PNW Drupal Summit Presentation & Slides
I had the privilege of presenting at the PNW Drupal Summit in Vancouver this week about the overlap between Project Management, Activism, and Drupal.
I met some amazing local folks, had a chance to really get to know people, expanded by knowledge, and grew my excitement in the work we are all doing!
Below are my slides from that talk. See the SlideShare page for the slide notes.
Read on to view the slides.
Read MoreGoogle Summer of Code 2010 Reflection
Google Summer of Code came to and end last week and I wanted to post a bit about my experiences, accomplishments and plans for the future.
I went into the program looking for a way to fund my work on a program that I had been dreaming about after 2 years in the activism world. I was delighted to be selected by the Drupal community to contribute modules as part of Google Summer of Code 2010.
All-in-all, I had a fantastic experience with the program. GSoC is an amazing program to bring open source organizations and college students together and I’m happy that Google offers it. They contribute add a key element to the equation and ask very little in return. Working with the Drupal community was a pleasure.
In my proposal for this project, I set out to begin work on a project management tool for teams of activists to manage their events, tasks, meetings, groups, listservs, docs and other data related to their project. The four areas I set out to contribute to were: subgroups, more flexible task tracking, discussion listservs, and meetings. I was successful in 3 of these. All of these features were envision to be applied on top of the project management tools offered in Open Atrium, but also function well when applied stand-alone to a standard Drupal installation. These tools are meant to replace certain aspects of the Google Docs/Google Groups/Google Sites combo that are scattered and hard to manage.
I learned an amazing amount about open source programming, Drupal, and projects in general.
Read MoreCreate Simple Tests for Drupal Features
This article covers how to use the SimpleTest framework with a feature made using the Features module. Most of the advice here applies to anyone who is just getting started with SimpleTest and Drupal automated testing.
Since the Meetings module is almost ready for a stable release, I was forced to quickly realize how important a testing suite is. Until the module has a wide user base who is willing to test the module for me, it is up to me to do all the testing. Considering all the different states the module can be in (organic groups enabled, meeting owner logged in, various permissions, etc.) this quickly becomes an overwhelmeing task.
I dove into the SimpleTest framework to automate my tests in Drupal. It’s a very robust set of tools and it doesn’t take too long to get started with. Unfortunately, I got caught up on a few small points that I ended up wasting hours on. It was particularly difficult for me because I was releasing a feature, not a standard module. The differences are small, but they were enough to slow me down for a while.
After installing SimpleTest, patching Drupal 6.x core, and installing the Examples module, I started reading through the fantastic SimpleTest tutorial. Below are the “gotchas” that I encountered that prevented me from actually writing tests.
Read MoreMeetings Module
My work over the past two weeks has been focused on creating the Meetings module.
The motivation for this module came from the fact that most organizations I work with have a fair number of meetings to coordinate projects, but have no sane way of tracking them. Notes are always taken at the top of a google doc, agenda items are hard to gather in advance, and it is nearly impossible to find notes from the past.
Here is a screencast demonstrating most of these features.
The current release (alpha 2) is almost ready to be moved to a stable release. Current features include:
- Track date, time, location, agenda of individual meetings
- Take notes at a meeting
- Create repeating meetings
- Invite users to meetings
- Take attendance at meetings
- Organic Groups integration for invitations/attendance
- Views to show recent/upcoming meetings
If you have a few minutes to test out the current release of Meetings, I would really appreciate any feedback you have. You can post issues to the issue queue.
Read MoreAnnouncing Drupal7ReleaseDate.com
To all newcomers, welcome to Activism Labs. Learn more about the project management tools that will be created here this summer.
Today, I’m launching Drupal 7 Release Date and @drupal7release to help the community forecast the potential release date for Drupal 7 based on the number of critical bugs remaining in the queue. The idea came from a countdown discussion on Drupal.org.
