Now that we’ve had the weekend to reflect on what was in equal parts a mental and brilliant week, it’s time for a wrapup on Drupal’s big London event, DrupalCon London 2011. Being there alongside our cohorts from Redmond, we got to meet loads of Drupal developers, themers, designers, admins and site builders, provide the route to booze, sit in on a load of sessions and hand out some DrupalCon themed tees. All in all, we had a great time.

The highlight for us was definitely the brilliant sessions that we got to see, with the likes of Dries Buytaert, The Standardistas and Tom Standage giving fantastic keynotes, and far too many people to mention who gave great sessions on everything to do with the Drupal universe. Here are our writeups from the week:

Keynotes

The State of Drupal 2011 – Dries Buytaert

The Future of Social Media: A Historical Perspective – Tom Standage

Designing the Sustainable Web – The Web Standardistas

Other Sessions

Forensic Theming: Key Techniques to Building Effective Drupal Themes – Emma Jane Hogbin

Node.js and Drupal – Justin Randell and Howard Tyson

Explaining Drupal to Others – What is this Drew-paul thing you do? – David Needham

The Economist: An Informal Technical Drupal Case Study – The Economist Team

Extra: Interview with Robert Castelo (from the DrupalCon UK Community and DrupalCon London Coordinator)

Finally, the Great DrupalCon Pub Crawl seemed to go off without a hitch, as long as you don’t count the after hours pub being closed. However, the night ended on a high with the hardcore heading on to The Castle on Commercial Rd (for those who were too… happy to remember). The day after saw the special edition ‘I Survived’ t-shirts vanishing within about 10 minutes, as those dedicated to the sticker (and signature) hunt descended on the Microsoft booth early to grab their prize. In truth, there was far more demand than we were expecting, thus running out of tees far too early!

To celebrate here are some of our photos from the pub crawl and the event. We’ll be adding more over the course of the week, so make sure you check back, or keep an eye on Ubelly on Twitter.

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What a week it’s been. Amongst the buckets of rain, pub crawling, Batman sightings and free t-shirts there was in fact a little injection of Drupal to the Greater London area in the form of DrupalCon 2011; we thought what better way to round it up than an interview with Robert Castelo, Drupal wizard and organiser extraordinaire.

Tell us about how you first got started with Drupal

I started using Drupal in 2004, when I got fed up with clients calling me up to change text on their sites and was looking for a CMS. First time I saw Drupal.org I thought it was really ugly and I didn’t understand most of what it was talking about, but after trying out several other systems it made sense and I could see Drupal was very well thought out.

What’s your fondest Drupal memory or project over the past 12 months?

I’m very proud of the work we’ve done on www.sagepay.com. A lot of Drupal developers regularly use the knowledge base on the site, and have told me that being able to quickly get to the information they need has saved them a lot of time.

What’s the question you’re asked most about Drupal?

Number one question for a while has been "When will Drupal 7 be released". The launch of Drupal 7 in January was huge for the Drupal community, and has been adopted faster than any previous version.

What’s the best thing about arranging and attending UK Drupal meetups?

It’s very rewarding when a couple of months after an event someone tells me that attending convinced them to give Drupal a go, and that it’s opened up a successful new career for them. Also it’s always a lot of fun to meet so many of the smart people that make up the Drupal community.

What were you most looking forward to about DrupalCon London?

At the last DrupalCon Amatai Burstein’s gave the best presentation I’ve ever seen. I was really looking forward to his DrupalCon London talk. As always I was also looking forward to the keynote speech by Dries Buytaert, Drupal’s founder, which gives an overview of the past 6 months and where we’re going.

What was your favourite moment of DrupalCon 2011?

My favourite moment was when @waako and @mysty turned up dressed as Henry VIII and Napoleon to lead the Great DrupalCon London Pub Crawl – kudos for having amazing costumes and being great guides! Thanks also to Ubelly for co-organising and making it so much fun.

Click here to get involved with the Drupal UK community, or here to find out more about Drupal and Microsoft.

Finally – our Ubelly posts around Drupal and DrupalCon 2011.

The Economist website, which runs on Drupal, is one of the big examples that everyone uses for to showcase how good Drupal can be. The Economist was first published in September 1843 to take part in a sever contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress. Now, unique visitors to the site are around 6.5 million and 32.5 million page views worldwide.

