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Join Kyle Hofmeyer, Joe Shindelar, Blake Hall, and Greg Dunlap to talk about the somewhat mysterious concept of entities, which was introduced to Drupal in Drupal 7. We explain what entities are, why we have them, and what the future may hold for them in Drupal 8.

Jeff Eaton and Jason Scott discuss digital preservation, the historical importance of the web, and the utility of large hard drives.

Jared Ponchot and Jeff Robbins chat with Denise Jacobs about overcoming your inner critic and other secrets to unlocking your creativity.

Drupal.org and its sub-sites (api.drupal.org, groups.drupal.org, etc) will be going down for 30 minutes Thursday, May 9, 17:00 PDT (May 10, 0:00 UTC). This maintenance window will be used to remove a core hack. Please follow the @drupal_infra twitter account for updates during the downtime and thanks for your patience!

In this episode, we have Greg Dunlap (heyrocker) join Addi to talk about being a Drupal 8 initiative lead, not from the perspective of the software, but as someone who needs to pay rent. We talk about Greg's efforts to raise funding for his work as the Drupal 8 Configuration Management Initiative (CMI) lead, why he needed to go knocking on doors, and what that means going forward. What is money's role in a sustainable future for Drupal core development?

Scott Reynen has done some fun things in the Drupal community. Some notable examples:

• Coordinated many meetups in Denver ensuring they happen, with interesting topics, and tasty pizza options
• Helped to organize several Drupalcamps in Colorado (which will be June 29th/30 in 2013)
• Presents on various topics at Drupalcamps
• Helps as one of the 3 site maintainers for groups.drupal.org
• Is an active Project Application queue reviewer heavily interested in new-contributor-onboarding and project quality
• Takes care of abandoned projects and ownership requests in the Webmasters queue
• And does a pretty darn good job as the maintainer for modules like @font-your-face.

How did you get involved with Drupal?

About 4 years ago, I took a job as a developer with Aten Design Group, where we do mostly Drupal projects. At the time, I was pretty skeptical of content management systems, after frustrating experiences with both WordPress and Joomla. But I quickly grew to appreciate Drupal’s modular architecture.

What do you do with Drupal these days?

Most of my Drupal time is spent building websites for clients. I’m fortunate to be able to work on projects I really care about, like the International Center for Transitional Justice, the National Center for Women & Information Technology, and the United Nations Development Programme. Apart from client work, I use Drupal as a platform to explore new ideas. With a wide variety of code and a huge active community, Drupal serves as a great incubator.

You’re involved with the Drupal community locally and internationally - can you describe some of the things you do and why you like them?

I co-maintain Drupal Groups (groups.drupal.org), deal with abandoned projects on Drupal.org, do some work on project review applications, help organize the local Denver Drupal meetup, actively mentor a few people, and contribute some modules. I think I like all of this because I feel like I’m actively building the future, either through directly improving the web, or by enabling other people to improve the web.

What got you started in the project application review process?

I didn’t go through the application review process to get my own Git (previously CVS) access, and didn’t realize the process existed for a long time. So I think some feeling of debt played a part in my getting involved. But I also believe the future of Drupal depends on people who aren’t yet involved, and the application process, if not handled well, can very easily be a point where we turn away this next generation of contributors.

What are some of your favorite moments from that process?

It’s always nice to get thanks from new contributors for my feedback, or to discover a cool new module before it even has a release. But I think my favorite moment was when klausi arrived. Before that, I felt like I had to stay actively involved or the whole process might fall apart. When klausi started doing a superhuman number of reviews, I could comfortably step away from the queue for a short (or even long) period of time and avoid both catastrophe and burnout.

Read a previous Community Spotlight about Klaus Purer (klausi).

Are there any cool projects you’ve learned about through that process?

Commerce Registration is, I think, a great example of why the review process is important to the wider community. After some quick minor bug fixes in the review process, that project was approved and is now part of the Conference Organizing Distribution, used in every DrupalCon site. And the maintainer has gone on to contribute several other modules, a few to Drupal Commons that will be part of the next version of the Drupal Groups site. A more frustrating project review could have easily meant the Drupal community losing all of this.

