Drupal.am

We will be deploying forum2 and this requires the full attention of the database, so we'll take drupal.org down. This should take about 20 minutes. The subdomains will not be affected, but you will not be able to log on during that time.

Hello from Jennifer and Ariane, your friendly Drupal Documentation Team co-leads! It’s time for another quarterly update on what’s happening in the Documentation Team—a lot has been going on since our last update (December 24, 2010), and we’d like to take this time to review the past quarter, talk a bit about the future, and let you know how to get involved! (Be sure not to miss the info at the very end about the April 2011 month-long documentation sprint priorities!)

Long-term goals and vision

People have been asking us about the long-term goals and vision of the Documentation Team lately. We’ve outlined some goals for the next year or so, but as of yet, we haven’t really articulated anything out farther than that. Rest assured, we will be thinking about longer-term goals and vision soon, but as new Documentation Team leads, we are currently still trying to get the basics taken care of and assess where we are and what resources we have for changing directions. That said, we do have some overarching goals:

• Make the documentation more complete and more accurate.
• Make it easier for users of all levels to navigate the documentation.
• Facilitate documentation work, so more people can help and those who are already helping want to continue.

If you have ideas about what our longer-term goals and vision should be, please start a discussion on http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team - we’d love to hear your ideas!

January-March 2011 Docs Team happenings Events

The Docs team participated in several events during January-March 2011.

Core conversations and sessions at DrupalCon Chicago

• We led a very productive discussion on a new help system for Drupal 8, which spanned a “Core Conversation” session and two Birds of a Feather sessions, and which will hopefully result in an improved Help module for Drupal 8 core (see Priorities section below for more information).
• We also presented a more general session on the state of the Documentation and Docs Team, and a call for participation/contribution. The video from the session should be posted on Archive.org soon. Several people contacted us afterwards to find out how to get involved (besides the people who attended the sprint—more information on that below).

Documentation sprint at DrupalCon Chicago

So many docs sprinters! Ariane led the main sprint in person in Chicago, while Jennifer joined via IRC from Seattle to lead the API docs sprinters. We peaked at 45 people in early afternoon, and there were certainly more attendees throughout the course of the day. Many commented and/or signed up on http://groups.drupal.org/node/132194 to show their attendance, and here are some highlights:

• drewish helped get several new people up to speed on contributing to API documentation. His quote of the day: “Docs are so much more fun. You can actually finish a patch in under an hour” (as compared to doing core code patches). He asked Jennifer not to spread the word about this, so he could keep all the fun and credit to himself, but she ignored that part. :) jeffschuler also worked on API docs, and drumm came by for a bit to answer some questions about API module.
• carolyn, liberatr, rootwork, and a pile of other folks worked on the theme docs! They are brave souls, and actually got a bunch of the theme docs updated with Drupal 7 information.
• wilbyr and greggmarshall started rearranging some distribution docs to get a solid base for this growing.
• gravelpot, mikechase, and some others worked on reviewing the Drupal 6 to 7 upgrade docs (the core upgrade docs are now finished!)
• jjkd, skjalf, bmadore, and others got us closer to having all of the Drupal 7 core module docs updated.
• itangalo, kvantomme, and eric_sea worked on planning and prototyping some of the new documentation and help system infrastructure improvements.
• chachasikes did some visualizations and diagrams of data migration methods.
• And more... we were so busy we can’t remember it all!

Thanks to all who participated in the sprint!!!

Other events

Several groups held smaller, but still mighty, documentation sprints, such as one led by bmadore and company on a bus trip from Minneapolis to DrupalCon.

And there was a lot of informal docs sprinting in the Sheraton lobby all through the week as well!

