Blog: Boston

After Drupalcon: Nonprofit, Intranet, and News Happy Hours
Bonnie Bogle
Communications Strategist
Posted Mar 3rd, 2008

If You're In Boston, Join us at Lucky's Lounge for Happy Hour Tonight

If You're In Boston, Join us at Lucky's Lounge for Happy Hour Tonight

Three exciting happy hours are happening all in one place tonight, so if you're interested in Drupal and Nonprofits, Intranets, or News, swing by Lucky's Lounge tonight to meet others working in these areas and unwind after the first day of Drupalcon with a few drinks. Come on, it's only three blocks away from the Convention Center. Map.

When you leave the Convention Center, make a left on Summer Street, walk two blocks and make a right on A street. Lucky's is right at the intersection of A and Congress. Be sure to get there early - the first couple of rounds will be picked up and food will be available to order.

Here's the line up:

We're hosting the Drupal and Nonprofits events, along with Gregory Heller, and want to bring people together who develop and use Drupal at nonprofit organizations. It will be great to share stories, experiences, and needs with others working with - or at - nonprofits. The Intranets event will definitely be eye opening as people building intranets and portals with Drupal come together to show off what they're doing.

After these wrap up the News happy hour will kick off at 7:45, organized by Ken Rickard, Michael Meyers, and Gary Kebbel. This sounds like a great chance for developers working on news platforms to meet people in the news industry. 

Hope you can make it!

Boston, Drupal, drupalcon, happy hour, intranets, All tags
Moving Fast: Messaging and Notifications
Jose Reyero
Multilingual Engineer
Posted Mar 1st, 2008

An Overview of the Latest Improvements and New Features

An Overview of the Latest Improvements and New Features

Some time ago we released the Notifications and Messaging packages as two handy and flexible frameworks to handle user subscriptions, notifications, and multiple messaging methods.

The good welcome to these tools by other developers has pushed us to keep working hard on them and that means a lot of improvements have gotten into both frameworks since the initial release. Thanks to everyone who's been sending feedback and/or patches for them. We've also been using the frameworks for our Intranet for some time now (yes, they work!) so a lot of ideas and improvements have come from our day to day user experience.

Here are a few of the big improvements:

  • Two new messaging plug-ins
  • SMS developed by Tim Cullen
  • PHPMailer contributed by Ted Serbinski
  • Better message formatting, improved filtering, and nice HTML to text conversion
  • Support for bulk messaging - not just for sending messages to single users anymore
  • Many usability improvements and bug fixes

There are now lots of different plug-ins for different subscription types and more
coming. You'll be able to manage them all from your user account. 

Here's a look at the main messaging settings page. See the new SMS and HTML mail (Phpmailer) plug-ins enabled and available:

As a simple proof of how easy is to develop a new messaging method plug-in, both of the new ones are around 100 lines of code and that's counting comments and white lines :-). Also we're learning as we go and based on this experience,  plug-in support is now much improved so itwill be even easier to create new ones.

We'll be presenting this work at the Boston DrupalCon so if you are interested in better notifications for your website users, you shouldn't miss the Mail, Notifications, and Messaging Framework session next week.

Coming soon: Upgrading to Drupal 6

Boston, Drupal, drupalcon, messaging, notifications, All tags
Design and User Experience Track 2008, DrupalCon Boston
Young Hahn
Artist
Posted Feb 18th, 2008

Great Design Sessions Lined Up for DrupalCon

Great Design Sessions Lined Up for DrupalCon

Without further delay, here is the lineup for DrupalCon Boston's Design and User Experience track: 

The track has a strong mix of sessions aimed at hardcore designers, novice Drupal themers, and longtime community members and developers. Whether you're interested in customizing Drupal's look and feel for an enterprise-level website like Lifetime TV or looking for a robust
dynamic interface solution using jQuery,
Flex,
or Open
Laszlo, the sessions will provide plenty of opportunities for learning and sharing.

Other highlights include Michael Angeles' start-to-finish program on the right ways involve users in the design process, Bevan Rudge's guide to Scalable Theming, aka "How Not to Get Burned When Someone Adds a New Content Type", and the King of Denmark's Sex, Drupal, and Rock n Roll: A Theming Love Story, which is bound to be a blast even if no one knows what to expect.

