Aaron Winborn (via DrupalFire)

ONLINE RIGHT NOW ON REDDIT: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1glbmg/iama_chief_assistive_techno...

On Tuesday, June 18, at one o'clock EDT, I will be on a panel for an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Reddit - http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/ - The topic will be ALS and Assistive Technology.

So why should you attend?

First, it's only an hour or so, and it'll look better if more than one or two people show up. Besides, it'll be a great opportunity to spend your lunch hour with me. Being online simply makes it that more simple.

Next, if you have any pressing questions, such as how do you manage to write awesome modules for Drupal when your hands are completely useless, then this is your opportunity!

My qualifications: I was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease about two years ago, just before my newborn's first birthday. At first, my arms and hands were weak, so I purchased a magic touch pad and keyboard for the mac. By September, I needed to supplement this with Dragon Dictate (Naturally Speaking on the PC). This combination served me well until last year, when my hands became too weak to control the touch pad, so I began looking at eye gaze solutions.

The first iteration was a custom built eye gaze tracking system built by my father, from an open source concept over at http://www.eyewriter.org/ . It was cumbersome and difficult to calibrate, however, so beyond a couple of proof of concept demonstrations, I didn't really use that much.

Then about July I got a head tracking piece of software for the Mac, which served me well for a few months. However, it was doomed from the start, as my neck strength was already failing.

So in September of last year, I finally got a Tobii PCEye, and used it to control the mouse, while I continued to use Dragon to dictate code and emails to the computer.

Finally, this January, my voice had degraded to such an extent that I gave up struggling to keep training and retraining Dragon, and now use the Tobii, in combination with Dasher, an open source word predictor for use with eye gaze systems, to control all aspects of the computer.

I'm planning to get a stand alone Tobii system next month, which will allow me to speak when I have lost that ability entirely, using my own voice banked with Model Talker, and have also begun a trial using a brain computer interface (BCI) for the possible loss of eye movement in the future.

By far the best thing I have done during the course of this debilitating illness has been to try to stay one step ahead, by training myself to use the next bit of software or hardware before I actually need it. I believe that where medicine has completely failed patients with ALS, technology has taken up the banner, and offers the only hope.

So join me Tuesday at 1:00 for an AMA on Reddit, to have a chance to chat with me live. I'll post the URL here and on Twitter: http://twitter.com/aaronwinborn soon before the session starts.

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Gábor Hojtsy (via DrupalFire)

As I've outlined in the previous post Drupal 8 core now has 3 core modules (+1 proposed, +1 hidden) to deal with language support. This tidbit will be about the simple language setup features provided by Language module, which is the base for every other language feature.

Language module provides a simple language overview screen. You can reorder existing languages, remove languages (except the site default language, which on the screenshot is Hungarian) and add new languages. It is not anymore possible to have enabled and disabled languages on your site. This feature resulted in a confusing mess where some places and permission combinations allowed for the use of disabled languages and it was used a means to stage certain new content. Just use proven content staging techniques (or unpublished posts) for new language content.

Lullabot (via DrupalFire)

For this episode we have special guest Chris Eppstein join Addi, Kris Bulman, Micah Godbolt, and Carwin Young to talk about Sass and Compass. Chris is the creator of the Sass framework Compass, and is also part of the core Sass team.

• @chriseppstein on Twitter
• Sass project homepage
• Compass project homepage
• Drupalize.Me Meetup Memberships
• CSS Summit Online (JUly 23-25, 2013)
• SassConf (Oct 12-13, 2013)
• CSS Dev Conference (Oct 21-23, 2013)
• Chris' post about LinkedIn
• Compass project issue queue
• Sass project issue queue
• Drupal Magic Module
• Sass Globbing plugin
• Chrome Compass Search extension

Sass, Compass, and Drupal

Everyone dreams of making money while asleep. The term "passive income" is often defined as income that is received on regular intervals without requiring a great deal of work to sustain it. Usually some effort has to be put in upfront, but the payoff from passive income can last for years. Passive income is particularly relevant when it comes time to retire. Two techniques often recommended by financial planners are (a) rental properties and (b) dividend investing. Both can work well, not only as a retirement plan, but as a way to build steady income. Certainly the idea of collecting checks for the rest of your life with minimal effort sounds appealing.

Quite a few people that try to retire early are documenting their journey publicly. For example, Jason is trying to retire by 40 by investing in dividend growth stocks and Mr. Money Mustache retired at the age of 30 through rental properties. Many other great examples exist online; I love reading up on their stories and progress. There is a lot to like about their lifestyle too; a common theme among them is that they live frugally.