Documentation milestones

Here are a few significant pieces of documentation that were written or improved during the first quarter of 2011:

• Melissa Anderson (eliza411) led a team creating documentation for Git, and they rolled out the docs in time for the Git migration (when Drupal.org changed from using CVS to Git for source code revision control).
• The Install guide for Drupal 7 was completed.
• The Drupal 7 Upgrade guide was finished.
• Documentation pages for all the new D7 core modules were completed, and we’re also getting close to having all the old core module pages from D6 updated with D7 information.

Process, communication, and infrastructure milestones

Here are some things the Documentation team did to improve processes, communication, and infrastructure over the last few months:

• Made a Current Priorities page, which we will try to keep up to date with a list of current documentation priorities that anyone can join in on.
• Updated the Documentation section in Community Initiatives, which we plan to keep up to date with the status of more long-term initiatives.
• Did some editing in the Contribute to Docs section to make it easier for new people to get going.
• Made some infrastructure improvements:
  • The Drupal.org online documentation used to be known as the “Handbook”, before the Drupal.org redesign. Accordingly, there were a number of page aliases that started with “/handbook”, including the main documentation landing page. These were all changed to start with “/documentation”, with permanent redirects (issue: #995310: Update aliases - /handbook to /documentation). Kieran Lal reported at DrupalCon that since making this change (which impacted the documentation SEO significantly), the page views for the online docs have shot up like crazy!
  • The “Help with documentation” block that appears on the right side of the main Documentation page was improved (issue: #995334: Improve the Help with Doc block ).
  • There is a new “Docs infrastructure” component for the Documentation project issue queue, where we’ll be discussing further documentation infrastructure issues.
• We now have topic-based subgroups in the Docs Team, and standardized tags for the Documentation project issue queue. If you’re interested in documentation for a particular topic, please sign up at: http://groups.drupal.org/node/125669, and find which tags are tracking those issues.
• Jennifer did a Drupal Dojo screencast on using issue queues, to help demystify them.

Priorities and initiatives: Next steps for YOU!

Here is what we’d like to concentrate on for the near future in the Documentation Team:

• If you are a new contributor to Drupal documentation, start with the Contributing to Documentation guide.
• You can always check the Current Priorities page to keep up to date with current short-term priorities, http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/documentation for longer-term projects, and http://drupal.org/node/1006924 for Drupal.org improvement projects (some of which impact documentation).
• Another way to find things to work on is to filter for critical issues in the documentation issue queues.
• We are working on a new help system for Drupal 8 that will make it easier for Docs team people to edit the inline help in Drupal, incorporate DITA principles, and be flexible enough for both Core and Contrib (see http://drupal.org/node/1095012). There are several pieces of it that need to be done (in code), so if you’re a coder and would like to help out, contact Jennifer.
• Drupal 8: Dries mentioned in his keynote address at DrupalCon Chicago that there will be a Documentation “Gateway” that all Drupal Core initiatives will have to go through before they are added to Drupal. We’ll be working with Dries on defining what that means, communicating that to the core developers and the Documentation Team, and mobilizing the Documentation Team to help the core developers implement the plan.
• Ariane plans to do a pilot of running agile sprints (not to be confused with documentation sprints where we get together in a room and work on documentation for a day) for the online docs work. More information about that is posted on the Docs Team group: http://groups.drupal.org/node/134909, and the April sprint priorities are in place, so if you are looking for something to help with and have some time this month, please jump in on the April sprint so we can finish up some high priority Drupal 7 documentation!

That's all for this update, hope you all have a fantastic and documentation-filled spring!

We are thrilled to announce that for the seventh year in a row, Drupal has been selected for the Google Summer of Code program!

Drupal uses this great opportunity to expand its family with new talented contributors and award its existing long-term contributors. This fantastic program also gets Drupal some amazing new coding projects done! More information about the program is available in the Google Summer of Code website and program timeline.

