Software

On Sept 15, 2014, Searchmetrics released their 2014 Ranking Factors Study. In it, they analyzed 10,000 search results and created correlations between characteristics of websites and their rankings. In other words, webites that rank high, do x. Sites that ranks low, do y. For this blog post, I’m leaving out things like Backlinks (factor 4, 9, 12, etc.) because - as far as I know - there just aren’t that many modules or settings that can help you with it.

Now, with all the usual caveats about correlations not equaling causation, here’s a list of their top correlated ranking factors that can be influenced with the proper use of Drupal and/or a module. (A quick note about correlations. Um...NM. Just read this.)

Factor 1: Click-Through Rate

People that click in the search engines, want to visit relevant and interesting websites.

Correlation: .65 (Pretty Strong)

Now, take this with a grain of salt. Of course sites with high rankings have a high click-through rate. They're at the top of Google. Still, there are some things you can do to increase your click-through rate and that's never a bad thing.

How to influence your website's click-through rate in Google.

Make your listing in Google as interesting as possible to make it stand out from everyone else. Use your target keyword at least once in the title (Factor 45) and in the description (Factor 40). Make sure the keyword is used as close to the beginning of the Title tag as you can (Factor 27 & 29). Google bolds words that match the search so your listing will stand out.

Module(s) that increase your click-through rate:

• Metatag - Write great, optimized Title Tags and great Meta Descriptions (Factor 35).

• Custom Breadcrumbs - If they’re available, Google search results will list breadcrumbs instead of the URL. It looks nicer.
  
  source: loseyourmarbles.co

• Schema.org - Highlights events or product ratings that will make your listing stand out and give you extra links in the search results.

Factor 2: Relevant terms

People search for topical content, not just specific keywords. Including keywords that are not exact or are on related topics can help your rankings.

Correlation: .34 (Weak) How to increase the number of SEO relevant terms on your Drupal website.

Think about topics and organization based on topical areas, not just keywords. Create topical silos in your site content. Write your content using a list of terms, not just a single term.

Module(s) that increase the SEO relevant terms on your site:

• Path & PathAuto: Create paths that naturally organize your content by topical areas.

• Taxonomy: Tag content with appropriate terms. Tags link to term pages. Term pages link to related content. That connection helps.

Factor 3: Google +1

People love to share great content so top ranking content tends to have a lot of shares. This also encompasses Facebook Shares (Factor 5), Facebook Total (Factor 6), Facebook Comments (Factor 7), Pinterest (Factor 8) Facebook Likes (Factor 10), and Tweets (Factor 11). Social is very important to SEO!

Correlation: .33 (Weak) How to increase your social shares on a Drupal website

Write great, unique, sharable content. Make it easy to share by sharing it first. (Retweets and likes are easier than sharing it yourself.)

Module(s) that increase social sharing on Drupal

• There are many social modules! Pick one.

• ShareThis is popular.

• Google+ module
  

By the way…if this blog post is helpful, please share it to your favorite social network! :)

(Note: Factor 4 - 18 are almost all either Linking or Social. These are very important factors that are outside the scope of this article.)

Factor 18: Number of Internal Links

Linking to yourself is a good indicator of the quality of a piece of content.

Correlation: .16 (Very Weak) How to increase the number of internal links

Link to your own great content! Use keywords in your internal links for extra credit. (factor 30)

Module(s) for internal linking on a Drupal website

• aLinks - Use this module judiciously. For example, set up links to your taxonomy term pages for your top keywords or topics.

• Menu - Build menus of great content. Use them throughout your site. Those links are valuable!

• Taxonomy - As mentioned above, tag your content. Drupal automatically creates the links.

• Solr's More Like This - Adds links to related content using Apache Solr.

Factor 20: Keywords in the Body

It’s just logical. If you want to rank for a certain term, you’ve got to have that term on the page.

Correlation: .15 (Very Weak) How to use keywords in the body

Use the target keyword once or twice in the body field of each node. Don’t write like a robot, though. That’s bad.

Module(s) to increase keyword use in the body

• SEO Compliance Checker - Set up the rules to match these recommendations. SEO Checker will also look at other SEO-related things like use of keywords in the title or header.

Factor 21: HTML Length

Longer articles tend to rank better than shorter ones. I’m going to lump in Text Character length (factor 22), Word Count (factor 23) here as they’re practically the same correlation and meaning.

Correlation: .14 (Very Weak) How to increase HTML Length

Write longer content. (Seems pretty obvious...)

Modules(s) to help you write longer content

• Rules or Workbench would allow you to create workflows that require certain body length.

• Field Validation module could be set to require a certain length. Seems draconian to me but certainly possible.

Factor 24: Site speed

People don’t like to wait so don’t make them!

Correlation: .11 (Very Weak) How to increase your Drupal 7 website speed

Make your pages lean and mean. Use sitespeed testers available online such as in Google Webmaster Tools or (my favorite) in Chrome (hit command-i). Fix any problems or suggestions.

