Droople Droople Droople? Drupe Drupe Drupe! *waves flag*

I'm back from DrupalCamp UK, where I was helping out – partly because I'm interested in Drupal (it and I will do Great Things together, yes, my pretty), partly because it was held at my workplace and partly because I know Ian and some of the other GeekUprs who organised it. It was nothing to do with the pizzas (70 of them. Seriously. Between just over 80 attendees), although those were nice, and provided an... interesting challenge trying to get enough people who would take the leftovers home.

Really, really good weekend. I have a stressball in the shape of the Drupal droplet and a USB stick with DAMP on it. Those plus a couple of stickers are about it for schwag, although there was also a prize draw giveaway thing for lots of books. (All fully compliant with BBC competition guidelines, of course.) I've also been lionised and ego-stroked by slightly drunk developers, which my psyche apparently interprets as a Good Thing. In fact I'm evidently so awesome that everyone's desperate for me to help out at the next northern Droople event. Provisionally yes, depending how I feel tomorrow morning and what becomes of the one or two blister startups on my feet.

So, I've learned a lot from the (parts of) talks I saw, even when some things were over my head, met lots of neat people whose names I of course instantly forgot, and generally Organised Things. This meant everything from chucking a napkin in the direction of a spilled pint, through whisking round with spray cleaner on the morning of Day Two, via making sure windows and doors were open to counteract the broken air con and roomsful of sweaty geeks, to telling people which talk was happening where and what they were likely to be about. Also seen some coooool modules and stuff in action, such as Administration Menu.

I'm all fired up about making Profusion work niceynicey on Drupe now. If only there were a halfway house between Drupal and a messageboard system (that ISN'T a phpBB clone *blech*), that would really be ideal. Either that or we could stand to reimagine our play-by-message-board dynamic, and, well, Change is Scary.

Forays into Twitter don't seem to have harmed my usual pointless verbosity.

Poetry!!1!

And now I'm tired. And it's a normal work week starting tomorrow!

*droops*

View the original post at Black Dog Blog

Guess I know what I'm doing this weekend after all; I'd forgotten until this morning (yay Outlook reminders!) that I'd agreed to help out with DrupalCampUK.

That also answers any questions I might've had about what to do this evening. That's right: get my V6 on and then see if I can get NodeProfile to do what I need it to... namely provide 'child profiles' for main profiles, call them 'character' and 'author' if you will, effectively allowing the author to post in-character. (You see? Everything I do, I do it for you...)

Am now itching for one of these. And a netbook to use it on. I do rather like being technology-lite, being naturally inclined to hold out until direct neural interfaces are available, but the drawbacks of being disconnected from the mothercloudwebnet in the meantime are starting to outweigh the benefits of not being mugged.

View the original post at Black Dog Blog

Drupal NW user group meeting last night was pretty good.

I wouldn't say I'm entirely sure how to go forward, but that'll come in time, and meanwhile someone did a good demonstration of using views in 6.x to do just about anything. I'm still at the "planning how to organise data" stage just now. To that end, I got an answer to my "how do I add y/n options to a node" question (surprisingly complicated). So, first I'm upgrading my test install to 6.6 and then I'm playing!

It'll be such a relief to drop Discus with their secretiveness and complete lack of release schedule. Drupal, apart from being FOSS and far better supported with a large contributor base, is much more geared to community sites anyway; with all the modules on offer we may be able to do just about everything we want within the CMS.

Could we start a pie-in-the-sky wishlist? Maybe I'll start a topic for it on the boards. Yep, done. Comments disabled, so please post on the boards.

(It amuses me that a search for Discus 5 turns up a thread on how to migrate Discus to Drupal. From the thread: Discus 5 is coming out in mid-Feb [2006] (I hope!:) ) Looks like I'll be strictly on my own migration-wise.)

View the original post at HellHound.net

Well, most importantly, I learned that it's pronounced "droople". ;)

(Also that I'm in the minority by saying "micicle" where most people say "my-sequel". I can't resist it, though; it's too much fun to say.)

Other than that, while chatting to the organiser I brought up (what I guessed, from brief reading, to be) the main requirement I have of a CMS that could cause problems with Drupal's way of viewing the world. Thanks to having read through drupal.org in advance, I was able to convey this intelligently and ask the right sorts of questions.

*waits for disbelief to die down*

In brief, building on my last entry, this potentially problematic thing is creating sub-users as part of a user profile:

• a user can post as themselves (their main profile) on every type of node
• on some types of node, a user can post as any of their sub-users
• sub-users are switchable using a simple interface (with UI design issues here too, obviously)
• the switcher interface is only visible on the appropriate node types (this much I know should be easily done with *blanks and looks up the term* blocks or something similar)
• some site features are organised per user (user role/permissions, sitewide communication)
• some site features are organised per sub-user (though the main user gets one too) (blogs, 'profiles' which are also encyclopaedia entries)

For sub-user, of course, read "character". Aha, Ceiling Dog sees where I'm going with this.

I was told that I'm the first person to ask about this. Whee, I'm special! However, I'm also told that it should be possible, and that a module called Node Profile is what I need to look for.

Other random features I'll need — list may be updated as I think more:

View the original post at HellHound.net