Well, February is always a short month, but this year it seemed like it passed in just a couple of weeks… and now it’s already March and I’m only finally getting around to putting the final touches on this posting for the January “Modules of the Month”. How did that happen? Well, I won’t try to bore you or make excuses. It’s just been one of those months. I’m going to try to keep up my current momentum and evaluate and write up my favorites from February now… hopefully finishing that in the next week or so. If it’s not done by the 15th, it won’t be done till April since I’ll be taking off for my first trip to India in the middle of this month.

But I’m not here to write about myself. This is about some modules which I found might be worthy of notice… specifically those released in January 2013. It’s interesting to see the evolution of a Drupal version and what kinds of modules are being released these days. Almost no modules are being released for Drupal 6 and Drupal 8’s developer API is still far enough from maturity that there are very few modules being released for it, so almost all the focus is on Drupal 7. Almost anything really critical has already been done, so most modules now fit into areas of workflow improvement, integration of third-party libraries, developer tools, and addressing the needs of an increasingly mobile audience (responsive design). There are a lot of new modules for image display, for keeping a closer eye on site administration issues, creating better e-shops, deploying content from one site to another, and managing caching, among other trends. It’s clear that Drupal 7 is a mature product serving the needs of an extremely diverse community and it’s exciting to see all the new ways that, each month, developers encounter new needs and find inventive ways to further extend on the feature-set. So read on to see what new and fun stuff we got in January… (and I promise to try to get February’s review done in the next week or so).

November 2012 was a busy month for a lot of people involved in Drupal contribution. It was the final weeks before the “feature freeze” for Drupal 8, so a lot of the focus was on new features for the next great release of Drupal. Many of the “new projects” were simply “namespace reservations” for new core modules or planned contrib modules which relate to Drupal 8; most of which had no project code committed at all (for some, presumably, it’s all in the main Drupal 8 repository). But there were also a number of new feature-enhancing modules released for Drupal 7 (and a few for Drupal 6), several which improve search functionality, a few for delivering mobile-friendly content from a Drupal site, some for commerce, others designed to help manage Drupal sites and ensure that nothing slips through the cracks when moving from “development” to “production”, among other new gems.

It’s fun, too, that we got a couple new “novelty” modules in November: one, Driesday, puts a “Happy Driesday!” message on your site every November 19th; another is a bit more insidious, with a fully-disclosed dependency on Bad judgement: Feature creep allows you to nostalgically hang onto the “good old days” when Features had a few more quirks. So if you want to remember that fun, just turn this module on and, as the module description says, “every time that you export or update a feature the Feature creep module will randomly add an extra component to your feature, what fun!”

Before we get into the module descriptions, of course, I should acknowledge the very late arrival of this month’s release of this column. It’s been one of those months… again. But let me try to hold onto my optimism that I’ll be seeing you with December’s write-up in just a couple weeks. I’ll be aiming for the first week of January. Now let’s have a look at the “new” modules.

Once again, I’ve surveyed the looong list of modules from the past month (September 2012). This article highlights and summarizes the features of some I found most notable. As usual, the selection and any opinions are my own and the order of appearance here is strictly alphabetical. Category terms are links to Drupal.org projects categorized with the terms. I’ve added terms for modules whose description lacked appropriate categories or might have been missing categories I thought were appropriate.

This month, while we didn’t get any new novelty modules which require bad judgment, there was one which I thought was funny and which otherwise serves no real purpose, other than perhaps to provide an example of object oriented PHP design with interfaces, etc: the BLT module, written by Jess of University of Wisconsin-Madison and Drupal.org’s reigning IRC queen. Its very short (non)description is sure to make you smile:

Q: You’re a vegetarian; why do you get to have the blt project namespace?

A: The BLT is actually a base implementation; a properly architected interface does not mandate bacon.

Now let’s get on to the serious modules…

I started writing this post at the DrupalCon and then continued work on it on the train back home after a long week, last Sunday after the code sprints—even now, more than a week later (after being ill for a week—I think I was burning the candle at both ends for a bit too long), it’s hard to believe that it’s finally over. I arrived the weekend before to participate in the pre-con code sprints and stayed for the Friday–Sunday after the conference to continue that effort. I’ll write about the sprints in another post. This one will cover the highlights of the actual DrupalCon, what I think worked well, and recommendations for those attending their first DrupalCon; with two new continents getting a ’con this year, I think there will be more than a few at their first.

