Kim Bach . Org

Regular readers might know that I’m a big fan of the Content Managment System Drupal. I’ve been actively promoting this system for 3 years, and I was active when Drupal Danmark, the Danish Drupal community, was established in the spring of 2006.

Despite this, I’ve never really managed to build anything useful using Drupal!

It’s not that I haven’t tried, actually I’ve ventured into a number of projects where I’ve tried to use Drupal as an application framework, because I, strongly, believe that Drupal is so much more than a CMS.

The projects haven’t failed completely, and I’ve learned valuable lessons, but I never really managed to finish them.

As a developer trying to work with a CMS for development is rather frustrating, since you get to spend most of your time configuring the system, and you constantly run into limitations, that mostly are related to the fact that developers and non-developers alike, has to be able to configure the system.

Why did the projects fail? Was it due to lacking skills on my part, or is Drupal not suited to use as an application framework or are there additional factors?

I’d like to explore this, so I’ve signed-up for the very first DrupalCamp Copenhagen, that will be held November 15th and 16th 2008 in Copenhagen.

I’ve also proposed a session: Using Drupal as a Web Application Framework, let’s see if that is accepted, but for sure I’m not going to be a tourist, and I’m going to actively pursue an answer to my questions.

You’ve come a long way baby
Like I mentioned, I was present when we took the first steps trying to establish the community back in spring of 2006, but since late 2006 I’ve been mostly absent from the community.

Since then Drupal, and Drupal Danmark, has grown stronger and stronger, and if you take a look at the sign-ups for DrupalCamp Copenhagen 2008, you can see how strong the community has grown.

The fact that there’s a significant number of international attendees is impressive. This has a lot to do with Drupal Danmark and evangelists like Morten DK’s and Mikkel Høgh’s very active participation in the international community.

So thank you all for growing the community, and having the guts to go ahead with DrupalCamp Copenhagen 2008. YOU ROCK!

Drupal Danmark: You’ve come a long way baby.

Hope to see you at DrupalCamp Copenhagen.

See also:

• Posts on Kim Bach . Org Tagged with Drupal

After a while being away from Drupal CMS, and struggling with a, IMHO, buggy version 5.0 earlier this year, I’ve come back to visit this old friend, and I’m very happy to be back.

Firstly: I must say that the current version 5.3 of Drupal is rock solid, and that I have renewed confidence in Drupal.

My revisiting Drupal has, in part, been sparked by a rather depressing talk on the Drupal Denmark mailing list. The community seemed to be withering away, and I was sad to hear that.

Personally I’m back from a long break from ICT work, and I think that I did a fair share of volunteer work, while we were trying to set up the group last year.

Another reason I’m back, is that I have a number of web-projects coming up, and I’ve long considered making Drupal the foundation of a majority of my future web projects, you might not notice, since my projects, most likely, won’t look much like Drupal.

You might also want to check my del.icio.us links tagged with Drupal, I’m currently looking into integration issues, but I’ll also be sharing module recommendations, and I’ll, most likely, contribute localisation files back to the community - it’s good to be back.

Drupal: Upon this “rock” I will build my “church”

If you get this error from Drupal:

Incompatible environment

The following error must be resolved before you can continue the installation process:

Multibyte string input conversion in PHP is active and must be disabled. Check the php.ini mbstring.http_input setting. Please refer to the PHP mbstring documentation for more information. (Currently using Unicode library Error)

It can be fixed by adding the following lines to your settings.php file in the PHP settings section:

/* PHP.ini overrides */
ini_set('mbstring.http_input', 'pass');
ini_set('mbstring.http_output', 'pass');

Thank you to Henrik for fixing this for me, Surftown accounts need this setting in order for Drupal 5 to work.

Using XML-RPC to combine Drupal and Wordpress on a site | drupal.org

This looks like a cool tip, using the Moveable Type XML-RPC API to integrate content from WordPress and Drupal.

I just love the XML-RPC blogging API, don’t migrate, integrate…Hmm does a Moveable Type XML-RPC API implementation exist for MediaWiki?

I think that using RSS for content integration, is the way to go under normal circumstances, but the flexibility the XML-RPC API offers is great.

So the very first BarCamp Copenhagen took place this Friday, and it was great, I went home with new ideas and confidence that my own ideas aren’t “completely off the meter”.

