FLM

DrupalJam in 7 tweets (Awesöme?!)

Hans de Zwart and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. For this post we agreed to write about DrupalJam 6 by commenting on 7 tweets that have a #drupaljam hashtag. You can read Hans’ post with the same title here.

1. bertboerland @arjenvrielink you can still do a BoF at the#drupaljam

I submitted a proposal for a presentation which was refused. But one of the organisers informed about the possibility of a BoF via twitter, which is very cool (considered but didn’t do a BoF after all). Furthermore, I learned  something since I didn’t know what a BoF is. Luckily wikipedia did.

2. arjenvrielink Would be cool if solr could build spatial indexes from shapefiles and geotiffs to allow semantic spatial search #drupaljam

Tweeted when watching a presentation by Robert Douglas on the excellent Apache Solr, which integrates beautifully in Drupal. Two slides later, Robert announced integration of of geospatial indexing in Solr. Supercool!

3. ijansch #drupaljam not sure I get it. If drupal and solr are free, what’s the added value of the commercial aquia search wrapper?

Common misunderstanding of the freemium model. I think Acquia is a great example of how freemium can be successful: release your software as open source and offer paid services around it.

4. kanariezwart @shderuiter Die views overtuigen mij niet zo. MySQL views zijn toch sneller? part 2 tippeldip? #drupaljam

rough translation (ed.): Those views are not really convincing to me. Aren’t MySQL views faster? part 2 tippeldip.

Two issues: 1. I think he completely misses the point of Drupal Views. Drupal Views are so powerful because it basically puts the tools of a DBA in the hands of a non-techie (the Drupal admin).  2. tippeldip  = tippelphip = tippelvip = drupal lingo for template files which end in .tpl.php. Nice to see that all communities have their own idiom and language.

5. shderuiter Loving the changes to theming in Drupal 7, but upgrading’s gonna be a bitch. So basically nothing new… :-)#drupaljam

Drupal is not backward compatible and upgrade paths are not always clean and smooth. I think this fundamental design decision is one of the forces that drives Drupal’s success. The developers are free to create the best thing that the current state of technology allows for. Moodle for example suffers from the opposite decision. Lot’s of ‘bad’ design choices in Moodle can be traced back to the quirks and limitations of early MySQL and PHP versions.

6. regnard RT @arjenvrielink: Design for the mental model, not for the implementation model. Drupal7 UX #drupaljam

Another reason why I love twitter: twitter is a mental note taker; tweet was about that often techies tend to design from the perspective of all the cool stuff they’ve build where they should be designing for the people using it.

7. hansdezwart What is the reason @mortendk has chewing gum in his mouth while presenting? To make sure we can’t hear what he is saying?#drupaljam

This was tweeted by several other people and the presenter apologised afterwards. The best presentation of the day severely wounded by chewing gum sounds. Bummer man.

All in all it was good to be at the Drupaljam. Met some cool people, got some fresh ideas and had fun hanging out with Hans.