2008

December 30, 2008

Using Bazaar to collaborate with other patch developers

In my earlier post on using Bazaar for Drupal core development, I explained how to use the Four Kitchens Bazaar repository to streamline development of core patches. For patches you’re developing on your own, those instructions work great. For patches involving a team of developers, you’d want to have a shared mainline branch, which is beyond my last post’s scope and this one’s.

But, what about when two to three people are collaborating, you’re using Bazaar, and someone else has posted an updated patch that you’d like to work from?

December 16, 2008

Dynamically attribute content in Drupal using the Author Taxonomy module

Author Taxonomy settings screen

Attributing a story, image, or blog post to more than one person can pose a problem on many web platforms. In the print publishing world, it’s simply a matter of adding another name to the byline or tacking “Additional reporting by Sue” to the end of a piece. (Nowhere does the poor designer or typesetter get credit for laying out the page!)

December 15, 2008

A year in open source

Mid-October marked my one-year anniversary with Four Kitchens and, consequently, the same anniversary of being an open-source software contributor. Because my career up to that point had been limited to proprietary software development, I had intended to write a one-year retrospective on the experience. But, as often happens, one gets busy, and now October, November, and half of December have passed. So without further ado, my self-indulgent retrospective on moving to open source development (complete with pontifications).

December 6, 2008

Using Bazaar to work on Drupal core patches

As anyone who’s developed core patches knows, it’s not the writing of initial patch that takes the work, it’s the combination of revising the patch and keeping up to date with HEAD. With Drupal.org’s CVS, this is difficult because you cannot commit your core changes to checkpoint your work. CVS’s merge algorithms are also relatively poor for maintaining large divergence from CVS HEAD.

December 5, 2008

Drupalers for Drupal: DrupalCon campaign buttons

Just for kicks, here are some DrupalCon “campaign buttons” we cooked up while brainstorming T-shirt ideas. We’re releasing them under the GPLv3, so feel free to use `em as you see fit!

December 4, 2008

Snazzy! Our DrupalCon DC T-shirt submissions

We’ve been busy preparing submissions for the DrupalCon DC T-shirt contest. Here’s what we’ve come up with so far.

See more snazzy designs »

December 4, 2008

A plethora of DrupalCon DC session proposals

Photo by Don LaVange

Besides sponsoring next year’s DrupalCon Four Kitchens is also offering to share our know-how in the form of five session proposals and a MEGA session series on theming! Oh yes, we have a plethora. Read the rundowns below and if you find one you want to see on the schedule — go vote for it!

November 19, 2008

The great Drupal module hunt

If you’ve keep up with Drupal news, you know there’s a hefty ongoing process of redesigning Drupal.org. Leisa Reichelt has played a huge part in documenting this process and has started some great discussions as well as set up some super useful cardsorting exercises to crowdsource site architecture concerns.

October 23, 2008

Four Kitchens at DrupalCon DC 2009

Four Kitchens is proud to announce that we are attending and helping sponsor DrupalCon DC. From March 4th through March 7th, the chefs will be in Washington, D.C. to discuss their recipes for scalability, theme development, module development, design, usability, project management, and business strategy. And we promise we don’t use any secret sauce!

If there is a particular topic you would like to see the chefs present a session on, please add a comment to this entry, contact us, or send us a tweet on Twitter.

Photo by Ryan McFarland

October 1, 2008

Formal usability testing of Drupal 7.x/8.x/9.x

As part of an ongoing effort to enhance user experience, the Drupal User Exeprience Team is submitting a grant proposal to the Knight Drupal Initiative to receive funding for several rounds of formal usability testing on Drupal. The working draft of the proposal is currently open to community discussion, and we encourage anyone who is interested to participate.

KDI Usability Proposal