Module(s) that speed up Drupal 7

• Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation + HTTP Parallel Request & Threading Library

• CDN

• Caching like Varnish or Memcache

 

That’s it! Covering those 21 factors (7 major factors with another 14 mixed in for good measure) should be fairly straightforward for any Drupal 7 website owner. There are other factors as well but with correlations weaker than very weak, I’m just not sure they matter that much. Read about correlations here, by the way.

Miscellaneous SEO Factors and the Drupal Modules that affect them

Here’s a quick shotgun list of a lot of the remaining low-correlation factors and modules that might help.

• Time on Site - Solr's More Like This Module

• Presence of H2 - Theming

• Image Count (the more the better) - Media

• Presence of H1 - Theming (Don’t put the H1 on the site name or logo, please!)

• Video Integration - YouTube add-on module for Media (and many others)

 

Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments.

Here's the full infographic if you'd like to see for yourself:

We look at the searchmetrics 2014 SEO factors and apply them to Drupal 7.drupal seo, Planet Drupal seo-ranking-factors-2014-big.png

Feature

Drupal's philosophy regarding backward compatibility is "the Drop is always moving". In order to create a framework that is as performant, scalable, and extensible as possible, each major release of Drupal can and will make changes, often radical changes, to its developer APIs in order to provide optimal solutions for Drupal users and developers.

To this end, Drupal 8, far more-so than any previous release, has undergone extensive refactoring under the hood. It sports an object-oriented architecture powered by Symfony components. In addition, it utilizes modern PHP (5.4 or later) best-practices, a new Plugin API that provides consistency for pluggable pieces such as blocks and image styles, a revamped and complete Entity and Field API, a new Configuration API to provide fully deployable settings, and numerous other great improvements.

The flip-side is that while a data migration path is always provided between major versions of Drupal for a site's content and users (and in Drupal 8's case, from both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7), migrating the code of contributed and custom modules is left for developers to do.

This article will therefore provide some starting points for folks trying to port their modules from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. (If you still have Drupal 6 modules kicking around, the "Coder Upgrade" sub-module of Coder will get you a fair chunk of the way towards converting them to Drupal 7.)

Note that as of this writing, Drupal 8 is still in active development. While the hope is that by the time this article is published, Drupal 8 will be at least in beta, and the APIs relatively stable (apart from API changes necessary to fix critical issues), information here could still change prior to D8’s final release.

LightSky recently welcomed Columbus Mennonite Church to the ranks of Drupal users with the launch of their new Drupal 7 site.  Columbus Mennonite Church is located in Columbus, Ohio, and was looking for a site that would help them not only help drive their message to members of the community and welcome people with open arms, but also that could help streamline some internal processes among their congregation.  Drupal offered an excellent platform to build the Columbus Mennonite site on, giving them what they needed now, and not preventing them from growing into the future. 

While a responsive design wasn't in the works for Columbus Mennonite, careful attention was paid to how things worked and looked on devices of all sizes, and the Drupal platform provides Columbus Mennonite a firm foundation with which to add a responsive design down the road.  Columbus Mennonite's beautiful forward facing design isn't the end of what their site offers though, as we created a great members only functionality that allows them to share certain information on their site with only members.  This allows them to distribute information to their congregation without having to worry about whether or not it is appropriate for the general public to have access to.  For churches this is a much needed feature to keep the congregation in touch with each other in the digital age.  Not only is there a members only section, but LightSky was also able to streamline their worship scheduling allowing schedulers to make changes to individual responsibilities each week, while allowing the congregation to view the schedule and find out if their help is needed.

As part of this project LightSky launched the new site on Pantheon, a hosting platform that provides some of the best stability and uptime by being fine tuned for the Drupal framework.  

If you have a new web project, one of the very first thoughts you probably have is ‘How much will it cost to build?’. The best tip I can give is if an agency has only received an RFP, no matter the level of details, it will not be enough to determine with any amount of accuracy how much a build will actually be.

Google Summer of Code 2014 has triumphantly concluded for Drupal as a participating organization. We selected thirteen students (https://groups.drupal.org/node/423558) out of fifty project proposals from around the world and twelve of the projects passed with success. Help us by reviewing each project's code (https://groups.drupal.org/node/442493).

Not only did students dedicate their summer contributing to Drupal, but most importantly they had fun. With Drupal 8 on the horizon, most projects were focused on porting modules many people will utilize everyday. Students worked on a vast array of functionality ranging from porting the Diff module with extensible new options to integrating Disqus comments in Drupal 8. As Drupal's GSoC Organization Admin I personally checked in with all projects to find busy students resolving issues no one had ever encountered and happy to be a part of our open source community. We can only hope that these talented young software engineers stick around.