What changes do you hope will come in the project review process?

Mostly I think we just need more people with the right mindset. Right now, the “needs review” backlog is gradually disappearing, largely thanks to a lot of new reviewers. I think we just need to keep more of these reviewers involved and make sure they know, as jthorson recently wrote, “the role of reviewers in this process is that of a 'mentor', not 'traffic cop'”.

What is your favorite part about the Drupal community?

It’s rare to hear someone say “I don’t care” in the Drupal community. There’s plenty of work that goes off the rails on passionate debate over what color to paint the bike shed, and that can grow tedious. But our bike sheds are the best-painted on the web (12 coats!), because people really care. I like that.

Tell us a little about your background or things that interest you outside Drupal?

When I was young, I hit myself in the forehead with a boomerang. I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the concept, but I’d never had one actually come back. This one did, just as I was turning to see where it had landed. Stitches weren't great back then, so I still have a scar. I still have problems with tools doing what I say rather than what I expect.

In this episode, the Drupalize.Me team — Addi, Joe, Kyle, and Emma — talk about our team's plan for learning and teaching Drupal 8. Drupal 8 probably won't be released until the end of 2013 or 2014, but there is a lot to learn with some of the big changes coming.

This is a copy of a guest post I wrote for the Government Web Toolkit Blog. It describes some of the experiences gained and lessons learned in using the web to deliver interactive maps to the public following the 2011 Canterbury earthquake, based my time at the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) to from April 2011 to September 2012.

A picture can paint a thousand words. In an earthquake recovery, interactive maps are worth a million.

February 22nd 2011, 12:51pm, I’m working from home, lying on my bed, reading email on my iPhone. 30 seconds later, my city, my life, and my future had changed irrevocably. Anything not bolted down was on the floor and half of it was smashed. Computer monitors, TVs, bookshelves, food from the fridge. The power went off then stayed off for five days.

Mobile calls worked for a few minutes, then failed. Texts became patchy after an hour. The only thing that was semi-reliable was Twitter over 3G. It took until 9pm that night for me to know that my 10 year old son was OK as he was at school in the central city and he didn’t get home until then.

Within three hours of the quake a group of volunteers had set up http://eq.org.nz, a crowdsourced effort using an open source disaster response platform to provide maps and information. Within a day http://canterburyearthquake.org.nz/ was set up (on WordPress.com) by the official Civil Defence response team, Environment Canterbury, and Christchurch City Council staff. The technologies that worked were web, cloud and mobile based. These teams delivered in a rapidly responsive and agile way to get information to people on the ground.

Disaster responses and recoveries are about people and things at places. They’re inherently geospatial in nature. Maps make a huge difference. Interactive, dynamically updated maps even more so.

Serving the Public

Fast forward to 23rd June 2011. Less than three months after being established, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) had completed the initial process of land zoning based on detailed geotechnical investigations. Like everything in the recovery, time frames were tight. People want government decisions to be based on sound scientific and economic evidence. They also want to know where they stand (and can live), as soon as possible.

CERA needed a way to let people see exactly which zone their house was in. That required an interactive website, capable of taking a massive initial load, which would be implemented in a very short time frame.

In stepped Trade Me.

Working with Tonkin & Taylor, the engineering firm that had done the geotechnical investigations and created the zoning maps, Trade Me built Landcheck in four days. They served the site from their server farms in Auckland and Wellington. There were 5 million page views, and 3.3 million individual property searches in the first 24 hours of the site being live. Trade Me did this for free, for the people of greater Christchurch.

By September 2011, CERA had taken over the hosting of Landcheck following three further land zoning announcements that generated about 10% of the initial load. The functionality was migrated to the My Property tab on the CERA website (in Drupal) hosted by Egressive (now Catalyst IT). Interactive mapping was added by NorthSouthGIS serving map layers from their Revera hosted ArcGIS server. A land announcements timeline map was also quickly built on the CERA website using Google Maps.

