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It may have taken me a whole day to wrap my head around the features API and how it applied to the workflow module but I finally got there. Today I wrote features support to the workflow module. At DrupalSouth I gave a talk about features in Drupal and about exporting your configuration into code so that you can maintain it with version control and make configuration deployable.

Drupal and Pressflow have too much magic in them, and not the good kind. On the recent Facebook webcast introducing HipHop PHP, their PHP-to-C++ converter, they broke down PHP language features into two categories: magic and mundane. The distinction is how well each capability of PHP, a dynamic language, translates to a static language like C++. “Mundane” features translate well to C++ and get a big performance boost in HipHop PHP. “Magic” features are either unsupported, like eval(), or run about as fast as today’s PHP+APC, like call_user_func_array().
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Media Mover 2.x has been slowly creeping along for the last bunch of months and is starting to approach an alpha state. One of the cool things about Media Mover 2 is that the architecture has been rewritten from the ground up. Now there are three main concepts - files that Media Move knows about, configurations which are a collection of steps, and steps which are settings for some kind of action or process that is done to a file. However, they all have lives of their own which means you can do some neat things with them.

Let's imagine that you have a module that needs to do some kind of file processing that Media Mover already supports. You can define a step- that is, a set of settings - much like a view - in code in your module. You can then invoke it simply:

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Have you noticed this trend? The worlds of eCommerce, Content, and Community are coming together. At Optaros we call these “the 3 C’s” and we’ve had so much interest in the convergence of the 3 C’s, we created a cloud-hosted SaaS offering around it called OCentric that combines Drupal, Magento, Solr, and other open source components into a single platform for ecommerce, WCM, community/social, and integrated search. But I don’t want to give you a product pitch. The reason why I bring this up at all is because I came across an interesting post at CMSWire today. It seems that open source WCM vendor dotCMS and ecommerce player KonaKart will be offering an integrated product later this year. I don’t know any of the specifics, but at a high level it seems to be aimed at providing functionality around the 3 C’s.

It makes sense to me that these areas are converging. “Community” as a feature of online retail experience is evolving beyond user reviews and blogs. As Facebook and Twitter use continues to grow, consumers expect those experiences to be incorporated into their online shopping in some way. As my colleague, John Eckman, put it, “People want the online equivalent of ‘Will these jeans make my ass look fat?’”. Until now, online shopping has been largely a solitary experience but community features can make online shopping more social.

Content is also becoming more important in the world of commerce, at least for certain types of retailers. I recently looked at about a dozen electronics retailers here in the US to understand how (and surprisingly, if) they were using content on their ecommerce sites. I figured electronics had the potential to be a category leader as it tends to be a heavily researched purchase. What I found was that the degree to which content was being leveraged depended heavily on the type of reailer: online presence tended to mirror offline presence. Crutchfield, a retailer that prides themselves on providing top-notch research and customer service, led the pack with their content efforts. Here are a couple of things that stuck out:

• They’ve got tons of quality content that’s fully integrated with the shopping experience. If you’re reading an educational piece on Blu-Ray players, the content includes links to specific products. Conversely, if I’m looking at a specific Blue-Ray player I’m offered multiple links to specific pieces of research on Blu-Ray and Home Theater topics.
• Search covers both products and content. On many sites, if they have search at all, it is one or the other, but not both. Beyond site-wide search, Crutchfield actually changes the format of the search results based on what I’m search for. Keywords that look like specific products give me a set of results that features product catalog entries while more “research-ish” looking terms (”Home Theater”) actually prioritize learning resources ahead of product catalog entries.

Can Your Commerce/WCM/Community Vendor Do That?

Traditionally, each of the 3 C’s has been addressed by a single vendor. Sure, maybe your WCM vendor has an integration with a shopping cart, but it won’t natively understand how to act like a product catalog. And your ecommerce vendor might offer some light content management for non-product catalog content, but it’s unlikely to provide much robustness around presentation templates, custom metadata, or workflow, and certainly won’t offer as much innovative community or social functionality as a full-fledged community platform.

Companies may decide to take a best-of-bread approach and integrate at the UI layer. It’s a lot of work to make the experience seamless. If you’ve got one tab for “shopping”, one for “research”, and one for “community”, but once you drill down into those, everything is silo’d, you aren’t there yet, in my opinion. And focusing on the presentation completely ignores the job of the web site producers and merchandisers who want to be able to cross reference tweets, blogs, and articles with specific SKU’s (and vice versa).