Student GSoC Experiences:

"My first GSOC Experience and one of the best summers I spent in the past few years." -Umar Ahmad (https://www.drupal.org/u/umar-ahmad)

"The best part of GSoC is the opportunity to be a part of a Open Source community, which is a venture we're unlikely to explore so soon if not for GSoC and to see your hard work put into actual use." -Sachini Aparna Herath (https://www.drupal.org/u/sachini)

"Coding for such a big project as Drupal was a great honour for me. GSoC helped me to discover Drupal community and to make my summer an exciting experience." -Andrei - Marius Dincu (https://www.drupal.org/u/andrei.dincu)

Mentor GSoC Experiences:

"With GSoC, students significantly participated in getting Drupal 8 core and contrib ready. Thank you for making this happen!" - Miro Dietiker (https://www.drupal.org/u/miro_dietiker)

"This was my first GSoC as a mentor and I enjoyed it! The learning curve was quite steep for my student and I felt her pain since many of the APIs she needed were unstable and not documented. In the end she managed to "survive" the learning curve and release a working alpha version of RDF UI module (https://www.drupal.org/project/rdfui)." -Stéphane Corlosquet (https://www.drupal.org/u/scor)

"GSoC provides opportunities that are unseen in the world of Open Source industries. Drupal 8 will thrive, and partly it's due to GSoC and the influx of those students in Drupal. Thanks!" -Nick Veenhof (https://www.drupal.org/u/Nick_vh)

"One can think that only the students learn, it's not always true. Mentors (especially with several years of industry experience) can learn enthusiasm from their students. It was great to work with Lucian." -Aron Navak (https://www.drupal.org/u/aron-novak)

Reunion Summit

Each year Google organizes a "Mentor Summit" after Summer of Code to help summarize the positive and negative experiences in an unconference style weekend of meetings. This year Google is organizing a "10 Year GSoC Reunion" instead of the traditional mentor summit where two delegates from each successfully participating organization are invited. Many past and present participants responded to our post to represent Drupal at the event (https://groups.drupal.org/node/437643). Because of this we decided to select one of our top GSoC Drupal alumni and one of our best students from this summer. We're proud to select Angela Byron (https://www.drupal.org/u/webchick) and Chandan Singh (https://www.drupal.org/u/cs_shadow) to represent Drupal at the 10 Year Reunion in California (https://sites.google.com/site/gsocmentorsummitstudentreunion/home).

Drupal's GSoC team is delighted we're able to send our most qualified alumni to the reunion because no one else deserves this more than webchick to represent Drupal. Angie's story of starting with Drupal working on the Quiz module (http://webchick.net/node/105) as a GSoC student almost ten years ago and becoming one of the most important people in our community is now legendary (learn more @ http://webchick.net/about). In an effort to repeat history, we're excited about Chandan becoming a rockstar developer pushing Drupal to the next level as a promising new contributor. Beginning by leading development of the Entity Embed module as a GSoC student (https://www.drupal.org/project/entity_embed), Chandan continues to be actively involved in Drupal 8 Core development with over 25 commit mentions. It is truly amazing to review the post and commit log from a user only 6 months old (https://www.drupal.org/user/2828287/track/) and realize our opportunity to find multiple success stories similar to webchick and cs_shadow via GSoC.

Thank You!

A big thanks to all the students with mentors who helped make this summer a success and of course the entire Drupal community for their amazing support. Last but certainly not the least, thanks to Google for making it all possible. The entire open source community is forever in debt to the gift Google provides us with Summer of Code. Google has funded at least $66,000USD (12 students x $5500USD) to Drupal alone in 2014.

What's Next?? How Can I Help??

Next we switch our focus from GSoC into Google Code-In 2014 (https://developers.google.com/open-source/gci/). Our current need is creating task ideas for Code-In students. If you have great ideas for small tasks taking up to several hours or want to be a mentor, please update our GCI task idea spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sFf5wnuCSkNauNw26-Kml0snplF4Fx0j...).

GCI is a contest for high school students to contribute small tasks to open source organizations to win a trip to GoogleHQ. Our GCI organization application usually opens in October and contest runs from November to January. GCI is a great way to learn the responsibilities of being a mentor prior to GSoC. Join our GCI group (https://groups.drupal.org/google-code-in) to learn more.

It's never too early to start planning for next year's Summer of Code in 2015. Join our GSoC group (https://groups.drupal.org/google-summer-code) to learn more and comment in our GSoC 2015 planning post (https://groups.drupal.org/node/437638) and chat with us in real time in #drupal-google on Freenode. If you're attending Drupalcon Amsterdam be sure to attend our BoF (https://groups.drupal.org/node/440663) on Wed Oct 1st at 10:45-11:45 to learn more about our initiatives in person.