The food at DrupalCon Munich was great

For me, one of the major highlights of this conference was the outstanding food quality. It was so good I was distracted enough I never pulled out my camera to take photos of i, but it was attractive, gourmet, and delicious and there was something for everyone, even a fantastic salad buffet as well as more desserts than anyone could try… and hot dishes with plenty of options for both vegetarians and omnivores, alike. In the closing plenary, it was revealed that the catering costs for the event were about €352,000 for the 1800+ of us in attendance; not surprising for the quality and abundant variety of fare they served us. Food service tables were put in place in all areas of the conference so that there was no crowding into one area and the same dishes were provided at both the Sheraton and the Westin Grand, which were a few minutes’ walk away from each other. The conference occupied the three conference center floors of the Westin Grand and a few smaller rooms in the Sheraton, which were primarily “core conversations”. One might think I would gorge myself, but most days I had simple salad items, walnuts, and seeds… and gave myself a break before finishing with some fresh fruit and a light mousse from the dessert buffet. Despite the fact that the days were hot and many of the rooms weren’t well conditioned, people were alert and in good spirits and I think the food had more than a bit to do with that.

To continue a moment in the vein of “food”, since I really do think it was notable at this DrupalCon, I hope this reflects some new recognition of the importance of good sustenance when organizing a successful event like this. And I hope that future Drupal events will also place emphasis on food quality. That said, I also think that the community would pull together if we had commercial kitchen space and quality ingredients—we could prepare similar gourmet meals without quite the budget we used for catering at this conference; on the other hand, such a model might work better at one of the large DrupalCamps (a few hundred attendees) than at a huge (North American or European) DrupalCon. Of course preparing our own food would provide another place for people to connect (food preparation and more volunteer service), which I think would offset the downsides (not being able to be someplace else whenever you have “kitchen duty”).

The Venue

Munich is a beautiful city I’d never really visited before the DrupalCon. Public transportation was not too expensive, but I got to see a bit more of Munich by walking almost everywhere, so my walks back from the pre-conference sprints and out to dinner (beer) in the evening were mostly through parks where I got to see the huge Olympics installation and unusual sights like Munich’s famous river surfing.

Sessions and participation

Choosing sessions

This was my second time attending a DrupalCon and I decided I wanted to primarily attend the “core conversations” track (with a few exceptions). For those who don’t know, the “core conversations” sessions are where plans for the future of Drupal are presented, discussed, and refined. It’s truly an amazing experience to sit in a room with dozens of top-notch developers as they hash out the architecture for new Drupal features or present the innovations they have already completed. Of course participating in the Drupal 8 (Multilingual initiative) sprints in Barcelona (a couple months ago) and before and after the DrupalCon session days probably also spurred my interest in the areas being covered by other initiatives, but it is definitely an interesting track if you are not sure what to attend. In the past, core conversations were often not fully recorded, another reason I chose to attend this track, but it looks like you can view most core conversations pretty well now, online. If you missed them and are interested in the future of Drupal (i.e. Drupal 8), there are many that you might want to watch.

Volunteering

Another first for me was helping the DrupalCon staff as a volunteer, mostly monitoring the rooms I was in and taking a head-count in mid-session. Other activities of a room monitor included being a bit early and making sure the speakers had everything they needed; I got to loan out a display adapter for one session and was prepared with multiple power adapters if anyone happened to be missing a way to plug in—we also tried to make sure that questions were recorded in session audio (either by having those with questions come to a microphone or the speaker repeating the question). I found volunteering rewarding and I thank Adam Hill, the DrupalCon Munich volunteer coordinator, for being a great guy to work with.

Drupal 8 will be great!

Angie Byron’s current overview of Drupal 8 (aka “Drupal 8: What you need to know”) had not changed a lot since I last saw her similar presentation at the “Developer Days” in Barcelona a couple of months earlier, but it filled the largest session room, so there may have been close to 1,000 in attendance. Some features are more polished, some of the features are not yet written, but are better conceptualized than they were a couple of months ago, but the general ideas are mostly the same so in a presentation providing an overview of Drupal 8, while much has changed, it wasn’t much that affected the presentation. I’ve take the liberty to add a few specifics which were actually covered in separate sessions (sessions which covered each core initiative, for example), just for the sake of brevity and consolidation of information.

One key point that was made by all Drupal 8 core initiative leads is that we are only 3 months away from “Feature freeze” for Drupal 8 (December 1st, 2012), so it’s time to pitch in and try to help get all the great planned features into Drupal 8. All of the major initiatives need help and have areas where they are behind schedule as far as being ready for the freeze deadline with all the features the community would like to have in core.

Key Drupal 8 initiatives and components