After realizing that “drupal 7 release date” is the first search that Google will suggest to you when you begin typing “drupal 7,” I thought it might be good to provide a resource for Drupalers who are excited about Drupal 7, but don’t yet know that they can help it be released sooner. So I created the entire site assuming that the majority of the users will be site builders who are eager to use Drupal 7, but have never contributed code to core or tested patches before. I provide some short, but sweet set of steps for reviewing patches on Drupal 7 to help squash bugs. (I’d love some feedback on ways to improve the set of steps to be more noob-friendly).
Here’s the front page with the projected date and many calls to action to help out on the bug queue.
There’s also an interactive graph of the velocity of critical bug fixes since march.
You can also follow the updates on Twitter by following @drupal7release.
While none of this is particularly related to the tools being created here at Activism Labs, I did feel like making this site would help the community by directing those eager for the next release in the right direction. Hopefully this makes up for the fact that I won’t be able to develop my modules in D7 this summer.
Know of a way to get more people working on the critical issues queue? Have advice for the site? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Read MoreOpen Atrium & Case Tracker for Drupal 7
As part of my continuing effort to narrow the scope of my project plan for the summer, I have been in contact with Jeff Miccolis from Development Seed, the maintainer of the Case Tracker module and one of the lead developers of Open Atrium.
He was able to fill me in on the early plans for Drupal 7 ports of Open Atrium (OA) and Case Tracker.
Open Atrium for Drupal 7
According to Jeff, the current plan is to get a stable 1.0 release of OA out the door before any big ports or feature additions. He said that it was “close to impossible” that there will be a stable D7 release of OA before the end of the summer.
As much as I’d personally like to see a D7 release, it is understandably hard for the OA team to base their plans around an unpredictable roadmap for Drupal core. While it may make sense for some contrib modules to pledge to have a D7 version ready the day that D7 is released, OA is a complex piece of art and it will take more time for the D7 core and contrib code to be solid enough for a port to be feasible.
This opens some interesting question for Activism Labs, which are discussed below.
Read MoreNew Community Section
As promised yesterday, I have added a new community section to the website!
Sections of community.activismlabs.org include:
They are all a little sparse right now, but I imagine as this project gains traction, this will be the ideal places for people to contribute and find information about the work we’re doing!
I used the project management tool that I’m in love with, Open Atrium, to setup the community section. I modeled the
By the end of the summer, I hope that all of the modules/features that I create will easily integrate with Open Atrium because of it’s beautiful UI and great ease-of-use.
Questions: What is the best way to start building a small community around a small set of tools? Is creating a specific space overkill? How will it reach a critical mass?
Read MoreProject Tracking Tools
Coding begins tomorrow for Google Summer of Code, so I’m working with my mentors to finalize the project plan. This includes cutting back my very ambitious initial project proposal and choosing a tool track my tasks, features, and bugs for the project.
Tracking Tool: Pivotal Tracker
I evaluated a lot of project management tools on a variety of factors. The main thing I was looking for was something that was popular enough to have integration with other software development tools. I ended up selecting Pivotal Tracker, for the following reasons:
- It’s free for project of any size
- It uses a story-based system
- It works well for an agile development workflow
- I can drag and drop things :)
- Integration with many popular tools including GitHub
- There is an iPhone app (multiple apps, actually)
- Good introduction video
I spent most of today moving all my specifications for the project over to user stories.
View the user stories for Activism Labs (click on Icebox to see all of the planned features)
Question: What is your preferred project management tool for Drupal modules?
Read MoreProposal Accepted to GSoC 2010
Hooray!
This morning the list of accepted Google Summer of Code projects was announced! The proposal for Activism Labs was accepted!
I’m really excited to work with the Drupal community and build some tools that will facilitate better project management.
My primary mentor is houndbee and I will be getting help from benjamin-agaric and sdboyer.
Also, I created a twitter account to track the progress of the project: @activismlabs
If you’re interested in keeping up to date with the project, subscribe to the RSS feed.
Special thanks to heyrocker, dmitrig01 and others in the Drupal community who are helping make GSoC happen.
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