Plenty of people have written about the tremendous potential that Drupal Commerce has to expand the capabilities of higher learning sites already running on Drupal. Colleges and Universities have overwhelmingly chosen Drupal as their CMS, and it’s a growing need for schools to use commerce functions to process a myriad of things, from registration and book sales to donations and permits. We just don’t think it makes sense to create these functions with a bolted-on commerce platform when Drupal Commerce provides such a smoothly integrated solution to serve a wide range of commerce needs at no cost. Leveraging the investment already made in knowledge, training and resources to serve commerce needs is the way to go.    These schools felt the same way.    Check out the ways they use Drupal + Drupal Commerce:     Harvard University - Uses Drupal + Drupal Commerce to sell books and other physical goods at the Harvard Art Museum website http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/   Stanford University SLAC - Uses Drupal + Drupal Commerce to manage event registration for conferences held at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). https://conf-slac.stanford.edu/   Georgia Tech - Uses Drupal + Drupal Commerce to manage their broad offering of Professional Education courses, enabling students to select, register, and pay for their courses and streamline Georgia Tech's ability to track, manage, and report on this important revenue channel. http://www.pe.gatech.edu/   Emerson College - Uses Drupal + Drupal Commerce to sell both physical and digital subscriptions and individual issues of their Ploughshares and Omnibus publications. https://www.pshares.org   Grinnell College - Uses Drupal + Drupal Commerce for fundraising and donations, allowing donors to select how and where their gift will be utilized through one-time or recurring gifts. www.grinnell.edu   Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School - Uses Drupal + Drupal Commerce for fundraising and donations as well as ticket sales. http://www.cgps.org/   Ready to join the Drupal Commerce community? Plug in at DrupalCommerce.org   Want to share your higher learning story or learn more about how Drupal Commerce can address your needs? Talk to us   

We're approaching the middle of the third day of the 2014 East Coast code sprint, situated in a bucolic farmhouse just outside of Frederick, Maryland. The location has made this sprint a little different, with some people being able to commute back and forth. In total, 14 or so sprinters have been working on webtests, improvements to CiviVolunteer, and improvements to buildkit for all platforms, which some renewed focus on Joomla and Wordpress. It's looking promising that buildkit will be fully supporting all the CMS platforms by the end of the sprint, making it even easier to contribute.

As this was my first sprint, I wasn't completely sure what to expect. In between some intense, heads-down work, we've found time for decompression as well. We've worked in great meals on the various porches at the farmhouse, great conversation around the firepit, and a spirited round of "The Greatest Game Ever." Monday also included a spirited discussion on forms strategy for Civi 5.0 focusing on usability and a robust architecture that will allow CiviCRM to integrate more seamlessly with all the CMS platforms and work in responsive design frameworks. This release is on track to provide an amazing level of capability and flexibility for developers while being the most user-focused release of CiviCRM yet.

While the work at the sprint has been focused on Civi, the time with other developers has been invaluable as well. It's been a great experience to have candid and in-depth conversations with developers on Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress covering not only infrastructure, but also challenges and best practices. While there are plenty of conferences and events where you do effective networking, it is rare to be able to spend both work and leisure time together. Getting to work together and in person with this extended set of collegues is already providing me with a lot of tools to take back to my company and to contribute even more to CiviCRM.

If you haven't considered participating in the community, or haven't done it in awhile, it's worth a look. You can make a measurable contibution, and you'll get so much more out than you put in.

 

• Community
• Drupal
• Joomla
• Sprints
• WordPress

If you have Drupal skills, or you are with a company that designs, builds or deploys Drupal websites, the good news is: business is strong.

According to a recent survey conducted by the Drupal Association, 82% percent of employers seeking Drupal talent expect to hire within the next six months, with 40% saying they are “constantly hiring Drupal talent”.  A whopping 92% of hiring managers surveyed say the market needs more Drupal talent to meet their needs. See the infographic.  

The positions most sought after by employers are:

• Developers
• Themers
• Site Builders

Why do employers need so much Drupal talent? Over 75% percent of those businesses constantly hiring Drupal talent point to business growth. 

The vast majority of Drupal talent who responded say they feel their skills are “very” valuable and that there are typically many open positions. The top criteria for job seekers are location, compensation, and whether the organization provides time to work on the Drupal project.

It’s no surprise Drupal talent is in high demand from employers. To fill their needs, employers can clearly define their requirements in order ensure the best fit, and be as flexible as possible with regards to geographic location. For talent seeking new opportunities, flexibility is also important and there are opportunities to invest time building a broad skill set with a variety of projects on their resume in order to have the best chance to land the perfect job.

For anyone considering a career in Drupal, these finding point to a bright future. 

Click the image to see the infographic.

 

 

Since we started our long-form Drupal Career Starter Program in 2011, we've always struggled a bit trying to find a single local Apache-MySql-PHP stack that is powerful enough for day-to-day Drupal development, easy to set up, and that works for a wide range of people new to local web development.

We're always on the lookout for a local Drupal development stack that will help to reinforce the lessons and best practices that we strive to instill in all of our students. It's pointless to teach students methods and processes that aren't typically found in the community, so being able to bring students up-to-speed as quickly as possible with things like Drush, Git, and commonly-used workflows is of the utmost importance.