At DrupalCon London, some of the folks from The Economist’s global technical team sat in a room and gave an informal case study of their use of Drupal and took questions from the attendees.

Development

From a development standpoint, the Economist team use Agile project management with Scrum. In terms of how things work for Dev Ops, they use Bazaar as their source control system. One of the main reasons they use Bazaar was access to LaunchPad. No piece of code that The Economist team write goes public without it being checked at least twice. With LaunchPad, any developer can put it up and have the rest of the team check it, comment it and approve. It allows a dialogue between different developers and teams (The Economist have three teams across the globe) and means that the code is generally bug free and robust when it goes live.

The theme

According to one of the devs, the theme for The Economist is possibly one of the most complicated themes they’ve ever seen. As a base, the theme uses a modified 960 grid system. They use modular CSS to ensure that unnecessary CSS isn’t left on the live site when they need to take the module down. The downside of this means that they have a ridiculously long list of CSS files and that because of some of the modules, they have duplicate CSS files throughout the site. In the future, The Economist are working on HTML5 semantic markup and responsive design, to make the site work well on all devices.

Testing

The Economist use Selenium for system/functional testing, SimpleTest for unit testing, as well as hand testing in all environments. Grinder takes care of load testing, and finally there’s team sign off before each release (using LaunchPad). They use PHPUnit to fire off the Selenium tests and the version of Grinder they use is a slightly modified version.

Hudson/Jenkins

Hudson/Jenkins, or Hudkins as The Economist calls it, is basically a way to run code on the command line, including drush commands. It’s used by The Economist because they found using Cron as inelegant, due to the fact that if something failed, nothing runs behind the failed task. However, with Hudkins, it does it on a per process basis, which makes everything a lot less buggy.

Infrastructure

Coming from the customer side, we use the CDN to deliver all the content. From there it goes to the load balancer level, 2 varnish servers to cache, then a memcache layer and 4 database nodes. The structure is exactly the same as the stage environment, as well as a disaster recovery environment. Jenkins is then used to deploy everything between the different environments.

Performance

When you have to scale your website, you figure out that things like memcache and master slave are essential. The Economist use a modified release of Drupal 6 called Pressflow, that comes with things like master slave already installed. Basically, the key to scaling is many levels of caching. Another thing that The Economist team have been playing with and will continue to use is ‘Edge-side includes’, that allows you to handle caching differently by caching portions of the page.

Question and Answer

Q: How many modules are you using on the Drupal site?

A: Around 40 or 50 contributed and custom modules altogether, with a 30/70 split.

Q: How does subscriber based service affect performance?

A: They’re really just authenticated users. However, it’s a really small percentage who come through as logged in users, so therefore performance isn’t affected. If it did go up, we’d have issues with performance and we’d need to readdress.

Q: What tools do you use for project management?

A: we use Scrum as the project management system, but in terms of tools we use Google Docs for spreadsheets and wikis. We’ve tried other tools, but we found they took too much time to update. We also use lo-fi physical taskboards with post it notes in some offices, which means we don’t spend a lot of time updating a tool and more time everyone talking together. With the Austin team, because a lot of people work remotely, we use the task board in Google Docs.

Q: How do you work with estimations?

A: We use the concept of story points within Agile Scrum. Instead of falling into the trap of estimating days, we work out what the story is. We then give them each relative sizes and then take in a certain amount of points. It gets it out of how many hours, and more in relative effort.

David Needham from Chapter Three gave his session on ‘What is this Drew-Paul thing you do? – Explaining Drupal to other’ at DrupalCon London on Thursday 25th August, 2011.

We’ve all been there. Whenever someone asks you what you do and you reply with ‘I’m a Drupal developer’, you’ll get a ‘Do what’s this Drupal thing?’ To the average person, “Drupal lets me build websites that help people build their own websites without needing to know anything about programming.” The average person doesn’t need to know anything about databases or PHP to understand what it is that Drupal does. However, if you’re talking to IT people (who don’t know Drupal), then “Drupal is an open source system for managing content and displaying it on the web. There’s no software to install, works on ever OS (even mobile) and is modular.” The modular bit is actually really important, as it highlights the fact that you can do many things easily and with relatively little hassle by using modules.