I didn’t really know the format of BarCamp, other than what Henriette Weber had told us in the invitation, but I think we did quite well, and all the participants had something to bring to the table.

I suppose that the other participants will write about their respective subjects, but I’d say that the GEEK factor was VERY high, with subjects ranging from marketing to blood donation over the “new new isn’t the new but the old”, which, by magic, was a recurring theme in three of the presentations, including my own.

Henriette Weber talked about marketing, and an idea that she had, she’s actually tired of the “new new”, e.g. viral marketing which she thinks is nothing but “old-school marketing”.

Peter Brodersen presented his simple and brilliant Google Maps application, findvej.dk.

Frederik talked about how to bridge the gap between business and technology, they rarely speak the same language. That could have been an interesting discussion, but I was too busy documenting what was going on the IRC channel, that right now seems to have been lost in the black bit hole, next time I suggest that we use iChat or Skype.

Karin Høgh presented a great list with 14 items on how to please your podcaster, basically they need encouragement, comments and donations to keep doing what they’re doing, so if you listen to a podcast, remember to please the people that are producing it.

Olle talked about the new and the old, and that put us on a track where we discussed programming languages, and Karin mentioned that she once had taken a course in Java programming…What a waste for the world, and her. She actually thought that programming languages were something akin to a real language, so she was surprised that it was basically mathematics. This started a track where we discussed the old Knuth paradigm of computer programming as an art form, vs. the current predominant paradigm, where computer programming is seen as a science.

Now it was my turn, and I also talked about the old and the new, we’re currently tied to our desktops, laptops, mobile devices. What if we could have dedicated hardware that could help strengthen and build a community, and this brought me from the visionary Minitel to the equally visionary Wired Rabbit - or “Lapin Communicant”, the Nabaztag from Violet - The smart object company. J’ai vu le futur et le futur étiez Violet.

I’m trying to build a Danish Nabaztag community site, Nabz.dk, but I’m managed to kill it with embedded PHP code, and my “man” is too busy at the D3 Expo to help me.

Here’s my presentation: Adopt a rabbit (1.4MB Open Document Format).

Now we took a break to go get something to eat.

After the break we went into a more free format.

Thomas wanted to discuss how to utilise cell phones for more than texting and voice, well this was not your typical audience, so we all surfed the web on mobile devices. My personal favourite mobile web applications are Google over WAP (http://www.google.com). Google over WAP is brilliant because it utilises Google cache to serve pages optimised for mobile devices, and it works like a dream, even with hyperlinks. Next is Gmail over XHTML (http://m.gmail.com), now I’m as mobile as I ever want.

I also mentioned my traditional collaboration project Æbletræet, where we’ve build a sizeable knowledge base of Apple and Macintosh related subjects using a wiki based on MediaWiki. This has been great being involved in, because you can “hype” each other - when somebody writes an article you get inspired to improve it, and/or write your own. Like one of the comments reads IRC+Kim Bach=Inspiration.

I also mentioned how we’re using MediaWiki combined with Google Maps, to visualise the location of volunteers and users in Hjemmelektiehjælpen - a volunteer project, in collaboration with the Danish Refugee Council (Dansk Flygtningehjælp). We’ve actually worked with the developer of the MediaWiki Google Maps extension to improve it.

Morten is venturing into GEEKDOM as well, he talked about how to improve the Drupal administration interface with standard Tango icons, what a remarkable and simple idea, for a geekstradionare comme moi, I have few problems navigating the Drupal admin interface, but after I went home I could see how right Morten is.

Finally Christian engaged the geek warp drive, first he talked about the perfect match RSS and XMPP is. And you know what? Nabaztag understands XMPP!

But Christian also had a surprise, and I guessed it a Simon game! WOW, I just love that. He made a historical account of the start of the gaming industry, and with the Nintendo Wii, Nabaztag etc. it’s like we’re coming full circle game play and plain fun is important once again.

Christian ended by pitching blood donation! A noble cause, he felt that he need some counterweight to my shameless pitch of Nabaztag.

“Geeky shit” as morten.dk said…Indeed!

Thank you Henriette! Looking forward to the next BarCamp Copenhagen. I think the attendance was about right. Yes it was sad with the late cancelations, but if we’d been more people, we’d had too little time to go into the discussions. I love the open space format, but we sometimes we need to respect the “speaking order”.