00-18:00 CET) the Dutch Drupal community will organise the 6th "DrupalJam".

A DrupalJam is a place where anyone interested in Drupal can get together to discuss about one of the best Open Source CMS-es out there. A friendly palce where users, coders, business people as well as people interested in web technologies. This time the Jam will be helded at the StayOkay hotel in Amsterdam, Timorplein 21. More information about the StayOkay location can be found on Maps as well. We expect over 200 people (up to 300!) visiting the DrupalJam and we will have attendees form over four countries.

It only seemed like yesterday.. The first DrupalJam I co-organised was in a basement with 50 or so people (top left). Not unlike the second DrupalCon, held in Amsterdam (right).

And now, 6 editions later we have reached the scale of the third DrupalCon in Brussels as can be seen on Dries' site. And this is a global trends. While DrupalCons get bigger and bigger, there is also a trend to localise DrupalCon's that are reaching the same scale as DrupalCon's were only a a few editions ago. And with that the global DrupalCon problems get local as wel, continuity, professionalism en sponsors.

I am proud to say -not meant to toot my own horn- that the organisers of the DrupalJam so far did an excellent job. The very healthy ecoshere around Drupal in the Netherlands made that we have the following premium sponsors; Microsoft, Radio Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Dutch Open Projects, Internet Unlimited, KPN, NCRV, OneShoe and Sogeti. Other sponsors include VLC (gold), Lucius, Acquia, Synetic, Wizzlern (silver) and Merge (bronze). Looking at this list there are at least two key things to note. The first one is a classic one, the distribution is skewed to the left meaning we made the premium sponsorship to cheap.

The second one is more important. The ecoshere around Drupal grew and outgrew the standard Drupal implementers. KPN (fortune 500, telephone, mobile, ADSL, high end webhosting), NCRV (public broadcaster using Drupal a lot), Radio Netherlands Worldwide (public broadcaster using Drupal, see Dries' site) and Microsoft are not the "standard" sponsors of an Open Source project. It shows that the market around Drupal is maturing and that parties that have an indirect stake are willing to invest and give back. And we do thank them for that, as well as thank our other sponsors!

Dries once told me he wanted to have local DrupalCamps in every city around the world. We are not there yet. But I do think there is a (bi-)yearly DrupalCamp in every free country around the world right now. And when these will become too big, there will be a DrupaCamp in every major city around the world by 2015 for sure.

Drupal is coming home in 2015, your home! But if you can not wait that long, sign up for the DrupalJam in Amsterdam, look the sessions and propose a session (login required). Please do contact me or Bart Feenstra if you have any questions. DrupalJam will rock!

Drupal at FOSDEM 2010

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:34:51 +0100

( source flickr, copyright faerie)

Next weekend on Sunday, February 7, we'll have a full day of Drupal talks at the 10th edition of FOSDEM, Europe's biggest, free-est and open-est software conference.

FOSDEM, is a free and non-commercial event organized by the community, for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet. The Drupal project was granted a developer room at FOSDEM to do exactly that: to share knowledge about Drupal.

The presentations schedule for the devroom was published a week ago on http://groups.drupal.org/fosdem. It features interesting speakers such as Robert Douglass, Károly Négyesi, Roel de Meester and Kristof van
Tomme and even more interesting subjects as mobile device design, AHAH, eID and Views 3. Everyone is invited to attend the presentations.

On Friday the giantesque beer event kicks off the conference. For Drupalistas there is a sprint on Saturday in Zaventem.

Please join, I have been to a couple of FOSDEM's and if you ever attended an Oreilly or Gartner con, you are in for a surprise :-)

FOSDEM takes place at ULB Campus Solbosch in Brussels.

Data.gov.uk running Drupal

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:28:06 +0100

Advised by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt and others, government are opening up data for reuse. This site seeks to give a way into the wealth of government data and is under constant development. We want to work with you to make it better.

Sir Berners-Lee -together with Al Gore- the inventor of the web (not Internet)- knows Drupal, his personal website runs Drupal. And he seems to know a bit about the "Semantic Web" as well ...

It is very good to see that the UK government is opening up its' data sources to the public. And for the Drupal community it is a big win to see that they have chosen the same Content Management System / Framework as Obama and many others did.

I really wished all governments would open up their back-end data like this and hope that the Dutch government will focus on Drupal as well. Note that there is a strong movement under the Dutch for this, combined under the "Hack the Government" mantra. See this older nice presentation / screencast I made about this in Dutch.

So great news for the British and great news as well for Drupal!