Some of Drupal's Summer of Code success stories include:

Angela Byron (webchick) the Drupal 7 co-maintainer, a consultant with Lullabot, a Google-O'Reilly Open Source Hall of Famer and a Drupal Association board member. Gábor Hojtsy, the co-maintainer of Drupal 6, was an existing Drupal contributor who spent the summer helping to get i18n in Drupal core. He is now an engineer for Acquia. Rok Žlender, whose success on the SimpleTest automator led him to be one of those at the forefront of our efforts to integrate unit testing into core. He works full-time with Drupal at NowPublic. Andrew Morton (drewish) was mentored by webchick during the 2007 Summer of Code and has become one of the most prolific Drupal contributors. Joshua Rogers (JoshuaRogers) created the Plugin Manager module which greatly improves the process of installing and updating Drupal modules and themes. Ezra Barnett Gildesgame (ezra-g) added functionality to the highly used Nodequeue module, which he now fully maintains. He now works at the Drupal firm Growing Venture Solutions. Bojan Zivanovic (bojanz) became a preeminent contributor to views and contributed to EntityFieldQuery for Drupal 7. Jeremy Blanchard, created Drupal meetings module in SoC 2010 and now working with OpenSourcery.

So if you're:

• a post-secondary student looking for an exciting project with a thriving development community and tons of smart people you can work with
• an existing Drupal contributor who happens to be attending college/university and would love a chance to get paid over the summer to work on the "Next Big Drupal Thing"
• a seasoned Drupal developer with some time over the summer, who'd truly enjoy mentoring and helping the next generation of contributors make Drupal the best that it can be
• a Drupal community member who might not have the time or coding experience to mentor, but knows where to find resources and enjoys helping others find them.
• someone with a great project idea for an improvement in Drupal that would be perfect for a student to work on over the summer
• a Drupal evangelist who wants to help grow the community by actively engaging students

...then there's something for you in Summer of Code! Read on to find out more.

Prospective Students

If you have enthusiasm the drive to work on something great, now is the time for you to get started! Subscribe to the developer mailing list, look over the developer's guide and API reference, catch up on the lessons at the Drupal Dojo, find a Drupal event near you to get to know Drupal's amazing community, and take on a few bite-sized tasks in the Novice Issue Queue.

Most importantly, start thinking about your project proposal! Prior to submitting your application, stop by #drupal on irc.freenode.net or post your project ideas to the Summer of Code 2011 group to get community feedback. Your chances of getting into Summer of Code increase if the community has the opportunity to review your ideas and offer feedback to help you in improving your project idea.

We have already started accepting applications. For more tips, students should check out the Student Template Page.

Mentors

Please sign up to be a mentor if you have either experience with Drupal development or expertise in a particular area of interest (for example, newspapers, education...) and have some free time from now until the end of August.

To become a mentor,  join the Drupal SoC-2011 group and the sign up on Google's SoC mentor web app (now known as Melange). Please describe who you are, what your level of Drupal experience is, and your motivation for being a mentor. Your application will be reviewed by SoC admins (Chx, SumitK, or Dmitri).

You can go through Advice for mentors page to find more tips on mentoring students.

The more mentors we have, the more students we can get in, and the more exciting projects of varying types we can accept.

Community members

Great project ideas are vital to attracting both great students and great mentors. If you've ever thought "if Drupal could be...", now is the time to turn it into a project idea. The project should be feasible for a Drupal-novice developer student to achieve in a 3-month time frame. Suggest a SoC project idea in the SoC 2011 group or help elaborating already proposed ideas

In addition, you can help review the existing SoC project ideas by providing students and other community members with feedback. Community members are in the best position to help students understand the finer intricacies of existing modules, and help hhem should channel their energies to meet the the priorities of the Drupal project.

To help the new Drupal family members, we need some existing community members to be active in #drupal on irc.freenode.net to answer student questions, point them to the correct resource,s and people with expertise.

If you think this sounds like fun, be sure to get on to IRC!

The IT Dashboard is a management tool for the United States federal government CIOs to use in overseeing their IT spending. To support transparency and open government initiatives, Federal decision makers also chose to make the IT Dashboard available to the general public. In the IT Dashboard, members of the public can view the same data about performance that government officials use.