Generally, we've stuck with a combination of Acquia Dev Desktop (version 1), Uniform Server, and DrupalPro, depending on each student's skill level and previous experience.

Until recently, we've always had more Windows users than Mac or Linux users (combined!), and usually didn't run into any problems until we introduced Drush, Git, and other Linux-y command line tools, at which point Mac and Linux users spent a lot of time attempting to help Windows users get Drush installed.

When Acquia Dev Desktop 2 was made available, the list of features definitely piqued our interest. Integration with Acquia Cloud is nice (similar to what Kalabox does for Pantheon), but what we were really excited about was the Drush integration.

Since we are using Acquia Dev Desktop 2 for the first time with our 2014 Fall Drupal Career Online program, we thought it would make sense to run through the pros and cons from a training perspective.

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Recently, the biggest piece of news in the Drupal 8 world is that we are finally down to just one beta-blocker. This is really great, but what does it mean exactly? Well, in the big picture it means that we are very close to releasing a beta version of Drupal 8 for everyone to start playing with, and this is a major step towards getting the final release out the door.   What is a Beta?

Ticket bought, flights and accommodation booked, like hundreds of others you’re DrupalCon bound for the very first time! No doubt you are very excited, perhaps a little nervous, not quite sure what to expect? Panic not, by the time you’ve read this blog you’ll be all set to make the most of the experience.   Rest assured, approaching half of attendees are first timers, just like you. Everyone was a newbie once. Drupalists are a friendly bunch, so once you get going it’ll be a breeze.    So here goes ….   Plan now!   Don’t spend valuable time during DrupalCon picking what session to watch next. Do yourself a favour, plan your schedule ahead not when you arrive  but be flexible in case something good comes up you might have overlooked! https://amsterdam2014.drupal.org/schedule.     “be flexible, you never know what opportunities you'll get during the conference, sometimes you might have to break your schedule to accommodate.” James Davidson @davidsonj   Who’s coming?   Browse the attendee list [https://amsterdam2014.drupal.org/attendees] ahead of time, there are bound to be some familiar faces you have spoken to on IRC, Drupal.org or social media.    Beyond this there will be other Drupalists sharing your interests, reach out to them and start a conversation ahead of time to help crystallize new friendships during the conference.   Not everyone is able to stay the whole time so be sure to ask those who you are most keen to see. Hatch a plan beforehand, most people’s calendars fill up fast.   Business cards   Even if you aren’t on the business side of Drupal, you will speak to a LOT of people at DrupalCon. Do get some business cards printed. This will save time and ensure you remain in touch with people beyond the conference. Moo.com [www.moo.com] are cost effective or use Lullabot’s wicked new digital card app “Shoot” [ https://www.lullabot.com/blog/article/lullabots-latest-mobile-app-shoot]   What (not) to pack   Be clear - there is no dress code. DrupalCon is inclusive, anything goes. Bring comfortable shoes, you will walk miles during the conference. To be honest, I always pack light and wear less than I think. Don’t forget smartphone and laptop chargers!   An international power adapter and power strip is an essential accessory. Keep those gadgets juiced up.    “Carrying a power strip around with you is often a good way to make friends at conferences.”  Larry Garfield @Crell   I find a notepad invaluable although you can be sure to stock up on these in the Exhibitor Hall.   Make sure you pack enough to survive in your carry on baggage just in case your hold bag goes missing. Even better, just go carry on.   Mobile data   Be sure to check with your mobile phone supplier any costs associated with data usage before you arrive. There will be ample free wifi at the conference centre so maybe you can manage without.   Money   Are you sure your credit card is accepted in The Netherlands? Be sure to inform your card company that you are traveling and to expect overseas transactions charges. Arrange euros ahead of time.   Twitter is your friend   Not only will major announcements be made on @DrupalConEur, there will be a stream of helpful advice and a certain amount of cat herding so be sure to follow.   A lot of attendees use Twitter to make plans during the conference so be sure to track the official #DrupalCon hashtag. Use the hashtag yourself to make plans, form new connections and share photos.    Help   The volunteers at the Help Desk where you register are available throughout the duration of the conference to assist with any enquiry or help you may require.   Before DrupalCon if you need to contact the conference organisers, the best method is the site contact form [https://amsterdam2014.drupal.org/contact-us]   “volunteer, be front desk, on the rooms, whatever, there is not a better way to meet new people if you don't already” Pedro Cambra @pcambra   Arriving   A lot of people save money travelling from the airport by sharing transport. This can be planned ahead of time using social media or more spontaneous or bumping into people wearing Drupal t-shirts. Remember there are thousands of us arriving in a short space of time, you are bound not to be alone.   Registration   Avoid the queues at registration by visiting before Tuesday morning. The registration desk is open during Sunday and all day Monday.   Say hello!   