Drupal, databases and semantics

Today’s lectures, sessions and BoF’s were actually quite focused on technicalities, for example creating and managing state-of-the-art ORM’s for PHP, kuddos to Larry Garfield and David Strauss for that one, followed by in-depth (some more, some less) discussions about the Drupal Core and most of its main components.

Still, one of the primary underground subjects was still RDF and its integration and implementation into Drupal and other systems, most of the sessions were actually “preparing the field” for post-conference discussions of various aspects and problems concerning RDF(a) and in-depth semantics while creating and distributing content.

Strauss also tried to get a group of everyone who’s interested in RDF implementation together, but due to some misunderstandings concerning the conference room and the fact that he was in some kind of arbitrary hurry, it basically ended up being random rambling bouncing off ideas. Surprisingly, this was actually quite fun and inspiring — but come on David, you can do better than that. Personally, I’m expecting some hardcore RDF brainstorming next year. There might be a sudden twist on Sunday’s code sprint, but I’m sadly unable to attend it, more on that later.

Also, there was a 3-part jQuery run-down which was being dragged along during the course of day and I’m saying ‘dragged along’ because they didn’t really manage to tell anything innovative, new or constructive to anyone who has used jQuery for more than 4 hours, I would even go as far as mentioning that it was boring to the extent that I won’t bother checking who was actually running it. Oh, not to forget:

Ubercart

I have to admit that I wasn’t that much up-to-date with the moduling scene on drupal before the conference, so it was quite a surprise to see so many fans, users, clients, followers, etc. on the Ubercart session. For those still in the dark, Ubercart is an E-Commerce checkout system for Drupal with great functionality, quite impressive extensibility and a great development crew.

I spent most dinners on the past couple of evening with these people and the amount of energy and emotion they’re putting into the whole project is very impressing and inspiring.

Final remarks

With that being said and done, I’ll be leaving the wonderful city of Szeged in a couple of hours, I sadly won’t be able to attend a couple of interesting RDF lectures on saturday and the code-sprint on sunday due to transportation (and deadline-*cough*) issues, so I’m basically taking a spiritual leave from the whole conference and the atendees with this addendum. Everyone, it was fun, it was great and it was very informative.

Personally, I’m very much looking forward to the next-year’s Drupalcon which apparently is going to be hosted somewhere in the US.

SimpleTest crash course, MySQL still blows

Starting the day as real proper geeks, after lunch of course, we were straight off to the venue and began the day with some fun Drupal test code-sprinting on the first session. Ironically I couldn’t get a clean drupal instance up and runnig quick enough due to a quite known and annoying MySQL socket pathing issue. Apparently Jure spent some quality time with the MySQL guys over at the Sun Microsystems pannel and they’re supposedly getting it fixed… Yeah, right.

Anyway, I managed to grab another rig, got the tests up and running and it was quite fun. We also found a couple of live bugs in the process, which I assume people were quite happy about for some reason.

Redesign of Drupal.org from the designers

One of the highlights of day 2 was an excellent session by Mark Boulton and his associate Leisa Reichelt about the upcoming redesign process of the current Drupal page, incorporating a full usability over-haul, probably stronger branding and a proper design this time (well let’s hope so!) to primarily get more people into using it… although I do have to admit that making the actual administration and management part sexier would also ease the motivation for developers and admins, give them a reason to switch. Alright, baby steps

We proceeded with some lectures about front-end caching, performance guidelines, etc. Jure went on with a shameless self-promoting Zemanta PR session and I managed to get a glimpse on some very fun and inspiring lecture by some of the engineers at Common Solutions about Web Application security, user and data safety and do’s and don’ts on how to avoid attacks and vulnerabilities on the application layer.

All in all, the Drupalcon days are getting better and better; if this continues, we’re up for a hell of a time this Friday. Let’s hope for the best.

Notwithstanding the fact that WordPress can go get trampled by an elephant stampede, I suppose it’s time to update my recently-dead blog again. If you haven’t heard yet, there’s a group of geeks meeting in Szeged, Hungary for their annual celebration of the existence of Drupal. I’m one of them.

Drupalcon introductions and first lectures

Ignoring the fact that some of us wasted half of our day only to get to the actual scene, we will immediately jumo into the fray with a quick overview of today’s happenings. It all started with Dries Buytaert giving a lecture about how Drupal is awesome and what can be done with it, followed by a quick batch of lectures to give the people a quick glimpse into the fancy framework.