The commercial arm of Drupal

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 23:17:03 +0100

Yesterday I tweeted something some might feel offended by on my account. Since it contains both a strong opinion and some strong language, I will not repeat it here. But I will explain my strong opinion. The point of the tweet was that Drupal is Drupal. It is an open source CMS, moving towards a "CMF". My definition of open source consist of three elements:

Code
Community
License

Without one of these items, you will not have a (successful) open source project. You need code, you need an open source license and.. you need a community! Of these 3 elements that make up open source, the "community" part is the one that is the hardest or even not to define. We are all parts of communities; in our families, our volunteer work, our church, our village. Everybody is daily part of a community. And as stated I can not define what a community is, but the closest thing I can come up with is people helping people, people caring for people and people loving people. And within a community there is mutual respect and benefits to help, care and love for free. Note that the word community is derived from Latin, a combination of "cum" (together) and "munus" (free gift).

When these three elements get together, great things can happen! As Drupal showed us for the last 8 years. The code is far ahead of the competition, proprietary or open source. The license is strict and thereby we do not suffer from "Joomladisation" and our community is real. Real people helping, caring, loving real people.

This does not mean that one can not make money with open source projects, people have been doing so for decades. This does not mean that people making money cannot be part of the community, companies have been active in the bigger open source ecosystem longer then the term "open source" exists.

I am not to sure I agree fully with Linus on Open source without commercial interests = crap but it is for sure that there is room in any community for commercial help, care ... and even love.
But just as there is not one company claiming our church, volunteer work, family or village, there is not one single company that can claim a (healthy!) open source project. Just as Redhat doesn't / can't claim GNU/Linux, no company can claim Drupal. And more important, there is not a company that claims the opensource project Drupal. Not even.. there goes the A word

Acquia with close ties to the Drupal community. In a good way. They have been sponsoring the Drupal project in money and time and maybe in the last two years more then any other company has in the previous 8. But Acqiua is not Drupal, they are a company with good ties to the community, helping, caring and loving other people (and their customers). But they are not Drupal.

And every time I read about "Acquia, the commercial arm of Drupal" my hair raises. Drupal is not MySQL or SugarCRM. Drupal is Drupal. And it does not have a commercial arm. It has many commercial arms, the list on http://drupal.org/drupal-services is just a very small part of that. There must be thousands of people contributing to Drupal core, modules, documentation and to lesser extend themes. Many of them making a living proving Drupal related services. And we do want to keep this healthy system of helping, caring and loving. And there is room to make money providing Drupal services. But there is no "Drupal INC".

Note that Acquia never claimed that position and I do not think they ever will. They made it clear what Acquia is, they reacted on my tweet and on the ZDnet story and make it clear in their press-releases. It is lazy journalist that -in this realtime web- want to have an easy digestible text for their readers. Meaning no room for nuances, no room for explaining and no room to tell the complete story.

So that is why I told the complete story, in a 140 characters tweet.

Google FriendConnect module for Drupal

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:03:13 +0100

On googlesocialweb.blogspot you can read about a nice module that Google made for Drupal, Friendconnect.

Friendconnect is

"... an Open Social application offered by Google that started in May 2008. Google Friend Connect main focus is to simplify the connection between social and non-social websites and standardize the handling and presentation of social applications and content. It uses a blend of open standards, such as OpenID for signin, oAuth to control data, and Open Social for applications."

(Wiki)

More information about FriendConnect can be found on Google's site and a live demo can be found at globant.

Though this is a nice open standard and a nice module, there are two downers IMHO that show that Google doesn't really get the Drupal community or has another agenda:

They house the code on their own servers, with own issue queue at code.google.com. Sure they are free to do so but the strength of Drupal is that all modules are on one place, not all around the web.
They have licensed this code under the Apache license. All Drupal code and thereby all Drupal modules -and to some extend themes- are released under the GPLv2 or higher. Read this FAQ about the license on d.o for some background. The Apache License 2.0 is compatible with the GPL v3 (not 2!) and since you can accept version 3 of the GPL when downloading Drupal, legally they are in teh clear but it would have been best if they released this under GPLv2 IMHO

Still, nice work Google!

update
Heine Deelstra (hint: lead Drupal security team) warns NOT to use this module on production site at his blog. Something about the quality of code, tweetsource. See Google, if you would have used GPL and drupal.org we could have solved this issue via the proper channels. Now we have to use the public issue tracker of google.code.