This is your chance to meet people for real. Don’t spend your whole time head down in a screen. Conversations are all around you, go start one. Don’t be daunted because the person across the hallway is a ‘rockstar Drupaler’. We all like talking about what we love.   “do not session cram your day as it will make your head spin, say hi to people (we are not scary) :)” Emma Karayiannis @emma_maria88   “don't be surprised if everyone seems to know everyone; at my first #DrupalCon I thought: established social group; but half were newbies!” J-P Stacey @jpstacey   SWAG!   Sponsors compete with one another to see who can create the coolest Drupal related giveaways. The best goodies go fast so be sure to attend the exhibit hall at the earliest opportunity.    Pro-tip: The Exhibit Hall opens Monday 17:00-18:30. There is a party like atmosphere, it’s a really nice way to ease into the DrupalCon flow. This is also when the smart people get their SWAG.    Don’t be shy, the sponsors really want you to take their swag home. Also, be sure to leave spare space on your journey out for SWAG coming home. Be sure of the baggage allowance of your airline!   Bookstore   Then there’s the Drupal Association’s confusingly have a “Bookstore” which actually sells way more than books. They have some awesome Drupal memorabilia, proceeds of which go to fund the Drupal project.     Exhibit Hall [https://amsterdam2014.drupal.org/exhibit-hall]   Social calendar   Amsterdam in particular has some noteworthy social events scheduled by the local community and attendees alike. Dinners, cultural evening, women in Drupal, pub crawls, the arrival of Tour de Drupal are amongst some of the events currently available.    [https://amsterdam2014.drupal.org/event/women-drupal-meetup]   Monday   Many people arrive ahead of the main conference. This can be an excellent time to arrange meetings with people before things get too hectic.    The community summit [https://amsterdam2014.drupal.org/community-summit] or business day [https://amsterdam2014.drupal.org/business-summit] are a really great ways to forge new connections and share knowledge at the same time.    Tuesday   DriesNote The Dries’s Keynote is always a full house. In fact I strongly advise get your seat early or possibly miss out! A pro-tip is attend Rob & Jam’s pre-keynote, you’d be mad not to anyway [https://amsterdam2014.drupal.org/prenote] , and bag yourself a prime location for the DriesNote early (they always share the same location).    Say cheese! A huge tradition at DrupalCon is the group photo. Be sure to be among the sea of Drupalists immediately after the DriesNote. We hear an octocopter will make an entrance in Amsterdam to help capture the epic numbers we now have. See how we did it in Prague last year [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tHvys7xTRM]   Thursday   Trivia Night A quiz night about Drupal. Unmissable, I am not kidding you. For many it’s the highlight of the social calendar. There are bonus points for teams with DrupalCon first timers so you will be most welcome! What better way to meet new people, and there are amazing prizes to be had.   Friday   Sprints! There are opportunities for everyone to contribute to sprints no matter if you’ve never attended a (code) sprint before. Special First-Time Sprinter Workshops [https://amsterdam2014.drupal.org/first-time-sprinter-workshop] exist to guide those of you who are new to sprinting. “Everyone can get involved in many aspects, including documentation, UX, design, testing, and development.”   Taking part in these mass participation sprints is invigorating and should certainly be on your schedule.   There’s more besides sessions at DrupalCon...   With so many great sessions to choose from there are bound to be clashes. Don’t panic, the amazing team at DrupalCon reliably have all sessions published same day to Youtube [https://www.youtube.com/user/DrupalAssociation].   Aware of these recordings you should consider what else there’s available to do ….   Hallway track   For many a highlight of the conference is those chance meetings in the hallway. Do take the opportunity to stop and spend time talking with people in the hallway.    BoFs?   Affectionately know as “BoFs” - Birds of a feather conversations offer a rare opportunity to meet and discuss a theme with Drupalists sharing a common interest. As a first time DrupalCon attendee I can’t stress how valuable BoFs are. There’s no need to register, just turn up or even arrange your own! [https://amsterdam2014.drupal.org/bofs]. Many presenters will arrange companion BoFs for their sessions, this is a great time to deep dive into a subject.   “the BoF is where the conversations happen, sessions are recorded but these aren't, many goodies happen there” Pedro Cambra @pcambra   Sprints   From 27th September all the way through to 4th October there are ample opportunities to get involved in sprints. In particular the mass Friday sprints are open to all with mentors to help you make your first core contribution. Go for it! https://amsterdam2014.drupal.org/sprints   Relax! There will be other DrupalCons   Don’t try and do everything first time round. With so many amazing keynotes, sessions, BoFs and people to meet plus a packed social calendar - there’s no denying there’s a temptation at DrupalCon to burn the candle at both ends. Be careful though, without some proper rest and healthy food you can easily get run down and suffer post conference DrupalFlu.   So pace yourself. Head for bed when others say “just one more”, eat some fruit, drink water and get some sleep. You’ll enjoy DrupalCon and take home just amazing memories.   Further reading   Jeffrey McGuire’s A-Z of DrupalCon https://www.acquia.com/blog/what-is-drupalcon   Doug Vann has further tips on what to bring to DrupalCon [http://dougvann.com/blog/top-ten-things-bring-you-drupalcon-austin]   Image courtesy of Michael Schmid  