Atleast so they say… The trains that brought me on the site were fast enough for me to actually miss the whole introduction ceremony, but fear not - most keynotes and slides should be available on the dedicated site as soon as someone receives several strongly worded reasons to actually do so.

Rasmus Lerdorf, one of the PHP pioneers, also had an intriguing session where he compared various aspects of some popular frameworks and ran some sample benchmarks and optimizations on a couple of drupal components. This is actually pretty interesting, beyond the scope of this rant, so a run-down post on this field should be expected somewhere in the distant future on my blog.

Life, the Universe and The Rest of the day

The day went on, more people kept arriving (including us), and the lectures got into full motion. Considering I can’t be at 4-5 places at once, I really hope that the recordings of the more interesting events, especially David Strauss’s Database optimization lecture, which got subtly swapped from Friday to today.

Other than that, I was surprised to find open and functional Wi-Fi spots all over the city, even in places where you’d least expect it, including underground and in the middle of a park the size of an average football field (take whichever football game you’d like, it’s still the same masochism).

The introduction party in the evening was a total blast — the whole community got into a nice bar next to the main city plaza and we spent what seemed to be the bigger part of the night chatting, bouncing off ideas and networking in general.

It’s really late, how about I blog again tomorrow

To sum it up, Drupalcon 2008 had a grand start and is on its way to be an unforgettable event for a lot of newcomers. Tomorrow’s highlights include unit test workshops, optimization tips, lectures about front-end caching, etc.

Stay tuned and don’t forget to comment and document the code you were supposed to write while reading this article at work.

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The Good

Launching your own blog these days got to the point where it’s easier done than writing ‘Hello World!’ in perl and with the ongoing nagging of some specific friends I’ve decided to finally give in and join millions of geeks, nerds, gamers and the occasional normal person and social reject in socializing and communicating the Web 2.0 way.

Of course there’s still a lot to do, but I seem to be heading in the right direction. Atleast no one has tried to fire or sue me yet for certain contents on my blog and I’d really really appreciate it if it stayed that way. As for me, yes - a thorough about page is in the works and a picture might also appear in the middle of your screen while you’re reading your favorite Harry Potter book instead of taking out the garbage.

Introduction been made, the garbage taken care of, let’s get down to business:

The Bad

Apparently the people over at WordPress are of the enthusiastic opinion that MySQL is the way to go and that PostGRE is nowhere to be found on their priority lists, so they scrapped a decent ORM altogether and decided that enforcing sticking with MySQL is the choice that is the most appealing to the average users.

Beeing quite the geek myself, I would really like to see the person who made this call. I desperately tried to figure out whether WordPress is salvagable or not, if an ORM implementation would be possible and how long it would take to get it running on a level which doesn’t crash the interwebz™.

So as every other coder out there with a brand new idea and too much time on hand does, the first thing you do before you start drooling over your new baby is Googling and finding out if anybody has tried to invent the hot water before you.  Apparently they have. And they’ve failed. Not only are some of the implementation even sloppier than the default MySQL one (which is plain horrible), you also have to work with archaic versions of WordPress and are forced into an underdog spot of waiting for some poor social reject to finally port the version which came out 5 months ago. This suspiciously smells of Linux-Gaming-Syndrome.

Despising the latter with utter hate, me, my insanity and the voices in my head decided that the odds are against us and we’re better off just going with the flow…

Welcome to my WordPress Blog

The Ugly

Having a hardcore geek mentality, it’s a real pain in the rectum to run something as wonderful as this blog on something so badly written (I won’t even go to the part with deprecated functions, more on that in future posts) although it’s rather extensible and shiny when you give it some loving templates.

It’s occasionally quite slow for some apparent reason, primarily due to the second-grade caching which is decent at best. Selective caching of certain pieces of the page anyone? Yes please! (Goes right unto the to-do list… Actually a to-do list plugin would be awesome too.) Certainly I have plans to make some minor upgrades sooner or later, which I’ll gladly make public and share with other ranting codemonkeys.

This place could surely use some optimizations, some new nifty tools and features, plug in some jQuery and gracefully degrade the whole story for all the Lynx and Mobile viewers. Given my current blogging-fever, most of these should pop up rather soon and if WP Super Cache is willing, you’ll actually get to see it the next time you’ll wander onto this site.

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