But the story didn’t end there. The Department of Building and Housing (now the Building & Housing Group within the Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment) had been working hard on developing the ‘Technical Categories’, describing expected land performance and damage in further earthquakes, and the house foundation systems likely to be required to withstand future quakes. In October 2011 CERA needed to announce the new technical categories, and knew they’d generate a similar level of interest to the initial Landcheck announcement. There wasn’t time to build out similar physical server infrastructure to that Trade Me had deployed, and it would have been very expensive. Within 48 hours of knowing the announcement was needed, Egressive had prototyped a scalable solution using the Amazon cloud platform as a front end cache and application server. This was backended with locally hosted Drupal servers with a Drupal module that automatically managed using Amazon as a content delivery network (serving images, PDFs and static files for the whole CERA website).

Within two weeks the solution was in place and tested, the data loaded, and the announcement made. Map layers were again served by NorthSouthGIS through Revera, who made sure there was enough bandwidth to the map servers for the announcement. People could look up their technical category through the My Property section of the CERA website, and view interactive maps of technical categories and land zones.

In the following year a similar approach was taken to deal with the major peak load of the Christchurch Central Recovery Plan launch by the Christchurch Central Development Unit (CCDU). More sophisticated map layers and viewers were also launched at maps.cera.govt.nz, including mobile map viewers on iPhones/iPads, Androids, and Windows Phones using the free ESRI ArcGIS mobile app.

What Was Learned?

These experiences taught us several things:

• Drupal combined with Amazon cloud services is a very robust and cost effective method to implement a hybrid locally hosted and massively scalable solution, that can cost effectively be dialed up and back for announcements that will generate large peak loads.
• As Dave Snowden says, the necessary preconditions for innovation are starvation, pressure, and perspective shift. If you put your IT vendors under significant time pressure, with fewer than normal resources, in a situation that’s really important to get right, they’re much more likely to come up with innovative solutions than they are when everything is comfortable.
• When you’re under pressure, without clear certainty on what you’re building, function and develop over time, using agile and iterative approaches works. You get to deploy quickly, get customer feedback from real users, and improve the solution. We showed that it is possible for government agencies to be agile.
• People love maps. The large majority of people think visually and spatially. They want to see information about where they live, and how things around them are affected by government policy. Interactive maps tell these stories really well.
• Making map layers openly available for download and through live feeds as ‘open data’ makes work much more efficient for the rest of government, and the private sector. Not only are government agencies required to release data for reuse, it creates real benefits. Christchurch City Council, Waimakariri District Council, Selwyn District Council, Environment Canterbury and many central government agencies received live updates of the land zone layers and used them in their systems. Private sector infrastructure contractors and utility companies did the same. Even Wises, a paper map book provider used the spatial layers in new editions of their printed maps.

What’s Next?

Right from the start CERA was supported by Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), and the NZ Geospatial Office (NZGO). Their knowledge of implementing mapping solutions, spatial data standards, and the way to share spatial data across agencies was invaluable. The government is now looking to extend the work already done, leverage the use of location-based information to accelerate recovery and rebuild efforts in Canterbury, and ensure other regions benefit from this innovation. This programme of work is called the Canterbury Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) Programme and will be led by LINZ/NZGO in collaboration with the Canterbury agencies.

So, you can expect to see more geospatial innovation from Canterbury in the months to come.

Jared Ponchot and Jeff Robbins chat with The Submarines male lead John Dragonetti about song writing, film scoring, simplicity, and the importance of panic in the creative process.

Mentioned in this episode:

• iPhone Commercial
• The Submarines
• ToneTiger.com

Release Date: April 8, 2013 - 3:32pm Album: The Creative Process Length: 46:59 minutes (24.19 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 71Kbps (vbr)

In this episode, Kyle Hofmeyer is joined by Joe Shindelar, Blake Hall, Jerad Bitner, and Brock Boland to discuss git, different workflows, and working in teams.

Git is often touted as among other things being extremely flexible. It's a big selling point for the software. You're not throwing all your eggs in one basket and assuming that there is one singular workflow to rule them all. This flexibility can also be a challenge though. In this podcast we'll talk about the various ways that we at Lullabot use Git when working with teams of people. Both small and large. And the organizational tricks we've learned along the way to help make sure our projects continue moving forward and don't get to messy.

