Survey: Help Shape Activism Labs
As part of my commitment to spent the next 12 months heavily devoted to building Activism Labs, I’ve created a survey to better understand the needs of teams of activists and organizers. Your ideas will shape the initial direction that Activism Labs takes.
Read MorePNW 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 MoreAbout Jeremy Blanchard
I am a student at the University of Oregon majoring in environmental studies (with a minor in computer science). My passion is climate activism and organizing.
Jeremy Blanchard's personal site