Now for a history lesson… Drupal was started by Dries in 2001. He was in college and needed a way to communicate with his friends and share a bunch of different things. Basically, he wanted to build Facebook, but for his friends. He created the system and then realised that other people can benefit from this. Apparently the name was originally Dorp, which is village in Dutch. However, when he was putting it in the domain registration he made a typo and registered Drop.org and called it Dropal, which Americans couldn’t pronounce. Dries then renamed the system to Drupal to make things a bit easier.

In terms of people saying that WordPress, Joomla etc is better than Drupal, it’s important to realise that different systems are good for different things. If all you need is a blogging platform, WordPress is great. However, if you need to grow it out of what WordPress was intended to do, it becomes a lot difficult and Drupal becomes a better option.

If you happen to want a job in Drupal, there are some really important things to take note of. Firstly, a custom Drupal resume and portfolio can really help, as it shows the experience you’ve had with Drupal specifically and not just general web design and development. Also, helping in the community can be really powerful, as it builds your knowledge and also your reputation. Usually if you are looking for work in a Drupal shop, they’ll look on drupal.org and see what you’ve worked on and helped with. Attending DUGs, cons, camps etc is also a great way to network and build your profile within the community. However, volunteer as well, as this can put you in touch with some great people (and you get some great experience).

A good website to give you an idea of where you stand in the Drupal community is Certified to Rock, which will give you a score based on your community involvement on drupal.org. However, it’s best to benchmark yourself against people who are at the same level as you (as opposed to comparing yourself to Dries). Also, if you organise or help out with cons or camps, points can be manually added by the guys who run Certified to Rock, but it’s good to let them know about it.

Q: Do you have a comeback for ‘Drupal is crap, why would we use it?’

A: it depends on what their problem is with Drupal. One thing that I’d definitely do is show them other awesome sites that run Drupal. Drupal isn’t known as the fastest CMS out there, which is a common problem, but there are some performance tweaks you can make to make it great. Sites like The Economist can show how a big site works.

The Web Standardistas gave their keynote on designing the sustainable web at DrupalCon London on Thursday 25th August, 2011.

To begin with, they’ve surveyed the landscape and looking at the history of web design, however their not going as far back as Tom’s keynote yesterday. In the last few years we’ve seen a proliferation of devices, including smartphones, tablets, desktops, laptops and old phones. Bringing that together makes it a difficult landscape for designing. Also, the context has become to change, as we’re consuming the web pretty much everywhere. In this regard we don’t only have to think about screen size, but also the shift of content. As designers, we need to present the content relative to where it’s consumed.

How do we confront this challenge? We need to create a sustainable web through a thoughtful combination of beautiful markup and classic design. It’s not about building from the top, but from the bottom up. There are a lot of sprinkles that you can add, including gradient, highlights, text shadow etc, but you need to start from basic principles, including hierarchy, composition, typography, semantics, device independence and openness.

As a beginner for composition, we need to look at design principles within print. There are basic things that have been refined over hundreds of years that still stand as true for good web design as well. With typography, there are also a few classic print-based rules that should be adhered to. But none of this is really new…

What the Standardistas suggest is the ‘Iceberg method’. We usually only care about what’s above the water or what’s below the water, but now we have to start caring about both. We begin below the water with the Markup Timeline, which are encompassed by semantics, device independence and openness. Back in the early 90s, all code was semantic, as it was mostly text based. What happened in the late 90s was animated gifs, tables etc came along and moved semantic markup away from what it was intended to do. Zeldman pulled together the community by taking over the Web Standards Project (WaSP) to take semantic back to what it was intended to do by adopting a standards based approach. Markup is evolving and we can learn from along the way. In the end, we need to understand that HTML is a design element, and we should treat it as such.

On the design layer, if we look at composition, hierarchy and typography and look at classic ideas of balance and weight within print design principles, we can create some beautiful looking pages. If we combine the two that’s how we move towards beautiful and sustainable web design. Some great examples are this year’s Build website and the 5 Simple Steps website (and the books), as well as Simon Collison’s personal site and the CSS Zen Garden.

Together, these make a marriage made in heaven to create well balanced, beautiful and sustainable web design.

Questions

Q: Are there practical ways of applying typography rules in our web design?

