Drupal

The third ever Drupal Ireland meet-up took place on Saturday 15th November and it was a huge success. Over 70 people attended, which is an amazing 5 times more people than there was at our last event, just a few short 6 months ago!

When in Drupalcon Szeged, Heather and I saw how active other groups were in different countries and regions and thought "wouldn't it be great if we could build a Drupal community in Ireland?" So we decided to run a day long Drupal event in Dublin to promote Drupal and help grow our community.

Wow, it's been a while since I last blogged, and a lot of things have happened since then. In my last post, I had just handed in my notice to TNS. Well, five weeks on, I've started my part-time MSc, am doing Drupal development, my company Annertech has been fully incorporated and I've set up a home office. I've even sorted out a pension!

This week I handed in my notice at TNS and am going into Drupal development full time! Until now, even though I've worked in software development for over 7 years, Drupal has been just a hobby for me. Yep, I was one of the 29% of Drupallers who do Drupal for fun! All of the work I've done on Lightbox2, Coder and the other modules, has all been done in my free time.

I've finally got consensus on the JS coding standards we should adopt in Drupal. I got lots of useful feedback at Drupalcon Szeged last week, and so have now posted up a slightly modified version of my JS Coding Standards proposal in the Drupal handbook at http://drupal.org/node/172169 This is the final version (other than a few tweaks) and replaces the existing set of standards in the handbook. I've also included the final version below. Enjoy!

Drupalcon Szeged was absolutely fantastic! If you haven't been to a Drupalcon yet I would totally recommend it. One of the best things was I could finally put faces to the nicks who I've encountered over the past two years on IRC and drupal.org. There were also some really fantastic presentations - my only problem there were too many which I wanted to see! Thankfully, it was really well organised and all of the main presentations are now available to watch on http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/program/sessions

New releases of the Avatar Selection module have been made - versions 5.x-2.7 and 6.x-1.5. This release includes a number of bug fixes and some new features. The main changes revolved around performance enhancements.

New features added include:

• #282832 - Ability to set default name for bulk uploaded avatars.
• Improved performance.

I'm officially going to Drupalcon Szeged! Flights booked, accommodation sorted, bags packed (okay, not really!) and most importantly, fully registered. This is going to be my first Drupalcon and I must admit I'm totally excited about it! It'll be great to finally meet other Drupalers and to put faces with all the names.

I'm also busy reading up all the proposed sessions. Some of them should be very interesting, including webchick's testing sessions, Page serving and rendering (XHTML/XML/JSON, etc.) - now and Drupal 7, the Drupalchix BoF session and, of course, Dries State of Drupal speech.

New releases of the Avatar Selection module have been made - versions 5.x-2.6 and 6.x-1.4. This release includes a few bug fixes and new features, but the main change was a complete rewrite of the avatar selection pager. It is now AJAX based, which should improve performance for larger lists of avatars, but also degrades gracefully if Javascript is not enabled.

New features added include:

• #257726 - Ability to weight avatars and to give them a name.
• New AJAX based pager, which improves performance and degrades gracefully when Javascript is disabled.

New releases of the Lightbox2 module have been made - versions 5.x-2.8 and 6.x-1.8. There were quite a number of changes in these releases, including a whole bunch of new features including inline / modal content support, ability to change the lightbox colour, and much much more. A number of bugs were also fixed, including area tags not being fully supported and emfield image width and height settings not being followed.

New features added include:

• #141867 - Ability to open node page without sidebars in an iframe.

New releases of the FAQ module have been made - versions 5.x-2.11 and 6.x-1.7. There aren't many changes in these releases. It's mainly bug fixes. The only significant change is that now the layouts are separated out into their own include files and are only loaded as needed. This should improve performance.

New features added include:

• FAQ layouts separated out into include files, which should help improve performance.
• Updated German translations.