Planet Drupal

This is a listing of Drupal-related articles and weblog entries that are of interest to the larger Drupal community.

Report from the Front Lines: Free Drupal Training Day in Los Angeles

Submitted by Christefano on February 27, 2012 - 5:43pm

At the end of 2011, we were excited to hear that the Drupal Association was planning a series of global training days, when high-quality Drupal workshops would be scheduled all around the world and all on the same day. We believe 100% in this initiative and talked with Jacob Redding, the Executive Director at the Drupal Association, about how to bring it to Los Angeles. We quickly settled on some common goals, including how to work together to promote Drupal to as many newcomers as possible.

Everything was moving forward until we learned that one of the key pieces of the Drupal Association’s strategy is that Exaltation of Larks and other Drupal companies with well-developed training programs were being asked to produce these trainings at low- or no-cost to attendees. This one had us at a loss — literally! — and had us wondering how to sustain the growth of our training program without sapping resources from our consulting and development divisions, not to mention the attendance at our upcoming paid trainings.

One of the things we enjoy the most is a good challenge, and we immediately started coming up with ideas to make it work with our training program’s existing costs and our dedication to quality. In the end, we succeeded on all counts with two parts planning and one part luck.

Our 2011 Drupal Training Year in Review

Submitted by Christefano on January 1, 2012 - 12:02am

2011 was a big year for us at Exaltation of Larks. In addition to our regular consulting and development work, we kicked off our public training program in January of 2010 and have offered public classes on everything from Drupal fundamentals to back-end development and everything in between.

In 2011, we trained organizations in Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Irvine and San Diego and our training clients are companies including LegalZoom, Disney Interactive, Thomson Reuters, The Annenberg Foundation and Warner Brothers; universities including UCLA, UCI and UCSB; and many Los Angeles-area creative and advertising agencies.

Training Scholarship Program

Our trainings aren’t just for big organizations, however. We want to help train as many people as possible, including unemployed job seekers and people in need, and help them become the developers, themers and architects of tomorrow. To this end, we started our training scholarship program in September.

In 2011, we gave away seats at our trainings worth more than $10,000 to our scholarship students and to local area Los Angeles Drupal user groups to raffle off at their meetups. This has been a tremendously rewarding experience for us and we look forward to doing more of the same in 2012.

Upcoming Trainings

Our first training of the new year is on Drupal Scalability and Performance and it’s at SANDcamp, the San Diego Drupal Camp, on January 26, 2012! If you’re interested in making Drupal go really fast, this training is for you. We’ll provide the servers you’ll get to optimize for performance and all you need to bring is your laptop.

Prehistoric Browsers, conversion.js, and How I Came to Love Drupal.settings

Submitted by Craig on October 21, 2011 - 9:54am

We’ve been working on a website that all of a sudden developed a really specific and annoying problem. After going to any page in the site, the page would load, then would instantly go to a white screen and sit there forever. This only happened to certain users, and was tough to duplicate from any of my dev environments.

Digging deeper, I found that the issue was with the Google Analytics conversion.js script, but only with circa version 3 Firefox and Safari, and it appeared that this issue came up as a result of some change on Google’s side — our site used to work fine with these browsers, then something changed and broke. The “white” page was loading a 1px-by-1px tracking pixel from Google, and inexplicably timing out on some request to an Adsense server.

Our site was loading the Adsense conversion tracking script in 3 situations — general browsing, and based on two specific user-conversion actions. The general browsing instance was handled by the Google Analytics module. We added the conversion tracking code in the “post-snippet code” to automatically add a reference to Google’s conversion.js script on every page. For the pre-historic browsers, that spelled a death-knell for the site.

Why use RESTful? Web Services and Drupal explained

Submitted by Blake on October 17, 2011 - 12:42pm

RESTful is the native API of web browsers. When you put some website’s address into a browser, that’s an implied REST expression called a “GET” of the resource at that address. In response to that GET request, the web server on the other end returns a web page. However, REST is much more than requesting the resource (data) at some address. Just like using any website, one is able to Create things, Retrieve them afterwards, perform Updates to them, and eventually Delete them. That Create -> Retrieve -> Update -> Delete cycle is called “doing CRUD” (really), and that in a nutshell is what creating and using a RESTful system is all about.