A: Tim Brown from Typekit has a website called Nice Web Type, where they have a lot of articles on the topic.

Q: What are your feelings on moving away from XHTML markup to HTML5?

A: It’s something we’ve been rattling with for a while. When you had the strictness of XHTML you had to say ‘you had to do it this way’, whereas HTML5 is a bit wishy washy and says you can do it a bunch of ways. It’s more of an open landscape, but what you decide to do should be an informed choice, and be more about guidelines and standards than what is valid and works.

Q: When it comes to new devices and grid systems, how do you apply grids to a device that has no physical bounds?

A: You have to think of a grid system that’s appropriate to each of the devices. The heart is understanding the way the content works with the designs. Also, you need to think more in percentages and ems rather than pixels.

Suggested reading

HTML5 for Designers – Jeremy Keith

Responsive Web Design – Ethan Marcotte

Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design – Khoi Vinh

Grid Systems in Graphic Design: A Handbook for Graphic Artists, Typographers, and Exhibition Designers - Josef Muller-Brockmann

The New Typography – Jan Tschichold

Justin Randell and Howard Tyson presented at DrupalCon London on the node.js module within Drupal. The presentation addressed why realtime, why node.js, how the node.js integrates node.js into Drupal, current features and what the future holds.

This is a live blog of the session on Wednesday 24th August.

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Tom Standage, the digital editor of the Economist, gave his keynote on ‘The Future of Social Media: A Historical Perspective’ at DrupalCon London on Wednesday, 24th September. According to Tom, there are two kinds of social media: the horizontal kind, where people circulate things amongst themselves, and the vertical kind, which is more akin to marketing messages being passed down to the consumer. Today, it’s the horizontal kind that is more widely accepted as ‘social media’. However, this isn’t a new concept. In fact, it dates back to the Romans. In fact, until the mass media was the brought in in the 19th century, the only way to share information was socially. People would literally have to tell other people through writing and conversation, making the distribution of information inherently social.

As an example, St Paul was one of the best practicioners of Roman social media. He wrote open letters (the epistles) that were disseminated to churches around the country. These were then copied and shared further, making them even more social. Interestingly, we’re still using the tools of Roman social media, including our current alphabet. Even inherently technical terms like ‘scrolling’, now rather key to the way we consume and share information, has it’s origins in Roman language.

If we move forward to the reformation, Martin Luther took things further, using the printing press to create cheap pamphlets that could be distributed easily. You could even say that Martin Luther was the master of Retweetable content centuries before everyone else.

Later, around the time of the English Civil War, England was one of the first countries to experience what was almost a ‘free press’, thanks to the printing press. However, with this came the first time there was a battle for public opinion amongst the pamphleteers. When one person would distribute a pamphlet on an event, another would issue a rebuttal by another pamphlet and so on. Thus began the first flame war. However, with lots of people giving their ideas and opinions, people could discover the truth for themselves.

Next up we have the origins of the open source movement, with scientific journals and discussions within coffee houses. People testing ideas, and discussing them in an open and free environment, is the basis for not only scientific method, but also concepts like open source. In fact, coffee houses are the origins of many large institutions. Jonathan’s coffee house, a coffee house where traders met, turned into the London Stock Exchange. Similarly, Lloyds had it’s origins in a coffee house where traders met.

There have been many cultures through the centuries that have thrived using social media through sharing, commenting, and copying. According to Tom, the moment it all went wrong  was with the invention of the steam press and the launch of the New York Sun. The problem is that with mass media, it all becomes a one way medium. Journalists and editors completely control the message that is spread en masse. The internet undermines this vertical style of media, with the horizontal style of old school social media finally coming back into play.

In the future, the internet as it stands today will speed up innovation within science and business, just as we saw the massive increase in the speed of innovation with coffee houses. Basically, we are reinvigorating the way that media used to be after mass media killed it.

This is a live blog of the session by Emma Jane Hogbin from DrupalCon London on Tuesday 23rd August.

To get your hands on Emma’s slides head here.

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Kicking off DrupalCon London this year saw Dries Buytaert, the man who wrote the first build of Drupal, give his six monthly State of Drupal, going over the changes that have happened since DrupalCon Chicago and what’s to come in the future.

