Conference Season - Fall 2012

Submitted by Larry on 18 July 2012 - 12:44am

That moment when you realize just how much awesome you have coming up that you're not sure you're going to survive it? Yeah, that.

It's nearly time for the second half of the year conference season, and it looks like my schedule is starting to fill up. I've three conferences and 5 speaking engagements in the coming weeks, so for those interested in Stalking Crell here's where you'll be able to find me:

Midwest Developers Summit: 26-28 July

Supporting Aaron Winborn

Submitted by Larry on 16 July 2012 - 8:52pm

Aaron Winborn is a longtime Drupal contributor and friend to the community. Since his diagnosis with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Aaron has been trying to enjoy time with his family, to remain productive in his work and to live as normal a life as possible.

As time passes, however, the disease has made his life increasingly difficult as it attacks his nervous system. To cope with the mounting costs of treating his condition, Aaron has set up a special needs trust, and you can make a direct donation from his web site.

As a show of support for Aaron and his family, for the rest of this year, my co-authors and I intend to donate all of our royalties from sales of Drupal 7 Module Development to the special needs trust. You can read reviews and order a copy at Amazon.com.

Not only can you get one of the top books on Drupal 7 development, in so doing you can help out one of the people that has helped to make Drupal as powerful as it is.

The Kernel has landed

On Friday, Dries merged in the first major work from the Web Services and Context Core Initiative (WSCCI). In short, it means we are now making use of all of the Symfony2 Components that we've pulled into core in the past few months.

It is also step one in the biggest change in Drupal's design since Drupal 4.7.

Larry 2 June 2012 - 2:10pm

readfile() not considered harmful

Submitted by Larry on 3 May 2012 - 9:12pm

If you're like me, you've probably read a dozen or two articles about PHP performance in your career. Many of them are quite good, but some are simply flat out wrong, or misinformed.

One of the old truisms that has been repeated for as long as I can recall is "don't use readfile() if you have big files, because it reads the whole file into memory and your server will explode." The usual advice is to manually stream a file, like so:

<?php
$fp
= fopen('bigfile.tar', 'rb');
while (!
feof($fp)) {
 print
fread($fp, 1024);
}
fclose($fp);
?>

There's just one problem with that age-old truism: It's not true.

Refocusing WSCCI

Submitted by Larry on 20 February 2012 - 9:18pm

As Dries has already reported, we held a summit meeting at the Acquia offices in Boston last week. It was a good sprint for a couple of reasons. For one, a large number of leading core developers got more clearly on the same page about the direction of Drupal core. For another, we were able to break the "too big to swallow" logjam that has been plaguing the Web Services and Context Core Initiative (WSCCI).

Top Ten Reasons To Go To DrupalCon Denver

Submitted by Larry on 24 January 2012 - 10:38am

You mean you aren't already attending what will likely be the largest web developer conference in the Western US this year? What are you waiting for? Not sure if it will be worth it? It will be. Oh, it will be...

If you still need some convincing, or if your boss still needs some convincing, here's the top ten reasons you want to be at DrupalCon Denver:

PHP project structure survey

Submitted by Larry on 14 January 2012 - 9:27pm

As Drupal is in the process of considering how to restructure code to best leverage the PSR-0 standard, I figured it would be wise to take a quick survey of how some other major projects organize their code bases. This is not a complete rundown of every project, simply roughly comparable notes for those areas Drupal is currently discussing. I am posting it here in the hopes that it will be useful to more than just Drupal.

Note: This is based on one evening's work of poking around. If you work with one of these projects and have more information to provide or want to correct a mistake I made, please do so in the comments!

Backward compatible APIs

Submitted by Larry on 2 January 2012 - 12:05am

As we begin a new year, it seems appropriate that the discussion of backward compatibility has come up yet again in Drupal. It's a perennial question, and you can tell when a new Drupal core version is ready for prime time when people start complaining about lack of backward compatibility. It's like clockwork.

However, most of these discussions don't actually get at the root issue: Drupal is architecturally incapable of backward compatibility. Backward incompatibility is baked into the way Drupal is designed. That's not a deliberate decision, but rather an implication of other design decisions that have been made.

Drupal developers could not, even if they wanted to, decide to support backward compatibility or "cleanup only" type changes in Drupal 8. It is possible to do so in Drupal 9. If we want to do that, however, then we need to decide, now, in Drupal 8, to rearchitect in ways that support backward compatibility. Backward compatibility is a feature you have to design for.

Does design matter?

Submitted by Larry on 25 November 2011 - 11:38am

Last week I was at DIG London, in London, Ontario. It's normally a gaming conference, but they've added a web track and asked me to come speak. It was a fairly good experience, helped in part by their keynote, the infamous Jeffrey Zeldman talking about responsive design and related topics.

One of the points Zeldman made was that users want content their way, not the way we (web designers, web authors, and web devleopers) want it. Visually impared users want content read to them, or resized. Color blind users want a different color scheme that they can actually read. Smartphone users want content in a narrow column, without a dozen sidebar blocks. Mobile users want content offline, so they can read it on a plane. Many users want just the content, no design, and so use tools like Instapaper to strip out everything but the text of an article. RSS feeds have been around for a decade, and are now growing rapidly thanks to mobile devices, and those are generally (mostly) layout-free. If you're doing responsive design, then you're not making a design but the framework of a design that will change, and possibly mostly disappear, under certain circumstances.

Of course, that to me begs a very important question. When I asked it during Q&A, even Zeldman didn't have an answer. (Yes, I stumped the King of Web Standards. Woohoo!)

In the modern web, does web design even matter?