So what does this have to do with Open Source? I love Open Source and Drupal and would like to see even more contributors. I think a lot of developers would love passive income so they have the freedom to contribute to Open Source more, preferably even full-time. Many developers also live a frugal life; passive income may be a good option to explore. But also, what about a third passive income technique: (c) websites? I know several people who have a number of websites, some of which they haven't touched for months, yet they still bring in around $500 a month. Owning a few websites could provide a wonderful chance to earn passive income, and it so happens that many of us in the Drupal community have a talent for building websites ... Food for thought.

Dries Buytaert (via DrupalFire)

Topic: Drupal

Everyone dreams of making money while asleep. The term "passive income" is often defined as income that is received on regular intervals without requiring a great deal of work to sustain it. Usually some effort has to be put in upfront, but the payoff from passive income can last for years. Passive income is particularly relevant when it comes time to retire. Two techniques often recommended by financial planners are (a) rental properties and (b) dividend investing. Both can work well, not only as a retirement plan, but as a way to build steady income. Certainly the idea of collecting checks for the rest of your life with minimal effort sounds appealing.

Quite a few people that try to retire early are documenting their journey publicly. For example, Jason is trying to retire by 40 by investing in dividend growth stocks and Mr. Money Mustache retired at the age of 30 through rental properties. Many other great examples exist online; I love reading up on their stories and progress. There is a lot to like about their lifestyle too; a common theme among them is that they live frugally.

So what does this have to do with Open Source? I love Open Source and Drupal and would like to see even more contributors. I think a lot of developers would love passive income so they have the freedom to contribute to Open Source more, preferably even full-time. Many developers also live a frugal life; passive income may be a good option to explore. But also, what about a third passive income technique: (c) websites? I know several people who have a number of websites, some of which they haven't touched for months, yet they still bring in around $500 a month. Owning a few websites could provide a wonderful chance to earn passive income, and it so happens that many of us in the Drupal community have a talent for building websites ... Food for thought.

Aaron Winborn (via DrupalFire)

First, some background. My name is Aaron Winborn, and I am a developer for Drupal, which is an open source content management system, used to make web sites. I also the father of two young girls, who bring much joy into my life, and married to a beautiful woman. You may have heard of her, her name is Wonder Woman.

Just over two years ago, I was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. In short, that means that my mind will increasingly become trapped in my body as the motor neurons continue to die, and the muscles atrophy and waste away, until my diaphragm dies, bringing me with it.

My hands and arms are already completely paralyzed, and I'm confined to a power wheelchair. My diaphragm strength is largely diminished, and I am using breathing assistance 24/7, and I am at imminent risk for respiratory failure.

Even if I am fortunate enough to survive another year, which is only likely if I opt for a tracheostomy, my chances of surviving much longer become increasingly unlikely, as pneumonia becomes a specter haunting the late stages of ALS. There is no cure for this awful disease. My family gets to take care of all my needs and wipe the drool off my face, until I die, and leave them to pick up the pieces.

But yes, there is a silver lining to this all, such as it is. Kim Suozzi made a similar plea to the Internet a year ago today, and came up with the brilliant idea of freezing her body in the hopes of a distant advanced technology being able to revive her someday. Her body now rests at liquid nitrogen temperatures. http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/uvaqe/today_is_my_23rd_birthd...

I approached the organization responsible for raising the funds to help her out, the Society for Venturism, last November, and they agreed to take on my case as well. http://venturist.info/aaron-winborn-charity.html

But I am actually telling you all this in order to come up with a sort of reverse bucket list.

I've had a full life, with no regrets. I've done some travel, have lived in some cool places, like the Netherlands and London. I've made lots of good friends, and continue to do so. I've contributed to my debt to society, working hard throughout my life, as a teacher, a waiter, an open source software developer. I've worked with a few interesting characters, like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, and even lived in a Buddhist monastery before I met the woman of my dreams.

But I'm not ready to hang up my jacket quite yet.

When I was ten, I came up with three things that I wanted to be when I grew up: a teacher, a writer, and an astronaut. I've been two of the things, which is not bad. As an aside, I once told that to some people, and was asked, "Oh, what did you write?" To which I replied, "I didn't say I've written anything."

Joking aside, I'm looking for some grandiose ideas of things to do after I've died, and have hopefully been revived. And by that, I mean the sky's the limit. Don't worry about whether something seems technically feasible. This is your opportunity to think big. Like, go skinny dipping in the methane oceans of Neptune.