Background

In June 2009, Federal IT leaders asked two questions about their IT budgets. These questions are common in the commercial world, but have been difficult to answer in the public sector:

• Where are our IT dollars going?
• Are we getting value from our investments?

The answer to these questions is a website that gives insight into the acquisition and management of the federal government's $75 billion-plus IT portfolio. The result is the IT Dashboard, a site built in collaboration with the government's most senior IT leaders and nearly every federal agency.

Purpose of the IT Dashboard

The IT Dashboard provides full lifecycle performance information on IT projects' scope and status. The data allows users to see project status, spot problems and trends, manage performance and quality expectations, and establish accountability. The tool is useful to the public and to government IT leaders who plan and manage IT investments. The home page screen shown above gives an overview of the tool.

IT Dashboard’s value comes from several facets:

• Mashing-up data from multiple data sets (IT project justification, schedule/status, expenditures, contractors.)
• Ensuring that real-time and complete data is available.
• Presenting the data and comparisons in ways that are visual and easy to drill into.
• Providing only high-level data that doesn't overwhelm the viewer.

Site Design and Functionality

Originally conceived as a PHP application, the IT Dashboard evolved to a Drupal-based application, employing the Drupal API, several modules, and basic theming. While not all functionality is built in a customary Drupal way, we have modified all pages so that they can be accessed using menu hooks. The advantage of using such hooks is that now all those pages can use the Drupal API, and contributed modules, without worrying about whether or not Drupal has been properly bootstrapped.

One of the primary requirements was that REI Systems deploy the IT Dashboard rapidly. Since the source datasets were already available, developers avoided the need for a data migration step by working with the existing data model. With a working data model and Drupal’s easy-to-use components, we went to initial release in under six weeks. Since the launch in 2009 active development has been ongoing.

Another requirement was that the IT Dashboard incorporate captivating and practical data visualizations. To meet these requirements several visualization libraries are used across the site. FusionCharts drives most of the bar, pie and line graphs throughout the site. Google Motion Charts and JuiceKit power the more advanced Tools section of the site.

Initial plan was for agencies to enter monthly updates through data entry screens. However, this approach quickly led to delays and data quality issues. To address these issues, we introduced an XML API, allowing for system-to-system integration between the IT Dashboard and the systems used by more than 26 Federal agencies.

Access authentication for data providers is handled by integrating with an existing security system, included within the OMB's MAX system -- the tool used by federal agencies to enter and report official budgetary data. This integration was accomplished by extending the Drupal Central Authentication Services module (CAS), which controls role-based data access at both the application and database levels. The application makes certain data visible to the user only if they have appropriate permissions; otherwise, the user is limited to viewing only the publicly available data and graphics. User credentials are propagated to the database and are stored in a database session. This information is used by the Database Views module to enforce authentication and authorization rules.

The use of the FusionCharts library, which uses the Adobe Flash plug-in for rendering, meant that many mobile users were not able to easily access the same information as desktop users. To address the growing need for mobile use, a mobile-friendly version of the website was rolled out using the jqTouch library and the javascript visualization library flot.

Apache SOLR powers the search capability. A private SOLR index is used for authenticated users and a public SOLR index with a subset of the data is used for anonymous users.

Infrastructure

To support easy scalability and accessibility, the IT Dashboard resides in the cloud.

The federal government selected a technical environment that is robust; provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); offers high levels of security, scalability, reliability and accessibility; and has a security plan and existing capabilities to protect publicly accessible web sites that disclose government information.

The IT Dashboard leverages a Content Delivery Network (CDN) structure for the public portion of the website to improve overall system performance. Business data is stored in a separate MySQL database; the Drupal database contains only Drupal-specific configuration information, along with static content.

The infrastructure was selected to support a tool open to use by more than 26 government agencies, members of Congress, the IT vendor community, and the general public - whomever may have some interest in the federal government IT investments.