How will this convergence take shape?

So it seems to me like this is a very natural and valuable convergence. What do you think? Will commerce, content, and community become one? Open source players will continue to innovate along these lines but what about the stalwarts–do you expect to see many 3 C related acquisitions this year?

Designing for the web can often be a tricky task, there are many variables to take in account, some of them of technological nature, some of them of human nature. The fold is something that involves a little bit of both.

If you’re not familiar with the idea of the fold on web-design, we could say in a nutshell that it is the area of the site that your users will see without having to scroll, therefore, making that region very valuable. Now, calculating how big that area is, is a slightly more difficult task, it involves screen sizes, resolutions, browser type, operational system, how many toolbars the users have, and so it goes. But we’re not going to go that far this time, the point of this post is to argue that the fold may not be as important as it’s been said.

It is commonly said that users won’t scroll bellow the fold or won’t pay too much attention to the content bellow that line. I would agree that to a certain extant. I can’t deny that for most of the sites that area is the most important. That is the first impression you user will get, so there are some important tasks to accomplish on there such as:

There is something just awesome about using a Drupal site hosted with Pantheon. Snappy page loads will make you happy, and when your pages generate up to ten times faster you will really feel the difference. Even though it makes Josh nervous (since we're still in beta testing) it has been really fun for us to play with the first Pantheon powered sites out in the wild. In all we have tracked over 1,000 Pantheon servers launch so far during the beta test phase of the Mercury stack.

We're getting very close to a stable 1.0 release for the Mercury Stack. So far, the biggest feedback we have heard from testers was that A) The stack needed to be able to run everywhere, not just on Amazon EC2, and B) Once a server was launched, improvements and changes to Mercury needed to be portable to live environments.

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hegemona hymeteron, basilea hymeteron

noster rex tabernaculo. non loquetur, quia mortuus est

Time: 6-7pm Networking/7-8pm Meeting
Topic: UX Cliff Notes: Reviews of Current Usability and User Experience Books
Location: TBD

With the growth of the usability and user experience professions, the number of books available on the topic has exploded. Books range from specific instructions on methods or techniques, to conceptual ideas that challenge traditional thinking. It’s hard to keep up with all of the reading, so we decided to help out. During this meeting, several of our members will give a brief report on user experience and usability books they’ve read recently. The reviewers will summarize the key highlights of the book, lead a discussion on how the material could be applied, and discuss the implications for practitioners. Books to be reviewed are:

• Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click? by Susan M. Weinschenk (http://tinyurl.com/yjr8k9t)
• Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide by Todd Zaki Warfel (http://tinyurl.com/yg4dgeh)
• Moderating Usability Tests: Principles and Practices for Interacting by Joe Dumas and Beth Loring (http://tinyurl.com/yfd8zqx)
• Visual Thinking: for Design  by Colin Ware (http://tinyurl.com/ygwoznv)

There is room for one more book review. If you read something recently you would like to discuss, please let us know.

Visit http://www.nhupa.com for more information and to RSVP.

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TV shows like MacGyver and Junk Yard Wars, as well as real world survival and minimalist training [even camping] tell us that it’s cool to take bits of whatever is lying around, and jury-rig it into something useful, and potentially vital to our survival.  Today as I was thinking about the plethora of hacks we need to do something insanely simple…like…embed a flash video and have it work properly in all browsers. This made me realize, anyone who does web development or design is a fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants, certified, Web 2.0 MacGyver.

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Details on the new Aegir alpha release, how to install it, and what’s coming next

Last week the Aegir project released the latest alpha in the 0.4 release cycle. The most important features of this release are compatibility oriented, and we now have working support for Drupal 7 installs and upgrades, as well as support for upgrading from Open Atrium Beta 3 and Managing News Beta 6, both of which will have new releases due out in the next few weeks.

All users of the 0.4 alpha release, and all users who are managing Open Atrium or Managing News installations with Aegir, are recommended to upgrade to the new release, which is very stable and can be used for production installations. Instructions on how to upgrade to the latest release of Aegir are here.

One of our core developers, mig5, prepared a very useful screencast that illustrates how to install the new alpha.

Installing Aegir 0.4 alpha5 from mig5 on Vimeo.