I want to do so much more with my life, but it's not in the cards this go around. I've become a spectator in life, living vicariously through my daughters, and relegated to typing with my eyes at fifteen words per minute on a good day.

But I'm not complaining. I awaken each morning as I always have, excited to take on the day. This is just a way to do some more brainstorming, to come up with a list of things to do during the next century, should we be so fortunate.

Stay strong,

Aaron

PS This question was originally banned from the Internet at http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1g7h69/anything_awesome_i_sho...

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Drupal Developer Days is a great tradition in Europe to provide space for developers and site builders to get together in the summer. After such prior locations as Barcelona and Brussels, the Drupal Developer Days is coming to Dublin this year!

The conference program includes great sessions on security, project management, automation, multilingual, mapping, REST, continuous integration and so on! Lots of opportunities to learn about Drupal and the entry ticket is only €25.

The event is also ideally timed to coincide with the last days before Drupal 8's API freeze. There is a whole weeklong sprint included for those who want to work on solving major and critical issues as well as any patches still viable before API freeze. If you are still to take your first steps to contribute, the Community Tools Workshop is for you to delve into giving back.

There will be a recruitment event there too, so when you register make sure to say that you're looking for a job. Acquia will be there so come talk with us about the work we do if you are interested in joining!

Dries Buytaert (via DrupalFire)

Topic: Drupal

Drupal Developer Days is a great tradition in Europe to provide space for developers and site builders to get together in the summer. After such prior locations as Barcelona and Brussels, the Drupal Developer Days is coming to Dublin this year!

The conference program includes great sessions on security, project management, automation, multilingual, mapping, REST, continuous integration and so on! Lots of opportunities to learn about Drupal and the entry ticket is only €25.

The event is also ideally timed to coincide with the last days before Drupal 8's API freeze. There is a whole weeklong sprint included for those who want to work on solving major and critical issues as well as any patches still viable before API freeze. If you are still to take your first steps to contribute, the Community Tools Workshop is for you to delve into giving back.

There will be a recruitment event there too, so when you register make sure to say that you're looking for a job. Acquia will be there so come talk with us about the work we do if you are interested in joining!

Lullabot (via DrupalFire)

By now everyone hopefully made it safely home from DrupalCon (if you're still there, it ended more than two weeks ago so you might want to head home), and while the dust settles we wanted to say thanks to all who helped make DrupalCon Portland a success, and also share some highlights from Lullabot.

The Lullabot Party

Gábor Hojtsy (via DrupalFire)

Once you install Drupal 8 in a foreign language, you'll have Language and Interface translation modules enabled with the chosen language configured. Drupal 8 has more core modules handling language related features, yet less requirement for contributed modules to be installed for the most important tasks (on my last count, the 4 modules explained here cover functionality of 20+ modules from Drupal 7 and in much better ways).

Why have multiple modules when a multilingual site just needs all the features? Well, there are also foreign language (not multilingual) sites that we aim to support better and multilingual sites can be very different as well. Also, admittedly there are technological reasons to organize the modules by the features they provide.

In Drupal 8 (so far) multilingual is the only group of modules, so you'll find these modules under the other core modules in a neat group.

Gábor Hojtsy (via DrupalFire)

Starting a new series

The Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative was announced on May 9th, 2011 - 25 months ago. Since it's inception, the heroic efforts of people on the initiative resulted in about 400 issues resolved but there are still about 300 open to resolve. We have made huge advances in terms of multilingual support in Drupal 8 thanks to all these changes and you can still help to make it perfect.

I'd love to highlight some of the great improvements that we made to make you excited about what is coming and point out some related places where you can still help to perfect what we have so far. This is number one in a series of short posts to discuss these improvements.

Language first in the installer

Drupal 8 makes language occupy the prominent first step in the installer. And compared to Drupal 7 where you were presented with a wall of textual instructions as to how to locate and download a translation file, place into a specific directory and reload the page, Drupal 8 comes with the realization that these are all automatable tasks. So we show you about a 100 languages to choose from to install Drupal 8 in.

The new Drupal version also comes with highly improved browser based language detection capabilities, so it will attempt to automatically identify your preferred language for this installation based on what your browser tells us. So in most cases, you'll likely just hit the button to continue and not think much about this.

We not only present you with the list of languages, we also download and import the translations to your system proper. So all the steps you did manually before are now automated. The installer can also fully show up in right to left languages, such as when picking Arabic.