Module Use

Contributed Modules

Major modules that were used were:

• CAS - Integrates with existing OMB CAS implementation named MAX.
• CCK - Used for data entry and file uploads.
• ClamAV - Scan attachments for viruses.
• Context - Used for page layout.
• Skinr - Allows easy application of a pre-built style library to blocks.
• ThemeKey - Eases transition from old theme to new theme on per page basis.
• Views 3 - Allowed us to plug in our own query backend, necessary to access separate application database.

Custom Modules

The following custom modules were developed for the IT Dashboard:

• Data Controller - A Views 3 Datasource plugin that has support for aggregations and efficient query generation.
• PHP Dataset - Describe data sets for views using custom PHP code. We are using this to drive views that require data from the application database.
• Views FusionCharts - Display style plugin to render view output as a FusionChart. This module is compatible with Views 2 and 3.

Challenges and Lessons Learned

We learned one significant lesson through this effort, namely that Drupal APIs were more versatile than we had originally believed. Our work on the IT Dashboard started initially with a PHP application, not using any Drupal APIs. We found several problems with this approach, each of which make system maintenance more complex and error-prone:

• The logic in SQL queries tended not to be re-used.
• Security items need to be addressed separately for each page viewed.
• There was not clear separation between logic and presentation.

Upon observing these problems, and gaining confidence in Drupal APIs, we revised several pages to use the Views module, which allowed us to:

• Centralize the logic of most queries in View Default.
• Establish a clean separation between View logic and View display.
• Most SQL-injection and XSS issues are already addressed in the code of the contributed modules.

As with any complex development effort, we met several challenges, and learned lessons that may benefit others in the community. The most significant challenges included:

• Reconciling preferences of different stakeholders for different visualization and layouts in order to take advantage of Drupal's strength in a consistent presentation style.

  Drupal offers many ways to utilize templates and generic modules to implement a consistent look and feel across many screens. However the quick turnaround and occasionally conflicting preferences from different stakeholders made it difficult to develop an overall design that leveraged this Drupal strength. We have made a number of revisions since launch to improve consistency and we plan to address this challenge by spending more time up-front on mock-ups, and facilitating agreement across stakeholders on the end-state vision.

• Legacy system includes a data model that isn't suited to new uses.

  The IT Dashboard has a separate application database that originated from a previous system. We addressed the challenge of accessing this database by using a custom query plugin for the Views 3 module.

• Facilitating expansion/collapse of table data detail to suit user preferences (an example of custom display functionality).

  Many IT Dashboard screens have custom functionality, which could not be satisfied by the Views module at a basic level. For example, some screens offer a table view of data. However, the desire not to overwhelm all users with the full set of data led to a decision that some rows should offer an "expand" button to allow drill-down capability at the user's option. Implementing this customized functionality required custom coding.

Project Team

The site is currently operated by a nine member team, composed of the following roles:

• 4 Drupal developers
• 1 database developer
• 1 QA engineer
• 2 business analyst
• 1 project manager

Additional Information

REI Systems is a leading provider of web-enabled, database-driven knowledge management and performance support solutions for federal agencies, state and local governments, and the commercial and industrial sector. For more information, please visit us at http://drupal.reisys.com.

Symantec Connect is an enterprise class, community-driven, social business support and information portal for Symantec products, offering users of Symantec’s deep catalog of applications and services a platform to interact with one another and Symantec employees through rich web-based tools. Connect enables the rapid publishing of information about the day-to-day use of Symantec products through key community-centric features which facilitate the customer’s ability to:

• Ask the community for help with issues and flag solutions when they are posted for easy discovery in the forums
• Suggest and vote on product enhancements
• Publish helper applications and scripts as community downloads
• Publish user-submitted screencast videos for enhanced knowledge sharing
• Build online/offline product centric user groups with events, private content publishing and messaging in the groups
• Keep up with content on a variety of topics within the IT and security-related fields through articles and blog entries
• Enjoy a highly qualified community experience enabled by a suite of Symantec employee moderation, organization, and publishing controls.