According to Dries, we are coming to a point where Drupal is becoming standard within the media and entertainment industries, with companies like Sony, Universal, NBC, Warner Music Group, Cartoon Network and Turner using Drupal as a platform for their sites. However, other industries like finance, government and high tech companies are also getting involved, with Twitter now running it’s developer network on Drupal.

Even though people are worried about the adoption of Drupal 7, it took Drupal 6 12 months to get to 100,000 live sites, yet it only took Drupal 7 only 6 months to reach the same figure. Further to this, the number of commits have spiked to almost 20,000 per month since January 2011, as have the number of committers. Dries cites a few examples of where Drupal is moving forward, including the media module and the almost released commerce module.

As Dries said, “All in all, we have a lot to be proud of.”

At the beginning of each major release cycle, Drupal put out a ‘State of Drupal’ survey, with the last one happening in 2008. 2011′s survey saw over 3000 people take part. From the results, Dries mentions that Drupal has a lot of developers and business owners, but nowhere near enough product managers and usability experts. However, when asked to describe Drupal in one word, the major response was ‘Flexible’ and ‘Awesome’.

Most organisations have multiple websites, including product sites, community platforms, media platforms, microsites, blogs, event sites, ecommerce, corp com site, wikis, forums and extranets, with the tradition being that a lot of these run on different platforms. Now, a lot of organisations are realising they can standardise on Drupal across the board. Drupal is uniquely positioned to fulfil this big vision, as it’s one of the only ones to have the scalability and the ability to be a jack of all trades.

One of the big things that Drupal needs to do, according to Dries, is to increase adoption and attract more hobbyists, who usually become Drupal experts over time. From the results of the survey, they’ve determined that their biggest long term goal for adoption is a better product. However, the big short terms goals are more marketing and training new users.

On Drupal 8, Dries goes over the Drupal 8 initiatives, including Web services, HTML5, Design, Config management and Internationalisation, with each of them progressing nicely, and HTML5 and Internationalisation having patches committed already. In terms of responses from the survey that are going to become Drupal 8 initiatives, Dries has prioritised numbers of these including Native HTML5/CSS3, Media/asset handling, Usability and ease of use, mobile support, WYSIWYG editor and Better APIs.

However, Dries makes it very clear that just because certain things that people want from Drupal didn’t make the top 9, doesn’t mean you can’t work on them. In his words, ‘We love it when you work on other things.’

Drupal has a huge opportunity ahead of them. It can change the way people build and manage websites, as long as it doesn’t get blindsided by the competition. In summary, Dries says we have to think bigger, making sure that Drupal focuses on three key areas, technical strength, ease of use and good marketing.

Questions after the Keynote

Are there any major sites running Drupal 7 at the moment?
Examples cited by the crowd include Examiner.com and the US House of Representatives.

You mention about the need for marketing. Is the community able to do it, or does it need a top down approach?
Dries says that the Drupal association should take a lead, but everyone could participate.

Picture by @thomasmuirhead

We’re just over a week away from DrupalCon London in Croydon and all of our nefarious plans are finally coming to fruition. To begin with, we’ll be at the conference with Microsoft, handing out some goodies, as well as a limited edition DrupalCon London tee courtesy of Microsoft. We’ll also be attending the sessions, tweeting and blogging anything that comes up.

However, the very exciting thing will be happening on the Tuesday night. We’ve teamed up with the Drupal UK community to bring you the Great DrupalCon London Pub Crawl, which will be taking folks past some of London’s most famous scenery, whilst also enjoying beverages and each other’s company along the way. Starting at Tower Bridge and ending up near Blackfriars, the crawl encompasses six pubs, conveniently located near local landmarks for visitors outside the UK (as well as those inside).

Also, at each pub you’ll be able to collect a sticker from one of the Drupal UK or Ubelly guys to stick on the back of your map. Collect more than four different stickers throughout the night and you can collect your official ‘I survived’ tee from the Microsoft stand on Wednesday! There are a limited number though, so first come, first serve.

If you’re interested in coming along, you’ll need to register at http://ubel.ly/drupalconpubcrawl. This is so we can keep an eye on numbers, and we won’t keep any of the information after the event. Also, keep an eye on that page for more information to come, including the full pub route, local history and other exciting facts.

See you all at DrupalCon!