Also, if you pick a foreign language here, English will not be among your site's languages anymore either. Drupal 8's assumption is that if you install in a foreign language, you likely want a foreign language website without English showing up at all kinds of places as an option. Compared to Drupal 7 where English was not possible to remove.

Lullabot (via DrupalFire)

Drupal's editorial experience has improved considerably over the past several releases, and Drupal 8 promises to be even better. However, it's still easy for writers and editors to collide with each other when they collaborate. If two people edit the same piece of content at the same time, one user's changes are inevitably lost. Fortunately, the Content Locking module is ready to help.

Lullabot (via DrupalFire)

Jared Ponchot and Jeff Robbins chat with Josh Higgins about his work as Design Director of the Obama 2012 Campaign. They discuss managing large creative teams, the importance of culture and lots more fascinating insights about the political campaign process.

• JoshHiggins.com
• BarackObama.com
• Shepard Fairey
• Illustrator Rafael López
• Designing Design Teams - Martin Ringlein

Josh Higgins on the Obama 2012 Campaign, managing creative teams, culture and more

Károly Négyesi (via DrupalFire)

There are a lot of great things happening! Let's first see those that are already in: the config system got back to a saner track by removing the partial import capability and only allowing import of full config trees. This removed manifests which, honestly, I never truly grokked. Also, config import and sync were converted to pluggable services earlier so if someone can figure out how to do partials better then they can do. There was an epic profiling effort made by the Twig team to get the conversion committable -- and then Alex Pott honored them by committing patches one by one instead of rolled together to give them credit. Same with the views rename method patches. Big, big kudos to Alex for this!

Database connections are now serializable. As MongoDB doesn't use PDO, this is only important to us in the way the Database class has been refactored to allow for this.

Entity controllers now can have their dependencies injected (what about entities themselves? see below). Although batch v2 didn't happen, the batch storage is now pluggable (and soon the batch specific tables will be gone completely as msonnabaum points out that the expirable keyvalue storage is fit for it).

On a performance front, let's note that contextual links are now AJAX, making them compatible with render caching. The issue was filed in 2010 and I filed it as "this will never be done although it's rather necessary", so big kudos to everyone fixing it.

Firing hooks during major upgrades were always a problem and we discouraged it but now this will throw an exception (this was mostly my work). This is the second cornerstone on making the Drupal 7->8 upgrade path way more resilient than before, the first one are tests for use cases that were untestable before. Probably it'd been better if migrate happened this cycle, but it didn't so we cook with whatever ingredients we have.

The evented branch of the entity refactor is now dead and won't happen but a lot of that code now lives in the widely accepted "let's move as much logic as possible from storage controllers to entity classes" patch. It even passed once but due to the user entities conversion to the next generation controller it currently fails but I expect it to be fixed this weekend and it's possible it'll get committed soon. This will make replacing entity storage controllers much easier and supporting contrib entities much easier too.

Meanwhile, entity classes themselves are being changed to not be plugins. This makes some sense because, well, there's not much pluggability here you would want to do. I believe this leads to dependency injection of plugins which will be useful now that most of the logic is moving there.

Ps. Let me congratulate two people here. You can't even find msonnabaum among the Drupal 7 contributors core and he is rapidly becoming one of the shaping architects of Drupal, quite for the better. Tim Plunkett of the Views in Core team, the unstoppable coding machine, who can somehow balance like five ongoing patches over 100kb, had only 23 core mentions in the Drupal 7 cycle. I am so glad to see others taking lead.

Lullabot (via DrupalFire)

Jeff Eaton and Jared Stoneberg discuss the Lark Cookbook, a Kickstarter-funded print/digital project powered by structured content.

• Lark Cookbook web site
• Lark Cookbook iOS app
• Lark Cookbook Kickstarter project
• Number 10 Web Company

Building a media-rich multi-platform cookbook with structured Drupal content

Károly Négyesi (via DrupalFire)

There are a number of Drupal 8 issues that simply make me sad. I still didn't stop contributing to Drupal nor I plan to, I just need to accept that we have some disagreements which are not getting resolved. It's frustrating and I am mostly just venting so comments are disabled. (It's frustrating enough that I went over them to tag them.)

Ps. There's a little silver lining: the config import code has been rewritten finally. Still, I will not touch CMI.

It's been a while since I wrote about Acquia Cloud so I wanted to give you a quick update. Acquia Cloud has experienced incredible growth so far in 2013. We recently crossed a milestone that I'm proud to share; we’re now running over 6,000 cloud instances on behalf of our customers in six Amazon regions stretching across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. These instances are used to run a wide variety of Drupal sites; from e-commerce to collaboration to marketing sites, and more.