All of these features also empower Symantec employees to quickly publish official versions of forum discussions, blog entries, articles, events, downloads, and videos while moderating and vetting content, helping steer the community in the right direction.

A Brief History

Symantec, founded in 1982, is one of the world's largest software companies with more than 17,500 employees in more than 40 countries. The company provides both security and storage and systems management solutions. Their customer base includes consumers, small businesses, and some of the world's largest global organizations. The company's phenomenal growth can be attributed to a combination of market acceptance and strategic acquisitions. 

In early 2008, Symantec's Customer Experience team began crafting a roadmap designed to consolidate several existing support and discussion sites into a consistent, best-of-breed community offering. The goals of this consolidation were to:

• Give Symantec customers a single point of contact where they could engage with the company's support, marketing, and product management teams, 
• Draw on other customers experience and expertise, 
• Reduce the support and licensing costs of maintaining a collection of disparate community offerings.

Why Drupal?

After considering the landscape of both proprietary and open-source solutions, Symantec decided to use Drupal as a foundation for their community initiative. Symantec recognized Drupal to be offering: 

• a wealth of out of the box CMS and social media features and functionality
• the ability to scale for high usage sites
• the theme and development flexibility to customize the user experience quickly without the typical lag they had experienced requesting new features from proprietary vendors
• a recognized developer community from which to draw quality development talent

Symantec’s internal UX team even installed and configured rough prototypes in Drupal leveraging the vast library of existing contrib modules to experiment with various use cases for the upcoming project. This ability to rapidly create functional prototypes further cemented the choice of Drupal as the platform for development.

The Team

The project was structured to allow Symantec Customer Experience team to provide input on the design and planning of the site while collaborating with a group of  Drupal experts. Symantec’s internal team is augmented with Drupal expertise in the key areas needed for successful Drupal development.

• WebWise Solutions Inc. leads Connect’s project development and is the principle contact on the project providing long-standing expertise in Drupal-centric project management and user community development.  WebWise handles all day-to-day operations and oversight of everything from server deployment to administering the rewards system and offering a first line of customer support for the site’s users, all of which enables Symantec to focus on utilizing Connect to serve their customers instead of having to worry about maintaining the platform.
• Tabs & Spaces Inc. brings the heavy lifting of custom module development creating upwards of 50 custom modules to augment and extend Drupal to meet the unique needs of building a customer support community around a deep catalog of products and services.
• Jeffrey Dalton Design Inc. adds the “hot sauce” of user experience centered design and theme work leveraging Drupal’s powerful theme system to tailor the interface to the specific needs of the community. After the initial launch the redesign process allowed Jeffrey Dalton Design to fully invest in re-visioning the theme and leveraging user feedback collected throughout the initial months of Connects operation. During this process the Symantec Corporation even went through a brand change of their own which was easily rolled into the new theme.
• Tag1 Consulting delivers the performance and scalability tuning that is essential for Drupal sites with millions of users. With multiple layers of content caching in multi-server configurations, world class scalability expertise allows Symantec Connect to continue it’s rapid growth in a high demand environment.

This augmented team approach allows for rapid expansion of area-specific development expertise when new features and functionality are requested while minimizing Symantec’s development overhead.

Initial Launch

The initial effort (which took place over 6 months) involved merging the content and users from three disparate Symantec communities including:

• 110,000 members from the "Symantec Technical Network" (STN) running on the Lithium platform
• 10,000 members from the "Altiris Support Forums" running on FuseTalk
• 20,000 members of the Altiris "Juice" community already running on Drupal in a separate Drupal 5 site 
• Hundreds of thousands of existing nodes and comments from these three systems. 