Some of the things discussed include designating someone as a branch manager, working in feature/task branches to keep your code organized and easy to review, and using pull requests. Spoiler alert! We end up boiling it all down to this. There is no one perfect way, but whatever way you decided to organize your team make sure you document it and that everyone on the team knows what you decided.

Podcast notes

Introduction to Git series

Release Date: April 5, 2013 - 10:00am Album: Lullabot Podcast Length: 42:35 minutes (24.85 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 81Kbps (vbr)

Drupal 7.22, a maintenance release with numerous bug fixes (no security fixes) is now available for download. See the Drupal 7.22 release notes for a full listing.

Download Drupal 7.22

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 sites is strongly recommended. There are no major new features in this release. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement.

Security information

We have a security announcement mailing list and a history of all security advisories, as well as an RSS feed with the most recent security advisories. We strongly advise Drupal administrators to sign up for the list.

Drupal 7 includes the built-in Update Manager module, which informs you about important updates to your modules and themes.

There are no security fixes in this release of Drupal core.

Bug reports

Drupal 7.x is being maintained, so given enough bug fixes (not just bug reports), more maintenance releases will be made available, according to our monthly release cycle.

Changelog

Drupal 7.22 is a bug fix only release. The full list of changes between the 7.21 and 7.22 releases can be found by reading the 7.22 release notes. A complete list of all bug fixes in the stable 7.x branch can be found in the git commit log.

Update notes

See the 7.22 release notes for details on important changes in this release.

Known issues

None.

Jeff Eaton and Jared Ponchot discuss the parallels between design systems and content models, the challenges of responsive design, and the importance of content hierarchy for designers.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Converge Southeast
• Artifact Conference
• DrupalCon Portland

Release Date: April 2, 2013 - 9:00am Album: Insert Content Here Length: 32:51 minutes (12.74 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 54Kbps (vbr)

In this episode, Addison Berry is joined by Kyle Hofmeyer, Dave Burns, Jerad Bitner, and Sean Lange to discuss the deceptively simple question "What is a Drupal Site Builder?" This is a term that is bandied about quite a bit, but we wanted to try to zero in on what exactly a site builder does. We end up talking about several different roles that are often used around site-building, like themer, front-end developer, developer, and they relate to each other. In the process, Dave and Sean end up creating some new words too. What is a globulator?

Podcast notes

Introduction to Git series
Drupal.org D7 upgrade getting restarted
DrupalCon Portland training is open
Plan, Build, Launch: Real-world Drupal
Drupal Performance and Scalability with the Dream Team
Get Involved with Core sprint and workshop

Release Date: March 22, 2013 - 10:21am Album: Lullabot Podcast Length: 39:31 minutes (22.86 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 80Kbps (vbr)

Jeff Eaton and Daniel Jacobson discuss the history of NPR's COPE approach to content management, his work at Netflix, and the future of APIs for content-focused businesses. (Now with extra bonus anecdote!)

Mentioned in this episode:

• Daniel Jacobson: 7 Ways to Improve Your API
• NPR API Reference
• Create Once, Publish Everywhere
• Netflix Tech Blog

Release Date: March 15, 2013 - 5:00pm Album: Insert Content Here Length: 37:54 minutes (13.58 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 50Kbps (vbr)

In this episode, Addison Berry is joined by Holly Ross, the Executive Director of the Drupal Association (DA). We talk about who Holly is, where she's come from, and here role in the DA. There is some timely discussion about transparency and communication for the DA and the community, and how Holly looks to address these concerns.

Podcast notes

Module Monday videos
Drupal Global Sprint Weekend, March 9-10

Holly's DA blog

Contact Holly
Email: holly@association.drupal.org
Twitter: @drupalhross

Release Date: March 8, 2013 - 10:00am Album: Lullabot Podcast Length: 41:48 minutes (24.1 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 80Kbps (vbr)

Drupal 7.21, a maintenance release which fixes incompatibilities introduced in the Drupal 7.20 security release, is now available for download. See the Drupal 7.21 release notes for further information.

Download Drupal 7.21

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 sites is strongly recommended, especially if you encountered problems with Drupal 7.20. There are no new features in this release. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement.

Security information

We have a security announcement mailing list and a history of all security advisories, as well as an RSS feed with the most recent security advisories. We strongly advise Drupal administrators to sign up for the list.

