Starbow Consulting

Just got done attending the Voices That Matter: Web Design Conference. I had a really good time, very inspiring to see how much the profession has grown up. I might do a more formal write up, but in the mean time, here is my cleaned up twitter stream. I tend to unfollow anyone that does line-by-line reporting of presentations, so I keep it to one or two per session.

• Tue, 2009-04-28 09:09: Attending voicesthatmatter, taking notes for #dcsf2010 proposal.
• Tue, 2009-04-28 10:44: Joel Postman doesn't seem that interested in what he is saying. #vtm
  

Here is a screencast showing off two modules that I have built on top of the Popups API module. They are Popups: Add & Reference, which allows the Node Reference widget to create new nodes, and Popups: Subedit, which allows semi-in-place editing of just parts of a node.

This demo starts with a fresh Drupal 6 install, with the Popups modules, CCK, Node Reference and Admin Menu enabled.

View it full size. You might need to turn up your volume, the sound is a little low.

• a full-time, or near full-time, position with benefits.
• a collaborative working environment in the San Francisco East Bay Area or accessible by BART.
• an opportunity to do innovative work, especially in the area where Drupal and Ajax intersect.

Personal Highlights

• Authoring over a dozen useful Drupal modules, including Popups API, Popups: Add & Reference, Private Uploads, Find URL Alias, and the Flexinode to CCK Converter (see the whole list at http://drupal.org/user/33290).
• Actively participating in the Drupal community by testing and submitting patches to core and other modules.
• Helping get the #ahah form element (and other improvements) into Drupal 6.
• Founding and organizing the Bay Area Drupal Camp (BADCamp) 2007 and 2008.
• Founding and running the Berkeley Drupal Users Group for the last two years.
• Presenting at OSCMS 2007 (aka DrupalCon Sunnyvale).
• Building the Popups API and seeing other authors build interesting modules on top of it.

It is time to review my personal module release tagging strategy. The available tags have changed since I started releasing Drupal modules, and my understanding of the flow has evolved recently. Readers will understand this better if they are familiar with the info on the Drupal contrib branches and tags page.

Here is my current thinking (replace X with an increasing counter starting with 1):

I have been meaning to get up a good Popups API article forever and a day. It has changed a lot since the last time I blogged about it. Fortunately sirkitree just kicked out a great article Popups addiction. sirkitree has been making some solid contribution in the popups issue queue, and I got a chance to meet him at the last SF Drupal Users Group. He told me about what he and his gang have been doing with Popups over at ParentsClick Network.

I gave a presentation on Panels 2 at the January Berkeley Drupal Users group. We got a lively discussion going, and Chris from Gravitek Labs demoed some sites they have been working on that leverage Panels.

People have been talking about John Van Dyke’s Actions module ever since I started up with Drupal, back in the 4.6 days. It is now baked into Drupal 6, and all this time I have been kind of wondering what the fuss was about. Now, with my discovery of Views Bulk Operations I finally have a reason to get excited about actions.

A screencast demoing the Popups API enabled block admin page. This shows off the Popups API and Popups: Administration modules.

Doing a good wiki in Drupal 6 is surprisingly hard. My project to create a site with MediaWiki-like functionality for climate research at UC Berkeley took much longer than I thought it would, and the result was mediocre. Here are my notes evaluating different modules:

The Drupal markup filtering system is confusing for a couple of reasons:

• The terms “format” and “filter” are used inconsistently. For example, the main admin page is title “Input formats”, but the url is “admin/settings/filters”. The best I can do is: The markup filter system consists of multiple input formats which are ordered stacks of individual filters.
• The term “Input format” itself is misleading, because the filters work on output, not input.

• The “Input format” admin page is unhelpful and hard to navigate.