Drupal, a top 10 "cool Open Source product of 2009"

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 15:28:07 +0100

A someone who has been "active" in the Drupal community for over 8 years, it is shocking to see that only in the last 3 years Drupal was really picked up by the mainstream press. This is not due to the quality of the code of Drupal of the community, as much as it has to do with building momentum and a shake out in the CMS landscape. So this story about Drupal being in the "Top 10 coolest Open Source products" (yes, it is that time of the year again) comes as no surprise to anyone how knows the code or the community.

The real power of Drupal however is that 5 (!) other Open Source projectsof the top 10 products use Drupal as a platform to deliver their tools, empower their community. That is the real power of Drupal. 6 (including Drupal self) of the top 10 Open Source tools according to CRN.com use Drupal:

Ledger SMB (a fork of SQL ledger)
DoJo (they hacked Drupal core to get the DoJo in and JQuery out :-) )
Ubuntu (Linux for humans, with their famous bug 1)
Firefox, the best browser chrome :-) )
OO.org, word!

Drupal power. "We, the Drupal community" are proud :-)

Community website of Dutch union of journalists / NVJ using Drupal

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:14:44 +0100

A couple of weeks ago the Dutch Association of Journalists NVJ (125 years old) launched a "community" portal based on Drupal. While it was a soft launch, already 999 users have signed up, showing that the need for a place in this niche.

Registered users can blog, ask questions and provide answers, microblog / twitter messages in the site, be active in forums, create and read wikipages, build a portfolio, be-friend people to network, start or join (organic) groups and search for jobs. Employers can post job openings as well.

Lots of content types / functionality usually leading to bad user experience; where do I do what? However, the site is rather popular and gets lots of hits and people do find what they are looking for in the site.

It was build by my employer DOP.nu using core Drupal, many contrib modules as well as half a dozen own modules. The Crowds did the concept and Xlab the design and User Interface.

It is my opinion that sites like these show Drupal at it's best, a community site where people help each other.

Marketplace Eclipse using Drupal

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 10:05:15 +0100

I still find it shocking to see that there are many many "developers" (especially in the proprietary cms landscape) that use notepad as a IDE and backup tapes as version control. While there are so many tools you /need/ available for free under an open source license. I dont think I ever came accross a question in an RFP about this, but if you ever outtask/source a project, one of your first questions should be what procedures and tooling developers use for doing their job. If the answer is notepad++ you should stay away from that company, no matter how cool the flash design looks.

One of the tools developers need, can be Eclipse, an open source IDE. And now, Eclipse launched a new marketplace site, marketplace.eclipse.org. And yes, it runs Drupal!

From h-online.com

While some of the features of the Marketplace are familiar from its predecessor, there are also many new aspects. For instance, users can now compile custom lists of favourites to keep informed about their chosen plug-ins. Furthermore, lists containing users' most popular plug-ins can now be shared. The search feature, which is now based on Apache Solr, has also been given a major overhaul.

A cool thing is that you can log in with your bugzilla account. Please provide feedback on Ian's blog.

Community website of labour union Jurnalist using Drupal

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 08:36:55 +0100

It was build by my employer DOP.nu using core Drupal, many contrib modules as well as half a dozen own modules. The Crowds did the concept and Xlab the design and User Interface.

It is my opinion that sites like these show Drupal at it's best, a community site where people help each other.

Dries included in most influential people In Open Source

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:37:30 +0100

(source)

Sad to see that there are no woman on the list, but still a nice list: Most Influential People In Open Source.

As part of MindTouch’s 2009 open source best practices research, we asked C and VP level Open Source Executives who they thought are the most influential people in the industry today. Over 50 votes from Executives in Europe and North America were cast to determine the 2009 edition (note: they could not vote for anyone in their own company). What makes this list remarkable is that industry insiders were the judges.

And on number 5 we have Dries: Dries Buytaert created Drupal in 2001 and has led the software project ever since. He has guided it through rapid growth and to widespread acclaim. Dries is able to motivate the burgeoning community of users and developers by communicating ‘the big picture’ while paying careful and measured attention to the technical details essential to good software development. These two factors have been crucial to Drupal’s popularity and success to date.

While I do think that this list -like any other list- is debatable and biased to end users applications (with MySQL as an exception) and is missing people (Mark Shuttleworth should be on the first spot), it is good for Dries ego but far more important, good for Drupal.

How do you spell momentum?

Whitehouse.gov turning blue

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:59:07 +0100

(source)

"Chocolate City"
Uh, what's happening CC?
They still call it the White House
But that's a temporary condition, too.
Can you dig it, CC?

(Chocolate City lyrics by Parliament, 1975 -pfunk at its best).