Drupal 7 includes the built-in Update Manager module, which informs you about important updates to your modules and themes.

There are no security fixes in this release of Drupal core; however, sites which were unable to upgrade to Drupal 7.20 (or upgraded but made modifications to disable the security fixes included within it) should upgrade to Drupal 7.21 to obtain additional security protection. See the Drupal 7.21 release notes for further information.

Bug reports

Drupal 7.x is being maintained, so given enough bug fixes (not just bug reports), more maintenance releases will be made available, according to our monthly release cycle.

Changelog

Drupal 7.21 is a bug fix only release. The full list of changes between the 7.20 and 7.21 releases can be found by reading the 7.21 release notes. A complete list of all bug fixes in the stable 7.x branch can be found in the git commit log.

Update notes

See the 7.21 release notes for details on important changes in this release.

Known issues

None.

In this week's episode Addison Berry is joined by Lullabots Joe Shindelar, Andrew Berry, and Ben Chavet to talk about automating server set up with tools like Puppet and Jenkins. Building a Drupal site is only part of the equation to a complete project, and setting up the servers you will need, and making sure that you can reproduce the site set up consistently is hugely important. It becomes even more important as your projects and teams grow in size. We cover the basics of what the goal is, and what tools we use at Lullabot, and why we use them. This is a great overview of the topic for people who keep hearing these terms thrown around, and would like to understand more of what it's all about.

Podcast notes

• New videos out on Views Bulk Operations and Entity Views Attachment
• Lullabot is looking for a Sales Representative
• DrupalCamp London Introduction to Drupal workshop, March 1
• Drupal Sprint Weekend, March 9-10

Release Date: February 22, 2013 - 10:00am Album: Lullabot Podcast Length: 38:50 minutes (22.4 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 80Kbps (vbr)

Drupal 7.20, a maintenance release which contains fixes for security vulnerabilities, is now available for download. See the Drupal 7.20 release notes for further information.

Download Drupal 7.20

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features or non-security-related bug fixes in this release. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement.

Security information

We have a security announcement mailing list and a history of all security advisories, as well as an RSS feed with the most recent security advisories. We strongly advise Drupal administrators to sign up for the list.

Drupal 7 includes the built-in Update Manager module, which informs you about important updates to your modules and themes.

Bug reports

Drupal 7.x is being maintained, so given enough bug fixes (not just bug reports), more maintenance releases will be made available, according to our monthly release cycle.

Changelog

Drupal 7.20 is a security release only. For more details, see the 7.20 release notes.

A complete list of all bug fixes in the stable 7.x branch can be found in the git commit log.

Security vulnerabilities

Drupal 7.20 was released in response to the discovery of security vulnerabilities. Details can be found in the official security advisory:

• SA-CORE-2013-002

To fix the security problems, please upgrade to Drupal 7.20.

Known issues

None.

Jeff Eaton and Relly Annett-Baker discuss the difference that carefully crafted microcopy can make to users; explore the challenge of bringing writers, designers, and developers together; and plan for future hijinks.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Relly Annett-Baker
• Arse Over Tit: The Art of Making Stuff Backwards
• CERN and the LHC (Large Hadron Collider)
• Yours vs. Mine
• Gov.UK
• Content 2013
• Future of Web Design 2013
• Player 2
• F*** Yeah, Karen McGrane

Release Date: February 17, 2013 - 4:00pm Album: Insert Content Here Length: 41:37 minutes (16.33 MB) Format: mono 44kHz 54Kbps (vbr)

Drupal.org and its sub-sites (api.drupal.org, groups.drupal.org, etc) will be going down for 30 minutes Tuesday, February 12, 5:00 PST (February 13, 01:00 UTC). This maintenance window will be used to upgrade our single sign on system. Please follow the @drupal_infra twitter account for updates during the downtime and thanks for your patience!

Sites will remain functional for the majority of the scheduled downtime, but everyone will be logged out. You may not be able to log into sub-sites for a few minutes as the update is rolled out. If you experience authentication troubles between sites after the maintenance window please clear browser cookies for Drupal.org and try again.