Palante Tech Blog

CiviCon 2010

Kyle Jaster from Rayogram

http://civicrm.org/blog/3711
Rayogram planned and developed features with the intent to contribute them back to the larger Civi community
When approaching projects like that, you need to think about how you can abstract your requirements so that they fit more use cases than just yours
Tackled all of the core-related work first, so that bug fixes got into CiviCRM svn and can be easily pulled to facilitate the more customized aspects of dev for the project

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Raw Notes: Intro to Module Building

Posted by Jack on 04/21/2010 - 4:49pm

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What is a module?

allows you to extend Drupal without touching Drupal core code
wraps related code into packages that can be used in other projects or shared with the entire community
allows collaboration with the community with common standards

Different types of modules

Glue modules: put little changes that you need to make to the way that Drupal is processed - not things shared on d.o, but created to achieve specific small things on particular site(s)
Input filters: take input from users

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Raw Notes: CiviCRM BoF for Drupal Developers and Site Admins

Posted by Jack on 04/21/2010 - 4:09pm

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Breakout conversation: CiviCRM and the Drupal Community

notes started partway into the conversation

How does a person contribute in bite-sized chunks to a code base that is monolithic?
You can write Drupal modules for CiviCRM - that's the best way to extend CiviCRM and is a recent development with added hook support
Drupal has Form API, CiviCRM has Quick Form - you have to be willing to make that leap and learn something new
there's a big gap between the users and the developers
there seems to be a Drupal/Civ

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Raw Notes: (How) should we measure diversity in Drupal BoF

Posted by Jack on 04/21/2010 - 12:05pm

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There were about 12 participants in the conversation; folks who were here and who were not are encouraged to add their thoughts, fill out these notes, say "I was there," etc!

(notes starting partway into the session)

There's an opportunity to grow Drupal if we can start to get at the diversity conversation
definition of Drupal community is problematic - very technical requirements, but there's a vast community that aren't people who aren't on D.o or have cvs accounts, implementers and users. Developer-centric approach is limiting.

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Raw Notes: From a contractor to a shop: How to make the leap

Posted by Jack on 04/21/2010 - 10:42am

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Starting Out

going from contractor to shop = making a lot of mistakes and surviving them

defining the type of shop you are - what are you selling, what is your market?

identify your team's strengths and go with them, but also be adaptable in case your market shrinks
CivicActions - thought they'd be leading shop for political campaigns and candidates and nonprofits - they're a mission-driven, values-based company and choose clients accordingly.

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Raw Notes: Best Practices For Managing a Drupal Firm

Posted by Jack on 04/21/2010 - 8:48am

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Panel of the people on this page, also listed below. Sorry for lack of attribution for each comment!

How has managing a Drupal firm changed over the years?

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Raw Notes: Managing and deploying configuration with exportables and the Features module

Posted by Jack on 04/20/2010 - 6:04pm

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Presented by Jeff Miccolis of Development Seed

(missed most of the beginning, talking about features and exportables)

Ctools is special
Strongarm gives you access to the variables table -- start to capture values from variables table
these components are the configuration that descirbes how your site behaves - Strongarm lets you bring out and safeguard those important decisions
Features should be used throughout the development process - not intended to come up later, meant to be there the entire time.

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Raw Notes: Views for Developers

Posted by Jack on 04/20/2010 - 11:11am

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Presented by Larry Garfield (Crell) of Palantir.net

The Views Stack

Views are a three-part stack - how Crell explains to clients
bottom of the view is the What Level - what data am I looking at - narrow down your entire database to what you want using filters, args, fields, sorts, and relationships
middle is How level - how data is displayed - styles, flows, pager, and area
top is Where Level - Display (e.g.

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Raw Notes: Planning and Executing a Successful Drupal Implementation

Posted by Jack on 04/19/2010 - 5:44pm

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Presented by Michael Morris and Dave Leonard of Phase 2 Technology

How to work with stakeholders

give people a proper introduction to Drupal - lots of weird terminology, figure out how to explain it clearly and properly
explain open source - talk about the community, understanding what free means (as in speech, not just beer), make sure they understand that you might share the work you do for them with the community
expalin that Drupal isn't magic - takes time, work to get a good site

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Raw Notes: Drupal 7

Posted by Jack on 04/19/2010 - 3:12pm

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