CivicActions

DrupalSouth was a great success. As New Zealand's first nation-wide Drupal event, many weren't sure what to expect. However it seems that most expectations were exceeded; presentations were useful and interesting, ad-hoc unconference time was valuable, food was on time and tasty, beer was drunk and appreciated and most importantly, a good time was had by all!

There are some great photos on flickr, a long list of tweets on Twitter, and some write-ups by Michael Dance and Brenda "Shiny" Wallace. These are all syndicated onto the DrupalSouth homepage.

As one of the organisers, I thank all the sponsors, speakers and attendees who made this possible; Especially CivicActions who has further helped make my involvement possible through CivicActions' community contributions stipend.

It is through this sponsorship, that we have been able make resources available for other Drupal events in New Zealand (as long as they are organised by individuals in the NZ drupal community we can trust), most notably and most visible; a Drupal banner!

I look forward to more Drupal events in NZ in the future!

Enjoy the photos, and read on for more details and my highlights.

Julian Carver; Drupal vs the Rest

Julian Carver doesn't work with Drupal directly but sells open source solutions to enterprises looking for knowledge-management solutions. He noted that Enterprise-level customers expect content items and documents to 'go' somewhere in a hierarchy and find it odd that Drupal nodes "disappear into a cloud". He acknowledges that a flat system of content items is more flexible and hierarchies can be built from this but pointed out that nevertheless this makes Drupal harder to sell to enterprise-level evaluators.

Such customers also don't like to hear; "There is probably a module for that". They prefer "We've done that before..." or "We can do it like this..."

Dan "dman" Morrison; Drupal and the Encyclopedia of Life - True Taxonomy

Dan demonstrated some highly technical code development he has recently been working on for the Encyclopedia of Life – "an ambitious project to organize and make available via the Internet virtually all information about life present on Earth. At its heart lies a series of Web sites—one for each of the approximately 1.8 million known species." And it is the tools that facilitate the creation of these websites (via install profiles) and the syndication of biological taxonomy (via xml and other technologies) between them that Dan has been developing.

The many tips and tricks I picked up from his presentation and a more detailed BoF afterwards, such as Drupal 6's batch processing API, are out of scope for this blog post, but the EoL project is extremely interesting for anyone interested in Biology, especially at an academic level. This great video sums it up nicely;

Bevan Rudge; Google Maps in Drupal; The Hub Map

My own session on Google Maps mashups in Drupal led to my discovery that everybody knows more about Peter Gabriel (founder of WITNESS, a CivicActions client) than me!

Dave Lane; Managing Drupal with Drupal

Dave's demonstration of Egressive's Drupal-based issue-tracker and project management tool was very inspiring and led me to feel guilty that we at CivicActions aren't eating our own dogfood (We use Trac).

Joshua Campbell; Drupal in Education

Josh's recount of how one of his 17-year-old high school pupil's hacked a Telecom server and got admin rights was very entertaining.

Brenda "shiny" Wallace; Drupal on Postgres

Brenda's rant about how Drupal developers don't write SQL, but instead write MySQL, and about how MySQL disrespects the SQL standard was a big eye-opener and extremely educational for a number of developers in attendance, including myself. It's a shame when superior technologies get left behind because marketing, business, the crowd, or other factors push another inferior technology to the top of the popularity charts and drown out the lesser-known but superior technologies. That seems to happen a lot in open source.

Jonathan Hunt; NZ Government Web Standards and Drupal

Jonathan Hunt's presentation of NZ's eGov web standards was perhaps the most educational and interesting for me. I believed I had a good grasp of accessibility standards, but was proven wrong by a number of accessibility issues that Jonathan discussed and are often overlooked;

• en-nz is the recommended language format for websites targeted to New Zealanders. mi is the 2-character language code for for Maori.
• Use hyphens instead of underscores in URLs (e.g. in pathauto settings) so that underlined links are not ambiguous.
• Don't use underlining in text so that text is not mistaken for links.
• Use height="" and width="" attributes in images so that the page content doesn't jump about as images load.
• It's wise to use a link-checker input filter or cron task.
• Use the eGov standards compliance testing bot for NZ-targeted websites; Accessware.
• There are standard access keys for navigation, e.g. type '1' to go Home, '2' for the Sitemap, '3' to Search, '9' for Contact.... The accesskey="" attribute on links does this.

Interestingly, malicious site attackers once intentionally tried to cause seizures by adding <BLINK> and <MARQUEE> elements to websites about epilepsy.