As of this writing Symantec Connect has matured to become the community destination for Symantec products with stats boasting:

• 3,000,000+ unique page views each month 
• more than 206,000+ registered users
• content base with 600,000+ combined nodes and comments (and counting)

The Redesign

After the successful launch of Connect in March of 2009, the Connect team spent a portion of the next 18 months gathering user feedback and iterating through ways to improve the site experience. In the beginning of October 2010 Connect launched a totally redesigned theme. The redesign brought with it the freedom to use a more flexible iterative design processes in shaping the new interface. The team was able to focus more on the user experience side of the application and bring out new features aimed at improving the usability of Connect. The overarching goal being: make Connect easier and more intuitive to use and the community will grow both in the quality content and overall responsiveness.

Site Navigation

One area of detailed focus was the site navigation. All site content, both official and user-generated, is created around a combination of content type and taxonomy terms categorizing nodes into “Communities” (ex. Backup and Archiving) and “Utilities” (ex. blogs, articles, downloads, videos, etc). A new site navigation system was needed that would make it easier to move between these communities and utilities and would clearly explain the relationship between them. Moving away from the original tabbed interface, a combination of an interactive two level drop down menus with the breadcrumb model of a site depth path was used to illustrate both the relationship of community to utility, and show a visual representation of where content lives in the hierarchy of the site. The selection of a community and its corresponding utility became possible with a single mouse gesture and click greatly simplifying the navigation tasks. The menu dropping down and then expanding on a per community basis also allowed for the interface to list all utilities available for the current community, while keeping the interface clean and uncluttered.

After some initial user testing a secondary utility only drop down was added, which becomes available in the second level of the breadcrumb once a user is within a given community, making it possible to quickly switch utilities within the same community.

The breadcrumb model then extends beyond the community > utility selection and, when in context, offers further details as links to forum name, blog name, etc. and a single dynamic RSS feed element that remains contextually aware as the site is traversed.

Subtle JQuery animations further enhance the user experience of the menu with quick yet smooth state transitions. All animations were carefully refined to enhance usability without adding unneeded cruft solely for the sake of eye candy.

Below the global navigation an authenticated user menu was added with:

• a user “Account” menu for quick access to account features
• a “Create content” menu with easily identifiable iconography and short text descriptions making a direct one click route to add content
• a custom “Share” menu to better visually integrate the share widgets into the site
• an expandable video screencast help system to allow for in-page video help and user training

Context-Aware Search

The main site search bar was enhanced making it contextually aware as the user browses into each community/utility. The search box sets community name and utility type as initial facets automatically aiding in search relevance by assisting the user to search within the community/utility category of the content they are currently browsing. An additional tab is offered to easily select “Entire Site” and run a global site search. The context also changes when viewing user related pages to make searching a user name quickly accessible. All of these facets and more are also interactive on the Solr search results page so searches can be further refined.

The Drupal Solr search results interface was enhanced by introducing facet state icons and subtle colors to cleanly and clearly layout the relationship of search facet blocks and the effect they will have when clicked. Of particular interest on a site where so many visitors are seeking answers to their questions is the “solved” facet, which returns all of the forum discussions that have been marked as having a recognized solution attached to them. This aids the user to quickly find possible solutions to the subject they are searching.

Visual Design

The overall visual design of Connect was retooled towards simplifying and modernizing the look and feel of the site to better represent a set of content focused around technology and technical users. The theme was aimed at a more open and spacious feel using grey tones to set the theme elements and UI into the background when not needed and allow the content to carry the focus of the page. A restrained use of JQuery elements throughout the site were added to reduce page clutter and reveal content through simple clicks of tabbed and carousel interfaces. This allows community moderators to feature content through node queues without overwhelming the lists and community pages with volume.