Longtime Drupal developers and users should definitely keep their eyes
on Cody
Hanson's session. Cody and several other notable presenters,
including Dries himself, will be going over results from the
University of Minnesota's formal user testing sessions which pitted
Drupal's UI against the dreaded everyday user. The results will no
doubt spark some interesting--and maybe heated--discussions on how to
push Drupal's usability forward to the next level.

Keep your eyes open over the next two weeks for more information on these sessions. We hope to see you in Boston!

Boston, design, Drupal, drupalcon, usability, All tags
Hot DrupalCon Session Proposals: Aggregation, Design, Messaging, and Multilingual Support
Bonnie Bogle
Communications Strategist
Posted Feb 12th, 2008

Vote for Talks on FeedAPI, Custom Workflows, Notifications and Messaging, and Multilingual Features in Drupal 6

Vote for Talks on FeedAPI, Custom Workflows, Notifications and Messaging, and Multilingual Features in Drupal 6

With DrupalCon just three weeks away, we're tying up loose ends and getting ready to make the trek up to Boston. Last week we all put our heads together and came up with several ideas that we think will make interesting additions to the conference agenda. But see for yourself - and vote on the ones you want to see at DrupalCon Boston.  

Aggregation: Last year FeedAPI entered the Drupal aggregation scene as a Google Summer of Code project by Aron Novak. Since then a lot of progress has been made and version 1.0 was recently released. In this session, Alex will share recent development on FeedAPI, show off the cool things it can do, talk about how the module performs under a heavy load, and talk about what's in store for FeedAPI in the future. Read full description and vote. 

Custom Workflows: As Young mentioned before, he's proposed a session about improving usability through simplifying the workflow and limiting user choice. Young and Jeff will walk through the user story of a complex news aggregation system, Managing News, and explain how clearly defined user stories lead to a simple and intuitive workflow. They'll also discuss how Drupal's core hooks and the context module can be used to improve workflow and usability. Read full description and vote. 

Notifications and Messaging: This session will give an introduction to the Notifications and Messaging Frameworks. Jose, Tim, and Jeff will talk about the features these modules have and how they can be used to provide subscriptions-like functionality in Drupal website. Jose wrote more about these modules here. Read full session description and vote. 

Multilingual Support: Gabor and Jose will be talking about the multilanguage request handling and content support that will be in Drupal 6. They'll also lead a discussion on what features are missing and how multilingual support can be improved in Drupal 7. Read full description and vote.

We've also proposed a bunch of birds of a feather talks on more specific topics. More on that later, but for the meantime, here's what we're thinking:

See you in Boston!

Boston, Drupal, drupalcon, sessions, The Shop, All tags
What Design Presentations Do You Want to See at DrupalCon?
Young Hahn
Artist
Posted Feb 4th, 2008

Only One Week Left to Place Your Votes

Only One Week Left to Place Your Votes

Everyone should go check out the latest proposals on the DrupalCon Boston site and vote on the sessions you want to see. From Bevan's "Contributing to Usability in Drupal" to the King of Denmark's "Sex Drupal & Rock n Roll," some old timers and new faces are weighing in on how to design for Drupal and how Drupal can be better tailored to designers. Let us know what other sessions you'd like to see by posting here or on the DrupalCon website - or read the goals of the Design Track and post your own session. Today is pre-selection day for the sessions, and there's only one week left for submitting sessions at all. So make sure to weigh in on your top picks.

The Design Track at DrupalCon 2008 will show off some examples of high-powered websites like Harvard's cluster of Drupal sites and TreeHouse's work on Lifetime TV. There is a lot of energy behind making Drupal easier to design for the end user. Steve's work on Garland and the color module and some ambitious ideas I've heard from Kieran at Aquia could make 2008 the year Drupal killed the designer. I've already found a solid life insurance policy.

I'll be pushing the UI and theming advantages of Drupal that are available to developers at DrupalCon. While Drupal is making design easier than ever for end users, Drupal also provides developers with a very flexible and powerful platform for producing custom web applications and tools. I’ll be talking about making Drupal easier and smarter to design for people that code. Keep an eye out for Development Seed's upcoming session proposal "Designing for Every Day Users." It will focus on UI details, how good design and good coding can go hand in hand, and what this means for people building applications with Drupal. I'll be sharing some examples and stories from two recent applications we’ve been working on.

I’m excited to meet everyone in Boston and am stoked by the energy that is in the air right now. I look forward to everyone's feedback!

Boston, design, Drupal, drupalcon, usability, All tags