Today I found myself in a complex codebase and my ticket was: this JS on this old page makes the monkey dance, can you make it dance on the new page? Well, my JS knowledge is... limited but I have a really mean right click. So I right clicked and looked around the source Chrome showed me. There was a div with a class slideshow-node-embed-processed. Now that's important: -processed is added by the jQuery once plugin that Drupal 7 happens to ships with. It's much easier to recognize the handiwork of the plugin than actually use it -- this is true for many similar reverse engineering scenarios. Next step is ag slideshow-node-embed (you have ag installed, don't you?) which comes back with a single JS file called sites/all/themes/foo/js/node-embed.js. Next ag -A2 -B2 node-embed.js -- just searching is pointless but by adding some context to it hopefully we can see some settings or CSS necessary.

Start:  2014-09-17 (All day) America/New_York Sprint Organizers:  David_Rothstein

The monthly security release window for Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 core will take place on Wednesday, September 17.

This does not mean that a Drupal core security release will necessarily take place on that date for either the Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 branches, only that you should prepare to look out for one (and be ready to update your Drupal sites in the event that the Drupal security team decides to make a release).

There will be no bug fix release on this date; the next window for a Drupal core bug fix release is Wednesday, October 1.

For more information on Drupal core release windows, see the documentation on release timing and security releases, and the discussion that led to this policy being implemented.

Using VBO (and Rules) to remove spam users

A strong lead management process requires B2B marketing professionals to respond to each prospect within the buying process. However, as your business grows, understanding and responding relevantly to a buyer’s interest is almost impossible to do manually. To ensure that your marketing efforts are targeting customers and prospects with the right messages at the right time, integrating a marketing automation platform into your Drupal website is key. 

Topic: DrupalLocation: China

I just spent the past week in China, and I thought I'd share a few reflections on the state of Drupal in China.

First, let me set the stage. There are 1.35 billion people living in China; that is almost 20 percent of the world's population. Based on current trends, China's economy will overtake the US within the next few years. At that point, the US economy will no longer be the largest economy in the world. China's rapid urbanization is what has led to the country's impressive economic growth over the past couple of decades and it doesn't look like it is going to stop anytime soon. To put that in perspective: China currently produces and uses 60 percent of the world's cement.

In terms of Drupal, the first thing I learned is that "Drupal" sounds like "the pig is running" ("Zhu Pao") in Chinese. Contrary to a pig's rather negative reputation in the West, many Chinese developers find that cute. A pig is a more honorable sign in Chinese astrology and culture. Phew!

In terms of adoption, it feels like the Drupal community in China is about 8 to 10 years behind compared to North America or Europe. That isn't a surprise, as Open Source software is a more recent phenomenon in China than it is in North America or Europe.

Specifically, there are about 5 Drupal companies in Shanghai (population of 21 million people), 3 Drupal companies in Beijing (population of 23 million people) and 5 Drupal companies in Hong Kong (population of 7 million people). The largest Drupal companies in China have about 5 Drupal developers on staff. Four of the 5 Shanghai companies are subsidiaries from European Drupal companies. The exception is Ci&T, which has 40 Drupal developers in China. Ci&T is a global systems integrator with several thousand employees worldwide, so unlike the other companies I met, they are not a pure Drupal play. Another point of reference is that the largest Drupal event in China attracted 200 to 300 attendees.

Given that China has 4 times the population of the US, or 2 times the population of Europe, what are we missing? In talking to different people, it appears the biggest barrier to adoption is language. The problem is that Chinese Drupal documentation is limited; translation efforts exist but are slow. The little documentation that is translated is often outdated and spread out over different websites. Less than 20 percent of the Chinese Drupal developers have an account on Drupal.org, simply because they are not fluent enough in the English language. Most Drupal developers hang out on QQ, an instant messaging tool comparable to Skype or IRC. I saw QQ channels dedicated to Drupal with a couple thousand of Drupal developers.

There is no prominent Chinese content management system; most people appear to be building their websites from scratch. This gap could provide a big opportunity for Drupal. China's urbanization equals growth -- and lots of it. Like the rest of the economy, Drupal and Open Source could be catching up fast, and it might not take long before some of the world's biggest Drupal projects are delivered from China.

Supporting Drupal's global growth is important so I'd love to improve Drupal's translation efforts and make Drupal more inclusive and more diverse. Drupal 8's improved multilingual capabilities should help a lot, but we also have to improve the tools and processes on Drupal.org to help the community maintain multi-lingual documentation. Discussing this with both the Drupal Association and different members of our community, it's clear that we have a lot of good ideas on what we could do but lack both the funding and resources to make it happen faster.

Special thanks to Fan Liu (Delivery Manager @ Ci&T), Jingsheng Wang (CEO @ INsReady Inc.) and Keith Yau. All the Drupal people I met were welcoming, fun and are working hard.

