Blog | Modules Unraveled

007 Khalid Baheyeldin and the User Points Module - Modules Unraveled Podcast

Published: Wed, 02/08/12
Photo of Khalid Baheyeldin

Outline:

  • Originally developed for an art site in 2005, to give visitors an incentive to contribute (add their art, vote on other people’s art, comment, ...etc.
  • Open sourced with some features disabled initially, then talked the client allowing all features to be contributed, and they agreed
  • Evolved into a user incentive, ranking and virtual currency system
  • Got more than one requests to port it to Joomla
  • Used on one site to encourage recycling, with online points and offline points, e.g. you take an item to a depot and they credit your account.
  • Jacob Redding, Executive Director of the Drupal Association was the D6 maintainer, for work he did for a New York non profit.
  • Contributed modules:
    • Commerce integration (get points when purchasing, and use it as virtual currency too)
    • Retroactive (accrue points for already published nodes and comments)
    • Moderation
    • Inviting users to join a site
    • Voting
    • Get a Role
    • Services integration
    • Karma
    • Badges

006 Khalid Baheyeldin and More Drupal Performance - Modules Unraveled Podcast

Published: Sun, 02/05/12
Photo of Khalid Baheyeldin

Last week brought two episodes with Mike Carper talking about Drupal Performance. This week brings one more performance episode, this time with Khalid, then another special Wednesday episode to talk about the User Points module. (Don't get used to two episodes a week... It's just a fluke that it happened twice in a row! ;-p)

Khalid works for 2bits consulting on Drupal performance.
Some things he talks about include:

  • Who needs these services
  • Diagnosis before Treatment, no guess work
  • The Contributed Module Open Buffet Binge syndrome
  • Cloud, Amazon AWS and cost vs. performance
  • Complexity is a disease
  • Performance Assessment service (full and targeted)
  • Install/Configure/Tune your server
  • Hosting for performance
  • 3.4 million page views per day on a single server

004 Mike Carper and Drupal Front-End Performance - Modules Unraveled Podcast

Published: Sun, 01/29/12
Photo of Mike Carper

Have you ever wanted to run 1300+ domains off of one Drupal install? Listen in while I talk to Mike Carper of Data Sphere about the Drupal performance modules he's contributed that make it possible for them to do just that.

This first episode will cover his front-end performance modules, and on Wednesday, there will be a special part 2 episode where we talk about his back-end performance modules.

The modules covered in this episode include:

003 Jess and Core Office Hours - Modules Unraveled Podcast

Published: Sun, 01/22/12

Have you heard of Drupal Core Office Hours? Do you know what they are? How about the fact that you, yes YOU can help make Drupal better every week?!

Listen in as I talk with Jess about what Drupal core office hours are, who can get involved, and what they can do to make Drupal a better CMS for everyone. Below you'll find a rather detailed outline that Jess put together.

About Jess

  • xjm on drupal.org (http://drupal.org/user/65776)
  • Community Spotlight: Jess (xjm) (http://drupal.org/node/1390816)
  • Drupal 8 core commit mentions (http://ericduran.co/drupalcores/)

Resources for the Drupal core office hours

  • Drupal core office hours (http://drupal.org/core-office-hours)
  • Denver core office day (http://xjm.drupalgardens.com/blog/core-office-hours)
  • @drupalcore (https://twitter.com/#!/drupalcore)
  • Drupal IRC handbook (http://drupal.org/irc)
  • Setting up a development environment (http://drupal.org/node/28245)

Resources for contributing to Drupal core

  • Core and you! (http://xjm.drupalgardens.com/blog/core-and-you)
  • Drupal core issue queue (http://drupal.org/project/issues/drupal?categories=All)
  • Novice issues (http://drupal.org/project/issues/search?status[0]=1&status[1]=8&status[2]=13&status[3]=14&status[4]=15&issue_tags_op=or&issue_tags=Novice)
  • API Documentation issues (http://drupal.org/project/issues/drupal?component=documentation)
  • Drupal coding standards (http://drupal.org/coding-standards)

Configuration management Initiative

  • Drupal core initiatives (http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/drupal-core)

Office hours outline

Purpose of office hours

  1. Help people work on the Drupal core issue queue
  2. Onramp new contributors to core
  3. Encourage experienced developers to devote time to the core queue periodically

Where and when

  • #drupal IRC (irc://irc.freenode.net/drupal)
  • Tuesdays, 0400 UTC (http://www.worldtimeserver.com/convert_time_in_UTC.aspx?y=2011&mo=8&d=9&h=4&mn=0) (Note: This is Monday night in the Americas)
  • Wednesdays, 1600 UTC (http://www.worldtimeserver.com/convert_time_in_UTC.aspx?y=2011&mo=8&d=10&h=16&mn=0)

Why

  1. Drupal core developers are all volunteers (and you can be one too!)
  2. There are currently over 9300 open issues filed against Drupal core, many of which need basic handling
  3. Getting involved in Drupal core development can be intimidating

How

  • If possible, set up a sandbox Drupal site, preferably with git (http://drupal.org/node/28245)
  • Join Drupal IRC during one of the timeslots above
  • Say that you’re interested in participating in office hours
  • Work on one or more issues

Ways a non-developer can help

  1. Get steps to reproduce
  2. Triage potential contributed module issues and move to correct queues
  3. Look for duplicates of issues and related issues
  4. Handle or refer support requests
  5. Write issue summaries

Ways to help with git

  1. Help test patches
  2. Improve patch code style or documentation
  3. Patch novice issues

002 Jeff Linwood and PhoneGap - Modules Unraveled Podcast

Published: Sun, 01/15/12
Photo of Jeff Linwood

This week I talk with Jeff Linwood about his work on a Drupal plugin for PhoneGap that lets you easily build native mobile apps with Drupal. Jeff will be co-presenting at DrupalCon Denver 2012 with Fabian Franz (Fabianx) on the topic of building mobile apps with Drupal and PhoneGap. You can find out more about their talk "Auto Generate your Mobile Drupal app Using PhoneGap" on the DrupalCon website.

We also recorded a screencast to show you how to use PhoneGap to build an app using Drupal. So, be sure to check that out too!

If you have any questions about the show or PhoneGap you can contact Jeff at his website jefflinwood.com, or post in the comments below.

UPDATE: Jeff and I have decided to put on a FREE live webinar about PhoneGap. If you'd be interested in that, get on the mailing list to receive updates as they are made available.

000 What to Expect - Modules Unraveled Podcast

Published: Sat, 01/07/12

This is an unofficial podcast episode! It's just a couple of minutes of me talking, and explaining what you can expect from the show.

I would love it if you'd give me two minutes of your day to listen and find out if it sounds like something you'd be interested in. And if it is, I'd love it even more if you'd pass it along to anyone you know that you think might also like to listen in. I forgot to mention this in the recording, but, the plan is to release a new episode every Sunday. :)

The podcast will be live in iTunes soon (if not already), but in the mean time you can subscribe early by doing the following:

  • Open iTunes
  • Choose "Advanced" from the menu
  • Click on "Subscribe to Podcast"
  • Type in: "http://feeds.feedburner.com/modulesunraveled"
  • Click "OK"

Yay! You're now one of the first subscribers to the podcast!

Embarrassing Edit: As Jess points out in the comments below, she is the one that has been working on TAC, not Lin. What a start, right?!

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