Details on the new Aegir alpha release, how to install it, and what’s coming next

Last week the Aegir project released the latest alpha in the 0.4 release cycle. The most important features of this release are compatibility oriented, and we now have working support for Drupal 7 installs and upgrades, as well as support for upgrading from Open Atrium Beta 3 and Managing News Beta 6, both of which will have new releases due out in the next few weeks.

All users of the 0.4 alpha release, and all users who are managing Open Atrium or Managing News installations with Aegir, are recommended to upgrade to the new release, which is very stable and can be used for production installations. Instructions on how to upgrade to the latest release of Aegir are here.

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On Tuesday, February 9th at 6:30pm the Atlanta Drupal User Group (ADUG) will be hosting a very special event at our location sponsor, Matrix Resources. Our discussion will be predicated around the Drupal distribution called Open Publish (OP) that was created by Washington DC based consultancy, Phase2 Technology. Most notably, Phase2 was one of the lead development firms for the high profile launch of WhiteHouse.gov.

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If Facebook has shown us anything, it's that website users like to get timely notifications via email if there is something new to be seen on the site. Acquia Drupal includes the comment notify module that can help achieve this goal for your site. It sends email messages to content authors and commentators whenever new comments are added to content. There are ample subscription options to suit everyone, and an unsubscribe mechanism so that nobody has to endure unwanted items in their inbox.

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If Facebook has shown us anything, it's that website users like to get timely notifications via email if there is something new to be seen on the site. Acquia Drupal includes the comment notify module that can help achieve this goal for your site. It sends email messages to content authors and commentators whenever new comments are added to content. There are ample subscription options to suit everyone, and an unsubscribe mechanism so that nobody has to endure unwanted items in their inbox.

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Creating pretty urls or permanent links in Drupal is easy. Really easy. This functionality comes out of the box with the Path module. And by adding the contributed Pathauto module you can make your life easier by letting Drupal generate the pretty urls automatically based on some properties of your post (like the title).

But there's another way of doing this in Drupal. Drupal provides a mechanism in code by means of the custom_url_rewrite_inbound and custom_url_rewrite_outbound functions. Using these wisely may give you some performance gain. Let's see how you can use these.

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["Five measures prove to be useful: A, the area of the isovist, which gives us a measure of size (in 3-D this is a volume); P, the perimeter of the isovist, which gives us a measure of the boundary length (in 3-D this is an area) excluding the horizon and excluding Q, which is a measure of the length (area) of the radial, component of the isovist boundary; M2, which is a statistical measure of the variability of the boundary’s distance from x; and M3, which is a measure of the asymmetry of M2." From Benedikt]

If we dimensionalize the data from any given social framework online, could we apply isovistic theory to the quantification of perceptual awareness around a user in this textually augmented reality we now find ourselves?

• iPad GUI PSD | Teehan+Lax
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The query log feature of devel.module has faithfully served us since 2002, relatively unchanged. Since then, the web learned about AJAX and now devel for Drupal 7 finally gets with the times.

In the ops column of the screenshot above, you will see three ajax links titled P, A, E. Those stand for Placeholders, Arguments, and EXPLAIN. They work as follows:

• Placeholders. This is the default presentation of a query. Here we see SQL with placeholders instead of values. This is the most compact representation.
• Arguments. This link retrieves the same SQL replaces placeholders with actual values. This presentation is helpful for debugging and for copy/paste into you mysql editor for optimization.
• EXPLAIN. This link shows the EXPLAIN output for the query. This is super helpful for optimizing any slow query.

Also, The far right column is helpful for knowing which slave server actually executed a given query (master/slave is a new feature of D7).

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Infra-mince, Duchamp declared, cannot be defined, but can only be described by examples, such as the difference in displaced volume between a clean shirt and the same shirt worn once, or the taste of one’s mouth lingering in exhaled smoke.

Infra-mince was a new way to think about physical and temporal dimensions (decades before Mandelbrot discovered fractals). Holes in some of Duchamp’s artwork link the 2nd to the 3rd dimension. Sometimes he shot the holes out with bullets, echoing infra-mince again in the delay between the sounds of the shot and the impact.

Add this to the isovism concept and you basically describe a social network.

Posted via web from ethank’s posterous

A single isovist is the volume of space visible from a given point in space, together with a specification of the location of that point.

Isovism is an interesting concept when applied to the creation of a website. Quantifying the perception of space in a given point. How far can you see from your homepage for instance into the larger n-dimensional world a site creates?

Posted via web from ethank’s posterous