Every developer has a slightly different approach to building their Drupal sites. I’ve tried just about every approach, and they all have their merits, but my favorite is Drush Make. Before joining Acquia, I didn’t realize Acquia Cloud supported Drush Make, but I was delighted to discover that I was wrong. Assuming I’m not the only person who had missed this fact, I wanted to spend a little time highlighting where this exists and how I’m using it.

Almost everything we do on the web will work better with autonomous blockchain technologies such as Bitcoin & ethereum because they allow systems to be built with unbreakable rules. Unlike Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Uber, PayPal or eBay, no executive authority can step in and say the rules don't apply to you.

Of all the blockchain technologies, Bitcoin is currently the most high profile. It is a massive area of growth in the startup eco-system.

Drupal 8 is going to be a fantastic platform for building startups, but we need to make sure that it is also a fantastic platform for blockchain startups.

I've started by creating a Drupal 7 & 8 project called Coin Tools. It provides various components that would be useful for building a Bitcoin web product. Many of the altcoins are very similar to Bitcoin so the project could easily be extended to accommodate them.

I've also created a Blockchain BoF at DrupalCon Amsterdam on the Tuesday at 10:45.

Coin Tools base module

Contains the following field types:

• Address
• Amount
• Transaction

Widgets

Formatters

Coin Tools Daemon

• facilitates configuration and access to bitcoind service
• triggers a hook when a Bitcoin transaction is detected
• provides a full UI for browsing transactions and sending and receiving bitcoin

I am currently working on a full implementation of BIP 70 which provides a much improved payment experience for the customer. Then I will add integration with Payment / Commerce. This means it will be possible to receive payments in Commerce without using a third party payment processor.

Coins Tools Fiat

• obtains bitcoin exchange rates from BitcoinAverage (which I consider to be the gold standard), falling back to BitPay BBB
• facilitates rendering of fiat amounts
• user can select preferred fiat currency
• current bitcoin value block

If you would like help developing your Bitcoin startup on Drupal, please get in touch.

More and more articles with these words are appearing right now: here's our approach for a front-end theme complying with Web good practices.

Unlike DrupalCon Austin, there is no separate UX track at DrupalCon Amsterdam. Ruben and I had to balance both design and development into one track. It was challenging, but it forced us to be really careful about every decision remade.

We really wanted there to be an overlap between sessions, frontend development and design are closer than ever in the workplace, so we wanted to reflect that in our session line up.

Here are a few sessions we think complement each other really well.

The State of the Frontend

Not sure what to learn or where to start in frontend development? Let David and Brian guide you through the landscape, introducing new tools and techniques.

We've also planned this session as an introduction to the entire track, pointing signposts towards other sessions in that track that can fill in more in-depth knowledge about particular subjects. I would encourage everyone with an interest in frontend development to attend the session if only to better understand which sessions in the frontend track are right for them.

We also have a few session that compliment and feed in to each other. Here are a few sessions we think work really well together.

Because it's about the interactions. (Better UX through prototyping) & Axure Prototyping for Drupal

How do we shift from an old design process to a new one while keeping our clients and team members happy? Roy Scholten, UX co-maintainer for Drupal Core, walks us through why prototyping is a better way to design and how to introduce this into your work life.

Then, in Axure Prototyping for Drupal, Dani Nordin takes us on a deep dive of Axure, a prototyping tool you can use without coding. I've been using it recently on a client project and I've been impressed with the way it introduces some concepts of frontend development without asking you to write code.

The Future of HTML and CSS

As a designer, knowing the limits and capabilities of your medium is important, also it means you can call your developers out when they hit you with “That's not possible” which is fun. If you're interested in seeing where web browsers are heading and finding new tricks to add to your repertoire, Preston's talk on The Future of HTML and CSS should be a treat.

Getting a CLUE at the Command Line

As a designer/front-end dev, I've never had a formal education on the command line, it's always been something I've picked up as I've needed it. It used to scare me. This is me using the command line a few years ago:

I'm so happy Emma Jane is talking on the command line in Getting a CLUE at the Command Line in the same vein as her introduction to Git at DrupalCon Prague last year. The command line is an immensely powerful and productive tool and I'm looking forward to picking up a few tips.

Open Source Design

Something I've struggled with, both in my day job and as the maintainer of Drupal's admin theme is how do we bring successful design together with Open Source. I'm really happy that Jan-C. Borchardt, agreed to speak at DrupalCon and share his knowledge and experience with us. Jan is a big supporter of usability and design in free and open source software, with projects including A guide to Usability in Free Software, OwnCloud, Libre Projects, and the brilliant Terms of Service; Didn't Read.

It's really important for Drupal for us to gain insight from people outside the community and learn from other projects. Thanks again Jan for agreeing to speak! I can't wait!

--
Lewis Nyman (LewisNyman)
DrupalCon Amsterdam Frontend Track Chair