CivicActions

LIVE FROM THE MINNESOTA SEARCH SPRINT...

The sprint team of Robert Douglass, Blake Lucchesi, Djun Kim, David Lesieur, Chad Fennel, Earnest Berry, and myself, began work at 8am on this uncharacteristically warm sunny May day at the University of Minnesota.

In the spirit of the "Data Sprint," and the "Testing Sprint", Friday 5/9 through Sunday 5/11, we are meeting in what is being dubbed the "Search Sprint" at the University of Minnesota.

The good news is that CivicActions is busy! The bad news is that I had hoped to prepare more, but this date has really snuck up on me. My plane leaves tomorrow, and I've neglected preparing at all. I was asked to write this blog several weeks ago (sorry).

I started work on the coder module a little over a year ago, as a response to an internal engineering meeting where were discussing Quality Assurance code reviews, and said "we should have a module to do that."

At OS/CMS I briefly introduced coder in the Lightning Talks session.

While in Barcelona, pre-conference, I gave a Drupal Dojo titled Upgrading your contrib modules to D6? Coder module can help!.

Every release cycle, dries starts a "Personal Battle Plans" thread on d.o. You can read them all here: 4.5.x, 4.6.x, 4.7.x missing?, 5.x, 6.x, 7.x.

If you're still looking for a DrupalCon hotel, check out the Milner Boston Hotel which is the best deal available and about as close to the Boston Convention Center that you can get. Be sure to use their website and get the web special $109 ($122 after taxes) per night!

I can't vouch for the hotel, this will be my first stay. They have free internet and free breakfast. The only downside I see is that they advertise "Quaint European Style Rooms", which means small.

Florida held their primary elections yesterday, and the Florida Party Chair proclaimed victory for the Florida Democratic Voters:

Forms API (FAPI) is one of the coolest pieces of Drupal.

The power and flexibility of hook_form_alter has made it possible to change the behavior of a module, without actually modifying any code in the original module, and has created a whole new class of "helper" modules that enhance the capabilities of existing modules. But this article isn't about form_alter.

Today is a Martin Luther King Jr Day, a National Holiday in the United States honoring the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King.

I was responding to a Drupal issue this morning, that involved using a = or a >= when I flashed back to my college professor teaching about guarded loops. 

A quick google, and I found reference to his 1981 book, "The Science of Programming" whose synopsis says "This is the very first book to discuss the theory and principles of
computer programming on the basis of the idea that a proof of
correctness and a program should be developed hand in hand." 

Why do I write about this?

I spent the last two days writing a Drupal module to support a new WYSIWYG editor.  A few days ago, Aaron posted a note to our internal list about a new "Micro Inline Editor" called nicEdit.  It looked nice (aka, the name), but without some Drupal glue, it wasn't really usable.  So I wrote a Drupal module, and I'm using it to write this article!

Some Background