In the “early days” of the Internet, when someone wanted to make a printer or some other machine programmatically communicate over the Internet, more complex systems with names like SOAP, XMLRPC and AMF were used to handle that communication. Then around the year 2000, a smart guy named Roy Fielding pointed out that the web itself was an API and these complex systems were not only a bother to create and work through, but needless because what they were offering was already built into the web itself.

Now, Drupal is a content management framework whose essential purpose is to create a website of some sort. You are probably familiar with some websites including information from other websites, such as a Twitter feed or Facebook friend status. This including of other website’s information can be accomplished “the old, hard way” via scraping the page that normally shows this data, via SOAP/XMLRPC or that communicating of information can be accomplished “the new, shiny RESTful way” which takes less effort and by it’s nature is universally supported.

This is essentially machine-to-machine communications, and is how an iPhone/iPad/Android/game console/printer or virtually any other device communicates on the Internet. This is using REST.

Services and RESTful Web APIs: An Interview with Blake Senftner

Submitted by Christefano on October 3, 2011 - 3:10pm

To celebrate today’s release of Services 3.0 for Drupal 6 & 7, we sat down for an interview with Blake Senftner, a Services expert who is providing our Developing RESTful Services and Web APIs training in Los Angeles on November 3, 4 & 5.

We’re also offering 10% off this training: just use coupon code SERVICES10 at checkout. The discount code expires on October 15th.

Christefano: What was it that got you interested in Services?

Blake: Well, to be honest it’s because of Services and Drupal’s other APIs that I’m using Drupal at all. I come from a 3D animation background — I did both feature films and console video games — and I needed the ability to create Web APIs for a distributed computing environment for my own startup.

C: When was that?

B: I started working with Services 6.x and the XMLRPC Server, getting the first version of my distributed environment operating with that. It worked fine and I wasn’t looking forward to the move to RESTful until a buddy at Disney Interactive sat me down and explained REST to me.

Los Angeles Drupal trainings: From Drupal Fundamentals to Scalability and Performance

Submitted by Christefano on September 22, 2011 - 12:37pm

Tomorrow is the last day of Summer but the Drupal training scene is as hot as ever. We’ve scheduled a number of trainings in Los Angeles this Fall that we’re excited to tell you about, and we’re happy to publicly announce our training assistance program.

First, though, we’re sending out discount codes on Twitter and Facebook. Follow @LarksLA on Twitter, like Exaltation of Larks on Facebook or sign up to our training newsletter at http://www.larks.la/training to get a 15% early bird discount* toward all our trainings!

Here are the trainings we’ve lined up. If you have any questions, visit us at http://www.larks.la/training or contact us at trainings [at] larks [dot] la and we’ll be happy to talk with you. You can also call us at 888-LARKS-LA (888-527-5752) with any questions.

Beginner trainings:

Intermediate training:

Advanced trainings:

All our trainings are $400 a day (1-day trainings are $400, 2-day trainings are $800, etc.). We’re excited about these trainings and hope you are, too. Here are some more details and descriptions.

Training, Sponsoring and Presenting at DrupalCamp LA 2011

Submitted by Christefano on August 5, 2011 - 11:18am

Drupal Camp Los Angeles 2011 - August 6-7th This weekend, August 6-7th, we’re at University of California, Irvine (UCI) for DrupalCamp LA. This is our 4th DrupalCamp LA and this year we’re sponsoring, providing a pre-camp Site Building with Drupal training, at last count, presenting (and co-presenting) 12 sessions.

Exaltation of Larks’ executive team, including Lee Vodra, Cary Gordon and myself, Christefano, will be there with members of our team and close to 250 other attendees who are attending more than 50 presentations, activities and Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions.

Here’s what we’re up to this weekend:

Pre-camp Training

Today’s pre-camp training is Site Building with Drupal 7 and we filled the classroom to its capacity. This training marks the first occasion that Chapter Three’s curriculum for Drupal 7 has been used in Southern California and the response was tremendously positive.