All that capacity served over 18 billion requests in May, with many more requests served via our CDN partnerships. Compared to last year, Acquia Cloud's traffic is up 200%. We also served over 232 terabytes of data in May. This astounding growth solidifies the scalability of Acquia Cloud. And it's only going to grow faster as Acquia is signing up larger websites.

Dries Buytaert (via DrupalFire)

Topic: DrupalDrupalConState of DrupalLocation: Portland

Two weeks ago at DrupalCon Portland, I gave my traditional State of Drupal presentation. A total of 3,500 were present at DrupalCon, a new record for DrupalCon attendance.

In good tradition, you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 29 MB) or you can watch a video recording of my keynote (keynote starts at 14:00). The video of the White House guest appearance and the Drupal 8 demo video area also embedded in this post.

Two weeks ago at DrupalCon Portland, I gave my traditional State of Drupal presentation. A total of 3,500 were present at DrupalCon, a new record for DrupalCon attendance.

In good tradition, you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 29 MB) or you can watch a video recording of my keynote (keynote starts at 14:00). The video of the White House guest appearance and the Drupal 8 demo video area also embedded in this post.

Four Kitchens (via DrupalFire)

Field collections are at the same time one of my most favorite and least favorite aspects of working with Drupal 7. Since they are entities they can be extremely powerful and flexible site building tools, and I see lots of unrealized potential in that, on the other hand theming can be tricky and, for lack of better word, generally feels “icky.” There is little documentation online about best practices with almost all links pointing back to this thread on how to theme field collections. The proposed solutions in this thread are a mixed bag — mostly bad — but some that may work, but they certianly don’t follow any best practices in drupal theming. I’ll admit I have shipped field collection theming that, while working, did make me feel “dirty.” Below was a clean solution that — while simple — is maintainable and, hopefully easy to follow.

I created a quick function that pulled out the themed items from the field collection and organized them into an easy to theme array. The theming then felt a lot more natural, like working with a views rows template.

<?php
/**
* Creates a simple text rows array from a field collections, to be used in a
* field_preprocess function.
*
* @param $vars
* An array of variables to pass to the theme template.
*
* @param $field_name
* The name of the field being altered.
*
* @param $field_array
* Array of fields to be turned into rows in the field collection.
*/
 
function rows_from_field_collection(&$vars, $field_name, $field_array) {
$vars['rows'] = array();
foreach($vars['element']['#items'] as $key => $item) {
$entity_id = $item['value'];
$entity = field_collection_item_load($entity_id);
$wrapper = entity_metadata_wrapper('field_collection_item', $entity);
$row = array();
foreach($field_array as $field){
$row[$field] = $wrapper->$field->value();
}
$vars['rows'][] = $row;
}
}
}

In this function we pull in the “variables” array from the field template, the field name and an array of fields that we want to extract, and then load them into our own rows array which gets attached to the variables array for use in our template. It uses the entity_metadata_wrapper that is like a swiss army knife of sanity and clean code for Drupal 7. If you aren’t familar with it, start with this documentation page about entity metadata wrappers, and follow up with some quick googling. It’ll make you and your code happy.

Below is the function being called and our custom field template being established. One thing that keeps our code simple is that all fields in the field collection are required eliminating the need to check for the variables existence in the template.

<?php
function THEME_preprocess_field(&$vars, $hook){
if ($vars['element']['#field_name'] == 'field_achievements') {
$vars['theme_hook_suggestions'][] = 'field__achievements_collected';
 
$field_array = array('field_award', 'field_award_presenter','field_year');
rows_from_field_collection($vars, 'field_achievements', $field_array);
}
}

Finally below is the field template.

<?php
/**
* Field formatter for the field_achievements field collection.
*/
?>

<?php foreach($rows as $row): ?>

<?php print $row['field_award']; ?>

<?php print $row['field_award_presenter']; ?>

<?php print $row['field_year']; ?>

<?php endforeach; ?>

We had a number of fields that were just sets of text data that needed to be output in definition lists. The function could be easily modifed to render the fields instead of just the values by using entity_view(). Next steps for this approach would be to refactor to use entity info to get the fields so that it can be generic and would no longer require the need to pass in the fields that you want.

There is hope for theming within the module itself. There is a promising issue in the queue that looks like it makes the native theming more sane. Since it’s such a big change it doesn’t look likely that it’ll make it into the 1.0 branch, so we may need to wait for the next version before it drops. Perhaps there is space for an add-on contrib module that cleans up the theming.