Just a Gwai Lo - fun within prescribed limits

Upgrading Drupal sites between major versions can be tricky. The community of developers that numbers in the thousands has taken great care to maintain upgrade path between adjacent versions of the content management system. This is especially true of Drupal's core, though one must go through each version to get to the destination. (An example: going from Drupal 5 to Drupal 7 requires passing through Drupal 6.) Contributed module upgrades take place with a very slight degree of peril, though typically a developer will include upgrade paths between major versions. Though incredibly rare, some modules will not upgrade their database to the new version of the module, and even then someone will flag it as an issue and it will get resolved.

Official Documentation

If you came here looking for guidance on upgrading your Drupal site, please consider visiting the official documentation at Drupal.org. The following only deals with two specific cases that may not apply to your site. read more →

Early last year, around the time of DrupalCon San Francisco, Packt Publishing approached me to serve as technical reviewer for a book. Several Microsoft Word documents and 7 months later, the dead trees edition of Drupal Theming Cookbook by Karthik Kumar, arrived at my doorstep, complete with an acknowledgement of my work inside the front cover. In the hopes of branching out a little, I also received a complimentary copy of Django 1.0 Website Development by Ayman Hourieh. Over the course of a month in December 2010 it served as an excellent guide to completing one's first app, with little or no Python knowledge required, but taking the 'dive right in' approach. (Anything that didn't work with Django 1.2 was a quick Google search away. I have sticky notes at every point at which it differs from the current version as of this writing.) I hope to ship an app based on the example sometime this year.

At the end of last November, I helped instruct at a community-based clinic teaching a basic-level introduction to the Drupal CMS. Based on notes from the Seattle Drupal Clinic held in 2009, several members of the Drupal community and people new to Drupal converged at the FCV office in downtown Vancouver. We covered modules, content types, image manipulation, and for my session at the end, the Views and Block modules. We the trainers learned a lot from that first session, and it seems like the same can be said about the participants. My thanks go to everybody involved. It's an initiative I'd like to participate in again.

A third win involves getting back into the Drupal support game. You can find me on the #drupal-support IRC channel when things slow down at work, and recently on Stack Overflow's Drupal-related questions. While having reservations about not tracking the Drupal.org forums for support, I will go where the people are.

Since some people have asked, since June of last year, I've been working for OpenRoad Communications, a web services company based in Gastown. They're technology-agnostic, and when they had a couple of Drupal projects come their way, it made sense to have me on full-time. Separately from web services, they created a product called ThoughtFarmer, which they bill as a social intranet. (It might be tempting to make a connection between Drupal and ThoughtFarmer, but other than my sitting next to the development team, rest assured the two are not related.) Since months can go by between my mentioning my employer, it's probably best to refer to LinkedIn or my resume for my latest professional status.

Unbeknownst to people who visit my website directly, Just a Gwai Lo has served Google AdSense ads for some time now. Very early on I came to the conclusion that showing automatically-generated content-aware ads on personal sites was tacky, since those visiting directly were likely those who wanted to develop a personal relationship, no matter how loosely defined, with the author. That applies to the relationship I want to build with my readership as well: if they visit the site directly in a browser of subscribe to a feed, they shouldn't have something hawked at them.

People visiting through search engines, however, get no such treatment. They're likely people I don't know and, based on what people search for—and don't find on the site—don't want to have a relationship with. So anybody visiting in from one of the major search engines would see a Google AdSense ad, and over the years I've made enough to help fund some small vacations to the United States. (Since Google pays me in American dollars, it goes in my USD account, which I then withdraw for trips south of the border.) Nothing spectacular, and definitely not worth the amount of investment I put into the custom PHP script which looped through a list of domains returning TRUE if one of those domains were Google, Windows Live Search (as it was known then), Yahoo! and some others. Now I use Drupal, the following contributed modules and a one-line conditional in the block display filter to show ads to people finding my site that way.

• AdSense, with the component modules "AdSense core" and "Managed ads" enabled.
• Search Engine Referer API, which returns FALSE if the referrer is not a search engine and an object (essentially TRUE) if it is.
• The following line of PHP in the "Page specific visibility settings" for the ad's block: <?php if (module_exists('serapi')) { return serapi_get_search(); } ?> I could have written a ternary operator, but I sought clarity in this case.

After my next payment, I'll disable this feature as part of an effort to simplify my Drupal install. This will cut down on the number of updates needed and ever so slightly decrease the load on the server. It's never been worth displaying them based on the time invested in this, though I can say the money plus experience with the advertising system in general did offset it a bit.

Addison Berry, aka @add1sun, presented about her experience as documentation lead for the Drupal content management system project the other day at the Writing Open Source conference in Owen Sound. In her role as chief cat-herder, she found that the most difficult people aren't poisonous. Instead they just don't know how to communicate with the community, and they need to translate where they're coming from to the way the community operates. It's hard work, she reports, to turn them into a contributor. She referred the audience to the "Poisonous People" presentation by the Subversion people, as yet unwatched by yours truly.

Addison talked about religious wars that occasionally break out. That is, the crux of the issue is more important than the resolution, and often leads to inaction. She also discussed the differences between recruiting in the corporate world and recruiting in the open source world. For private companies, they hire a skillset that they can filter for by listing the job requirements, either explicitly or implied. In open source, she says, you have the skillset first and you work with it. Many cats scratching their own itch, hence the herding to get them to scratch the community's itches too. The people you get working on a project have a rich background, both in terms of skills and life history. Skillsets include a lot of non-technical backgrounds in open source (Addison has an anthropology degree, for example, and my education is in political science).

Drupal has a large mass of documentation, and Addison is trying to whoop up energy in managing the base of existing documentation for Drupal 5 and 6 while gearing up for writing the documentation for the upcoming Drupal 7.

Open source has a natural passion that brings people together. Showing the example of a rowing team on her slide illustrated the need to hire a coach to tell them when to row. Herding involves keeping lines of communication open and opening up new ones as well as banging on pots about documentation. Instead of telling people what they can do, empower them by including them in the conversation. Addison, as leader, knows what she won't do and has so far been able to find people who will. Tracking metrics around the documentation—answering a question I had before I had the chance to ask it—Addison is not interested in, but she found someone who is. Many "soft-skills", such as facilitation, have come in handy even if the person with the skill does not claim membership in the software community. Also universities and their students have found time and energy to contribute usability testing as part of course credit or as part of their graduate studies.

Letting go and getting out of the way: Addison wanted the vision to be perfect, but quickly understood that she can't lead the charge or drag it out all the time: instead she recognized the need to let people run with things and support them. Getting people to trust you that that's the right direction.