It turns out that CC became brown then blue. whitehouse.gov switched to Drupal. Anyone up for a photoshopped-mashup between Drulicon and the whitehouse? :-)

For the real deal, checkout Dries' site, that I found via

HP Linux portal on Drupal

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:48:44 +0200

Not a great design (to put it mildly), but a great new name, HP Linux Community Portal on Drupal.

Via h-online.com

Prepare your iPhone for DrupalCon Paris

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 12:49:47 +0200

When you visit the DrupalCon Paris and have an iPhone you need to pack more then your suitcase and laptopbag. Do not forget to fill up your iPhone with some goodies. I shopped around and I do think that these apps are worth putting on your phone: (from left to right, up to down)

, including integration with Google Maps and SMS services about delays
, one of the best independent TV stations, in French and English, free app. (note: Do disable data roaming on your phone and watch this only when on WiFi).
, information, maps, districts (arrondissements) information, photo's.
, same as above but too expensive, don't buy.
, Offline maps, handy.
, Paris City Guide from Lonely planet. Expensive but good.
(Skiping French, I should be able to order a beer or two in French, something like "deux biere s'il vous plaît")
, if you are from Burma, Liberia, and the United States or some kingdom and you are not familiar with kilometers, euro's, celcius and liters, you might want to use this free app.
Next on the list is a must have if you a free (aka jailbroken) iPhone, the ability to capture video n first and second generations iPhones. Just look for cycorder in cydia.
, where to? is a great application to find restaurants and other places if you hav a GSM on your iPhone.
, Flight Track pro is a great application for making sure you catch your flight.
, Flickup is a flickr uploader from your iPhone.
, Twitterrific is a handy application to keep track on your friends and follow tags. I hope the wifi will survive the 1000+ IP enabled devices on the DrupalCon.

At the conference the official tag(s) to used will be given out for your tweets, flickrs and other social networks contributions, but I do think i will be dcp09 so you might want to use that when twittering about the Druaplcon before day 1.

A word of warning. Please disables your ssh deamon on your jailbroken iPhone unless you think it is funny to walk around hunderds of nerds with a default root/alpine giving someone full control on your iPhone. And no matter how friendly the community is on many con's (in the city or even at the conference) hardware has been stolen, mine 3 years ago as well. So do keep an eye out on the security of your systems, both software and physical wise. Also make sure you now what the costs are of roaming and if you dont, disable data roaming on your phone!

Layar, Drupal and Geo tagging

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:25:56 +0200

Some time ago I saw Layar, a Dutch product from SPRX Mobile; a mobile uugmented reality browser. It basically is an application for a phone with a GPS, camera and compass where you can add a layer of information on top of your real world view; the camera. Right now it is out for the Android platform and soon it will hit the iPhones' appstore (3GS). By combing digital information on top of your real world view you can see geotagged information, for example prices of houses in front of you, ATM's or friends at a festival as is demo-ed in this youtube movie.

The possibilities of combining geo tagged information in combination with your real world view might not be new, but this application sure makes the most of the combination by using the GPS, compass and camera.

So I started wondering, apart from the application on the phone, this could potentially be rather easy in Drupal. You could expose your database / content via a webservice to the phone that displays them. All you need is Drupal core and CCK to add a longitude and latitude information in a content type and maybe use the services module. It is rather easy to do and I would love to work on something like this for a customer.

Oooh. And you need lots of information. Lots of local information since content seems to be king for this kind of functionality. But it sure would be nice for a DrupalCon to find your friends, get information about what is the current and next track in a room by pointing at it or get more information about the sponsors booth. The possibilities are endless, also outside DrupalCon's. This since DrupalCons should probably be held outside due to the lack of GPS reach inside :-)

But then again, if all rooms and people were tagged with the mobile codes the problem would be solved :-) And even the first gen iPhone can read them. Something to keep in mind for the next con... But first: vive la France!

Sponsor DrupalCon Paris 09 (DOP did, and so should you!)

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:44:45 +0200

In case you are going the Drupalcon Paris, we have the option to meet in person since I was able to get in as well. But be sure to talk to your boss / yourself and convince him or her that presence in person is a great way to align with the community, but sponsoring the con is the best way to get more out of it; love, a better conference for all, potential employees and most of all prospects.

Dutch Open Projects became a silver sponsor some time ago, and so should you! Now I do not know how the economic downtime is hitting on you, but in the Netherlands this crisis is only bringing more companies towards using Drupal. It used to be true, that people choose Drupal for the quality and stayed for the (lack of) costs, but there is a complete new mantra now: come for the lack of costs and stay for the quality!

So if you are being hit by the crisis, invest in your product and become a sponsor! If you are doing well -good for you-, refund some of your love in cash to the community by aligning your wallet with the community.