News/Blog

WriteTheDocs Conference Rundown

Earlier this week, I attended and gave a talk (Motivating Developers to write API Documentation -- based on my experiences with the Drupal project) at the first WriteTheDocs conference in Portland, Oregon. The conference overall was pretty good:

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The book writing experience

I finally got a copy of my new book, Programmer's Guide to Drupal in the mail yesterday -- it's very satisfying to see it in print. Maybe you'd think someone who makes her living almost entirely by electronic means would stick to e-books, but ... call me old-fashioned, but I still do like reading paper. So, while e-books are poised to outstrip paper books (especially for technical books) any day now, I am glad that my book is available in paperback too, and it's tangible and very satisfying to hold.

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A Programmer's Guide to Drupal (my new book) is published!

My new book -- A Programmer's Guide to Drupal -- is officially published, just in time for your holiday shopping needs:
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920027799.do

The writing and publishing process was an interesting break from my usual Drupal site building and programming work, and I enjoyed it. Working with O'Reilly was great, and I'm thrilled that the book is finally done... at least for now. I expect to be doing revisions for a second edition when Drupal 8.0 comes out (sometime next summer or fall).

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Writing a book!

For the past few months, I've been taking on a bit less consulting work... because I've been working on writing a book! It's called A Programmer's Guide to Drupal, and it's now out in an "Early Release" (rough!) edition from O'Reilly:
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920027799.do

The final version should be done in a while -- we're in the editing stages now -- I'll post again when the final version is ready.

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PHP's max_input_vars setting - doh!

Today I ran into an interesting problem. I was having trouble with PHP form processing. When I tried submitting a form with a lot of data in it (points along a bike trail on http://poplarware.com/biketrails), the input my browser sent was being cut off before it got to the Routes plugin for processing. So even though the points were all there in the browser after I uploaded a GPX trace of the bike trail, after subsequently saving the post, the trail was being truncated down to 115 points.

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Changing my role in the Drupal Community

For the past 18 months or so, I've been the official leader or co-leader of the Drupal project Documentation Team, and I've been an active member and organizer for several years more.... Today I announced the end of my tenure in that role in the Drupal community, and I wanted to say a few words about my plans.

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Drupal project: New Contributors task list (more needed!)

One of the problems that I think every open-source software project faces is how to get new contributors to the project started. It's always necessary to recruit new contributors -- not all of a project's existing contributors will stay around forever, and any project benefits from new people with fresh ideas. But it can take a lot of time from the established contributors to get new people started contributing "the right way" in an established open-source project.

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Google Maps in Drupal 7 - the simple way

For a client project last week, I needed to display automatically-generated embedded maps or links to external maps (e.g., a link to Google Maps), based on an entered address for a performance venue. In some display modes, I wanted a map on the page (such as when displaying a Venue page by itself), and in other display modes, I wanted a map link (such as when displaying venue information on a Performance page). Although this is, I'm sure, a common need on web sites, an extensive search for existing Drupal modules to didn't get me anywhere.

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Report from PNWDS, BADCamp, and GSoC Mentor Summit

I spent the last two weekends at conferences -- a lot of traveling, but it is always good to see the people I'm interacting with online every day, and meet some new people.

The weekend of October 15, I attended the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit. Highlights:

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Drupal API doc cleanup sprint

We're having a Drupal API documentation cleanup sprint, to bring the function and file documentation headers up our Drupal 7 documentation standards. If you want to participate, see issue http://drupal.org/node/1310084 for instructions -- new contributors welcome!

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