We’re already preparing to offer this training again in Los Angeles immediately following DrupalCamp LA. We’ll continue offering Drupal 6 trainings for the foreseeable future, too, but this class showed us that the community is hungry for more Drupal 7 training.

Drupal trainings coming this Summer in Los Angeles

Submitted by Christefano on May 31, 2011 - 11:02pm

We’re offering Los Angeles Drupal and Drupal Association members a discount code that’s good toward our June trainings in Los Angeles. Use coupon code TRAINME and get 10% off!

These two trainings, Drupal in a Day and Drupal Module Development, are being offered by the Drupal experts at Exaltation of Larks and Chapter Three and will be taking place at Droplabs, a new Drupal event and coworking space in Downtown Los Angeles. Droplabs was created this year for and by members of the LA Drupal community.

Here’s what we have coming up in June in Los Angeles:

Looking back at DrupalCon Chicago

Submitted by Christefano on March 22, 2011 - 5:21pm

DrupalCon is a Mecca for thousands of companies and individuals that call the Drupal community home and, naturally, several of the Larks attended DrupalCon Chicago earlier this month.

We’re very involved in our local and global professional communities and we participated at DrupalCon Chicago on several levels, from volunteering to organizing to presenting.

Sessions and BoFs (birds of a feather sessions)

Rain Breaw, who heads up our Drupal training program, presented to a filled auditorium on Views Demystified, a Drupal 7 update to her immensely popular session from DrupalCamp LA and DrupalCon San Francisco. Rain was also a DrupalCon volunteer and you may have seen her at conference registration.

Also at the conference was our Director of Business Development, Cary Gordon. Cary is a Board Member of the Drupal Association, the organization dedicated to Drupal’s funding, promotion and infrastructure, and he has been working to help build the Association’s professional events team. You may have seen Cary at the Library BoFs (I and II), the Domain Access BoF and several of the Core Conversations sessions.

As for myself, I co-presented on Building Successful Local Communities: Insights and Best Practices. I also participated in the DrupalCamp Organizing Round Table, where I shared how the Los Angeles Drupal community, already one of the largest Drupal user groups in the world, is dealing with the growing pains of nearly doubling in size in less than a year.

Drupal Fit: Drupal’s fitness movement and support group

For fun, I participated with dozens of others in the Drupal Fit BoF that ran throughout the entire conference. Drupal and fitness might sound like an unusual combination, but as Dries Buytaert, Drupal’s creator and project lead, once told me, “We want the Drupal community to be fit so that we make better open source software.”

During the conference, I recorded several new Drupal Fit interviews that will shine the spotlight on members of the community who are focused on getting and staying fit.

Looking to the future

DrupalCon is one of our favorite events and DrupalCon Chicago was no different. This time, DrupalCon felt like another turning point for the Drupal community. As Rudyard Kipling once said, “I have struck a city — a real city — and they call it Chicago,” and DrupalCon Chicago has without a doubt left a similar impression on everyone who attended and exhibited.

See you at the next DrupalCon at DrupalCon London!

Drupal in a Day Training on February 4, 2011 (the day before Drupal Design Camp LA!)

Coming to Los Angeles this weekend for Drupal Design Camp LA? Come a day early to the Spring Arts Tower (the same venue as DDCLA) for a full day of Drupal training from Exaltation of Larks and Chapter Three! This introductory workshop will touch upon almost every aspect of the core Drupal framework. At this training you will:

  • Discover how to add, edit, and moderate content.
  • Learn how to create user accounts and understand Drupal’s permissions system.
  • See how to set-up menus, and position blocks on a page.
  • Create human-readable URLs, and categorize your content using Drupal’s taxonomy system.

At the end of this one-day class you’ll have a completed Drupal site, which looks and functions a lot like many sites you’ll see on the web today.

10% of the profits from this training will be offered as a donation to the LA Drupal Association, so registering for this training benefits you and the whole LA Drupal community.

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