Features of Note Screencast Help

Though still in it’s infancy, the video screencast help system has the potential to be a powerful help feature for site users. The Screencast Help system is an inline JQuery element that expands revealing a set of How-To screencasts created to get users up to speed on step-by-step ways to use Connect and participate in the community. The videos are loaded directly into the expanded element so the user never loses the page they are trying to get help with. The initial implementation is a static set of cached videos, but by leveraging the existing taxonomy system, this feature will be easily enhanced in a future iteration to become contextually aware and show relevant video help as the user browses the site.

Forums

The discussion forums are the centerpiece of the Connect community. The forum feature set allows users to post product and support-related questions to the huge community of Symantec customers world-wide. In a recent study, Symantec noted that 90% of questions posted to Connect are answered by other users on Connect.

One of the custom features built into the Connect forums is the ability for a forum poster to mark a particular answer to his/her question as the "solution". Marking solutions in this manner make it much easier for subsequent users to quickly find answers to commonly-asked questions. Symantec terms these answered questions as "deflections" that save the company money because they don't have to be answered by a paid support employee.

This approach to “solved” posts also allows Symantec Community managers to select posts that need to be solved and push those into featured blocks challenging the user community to find solutions.

Ideas

Following the lead of other sites like Dell's Ideastorm and Ubuntu's Brainstorm, the Ideas area on Connect allows users to suggest and vote on product improvements. Market researchers know that some of the best new features and product enhancements come from the minds of users who actually deploy and use the product. The Ideas area on Connect allows product users to suggest a new feature or function while giving other community members the power to validate an idea by voting it up or down. Popular feature requests -- as voted by the community -- get the undivided attention of marketing and development teams. With Drupal’s improved voting api modules we were able to easily skin the voting widgets for various uses both as thumbs up/down widgets and the Ideas up/down widgets.

Known Issues

A much requested feature from site users, Known Issues allows Symantec Support staff to create official notices of product bugs with various status/severity tags and links to technotes in other Symantec web tools, which can then be used to collect votes from users who are experiencing the issue. Support staff can then interact through node comments to dialogue about Symantec’s plans for fixes and bug handling. It is worth noting Known Issues is an excellent example of a user generated site feature. A user submitted an “Idea” asking for the basic outline of functionality and over 245 other users voted that Idea to the top of the board. This brought the Idea to the attention of Symantec’s community managers who requested the feature be developed into “Known Issues”. Many times the best ideas come from dedicated product users expressing potential solutions to problems they face and companies can benefit from creating channels to listen to those Ideas.

Groups

Groups are areas within the community where users with similar interests can gather to share ideas, plan meet ups, and self organize to support each other. Symantec uses Groups, powered by Organic Groups Module, to give their more than 100 regional user groups a place to schedule meetings, communicate with their members, and post agendas and presentations -- all from within their Group space on Connect. Private groups give the company's beta testers, advisory board members, and early adopters a quiet, confidential place to exchange messages, information and files.

Videos

Some users would rather upload videos that discuss their tips and tricks in writing. Symantec Connect makes this possible. In this "YouTube" generation, almost anyone can create a screencast, and in many cases, these visual communication tools do a better job of communicating a user's ideas than an article or blog post on the same topic. Connect was designed to make submitting these information assets as quick and easy as possible while also empowering Symantec staff to publish their own official videos and screencasts for the community.

Articles

Technical users can submit in-depth articles to Connect so other users of the community can learn from their experience and expertise. Connect articles have been submitted by users around the world. Teachers, trainers, systems administrators, and end users have all shared their tips, tricks, and detailed solutions to technical challenges via articles posted to Connect.

Blogs

Community members are welcome to post blog entries to Connect that describe their experiences with Symantec software. Symantec also leverages the blog platform to spread information from company and industry experts. One example of this is in the extremely popular Security Response Blog.

Downloads

IT departments around the world are constantly writing code snippets and utilities that make working with their enterprise infrastructure easier. Symantec Connect gives them a place to share those tools and utilities with the community. Users are encouraged to submit scripts and utilities they've written to solve their own IT problems. The idea being that others who have run into similar obstacles can use some of these user-contributed tools to solve the same problems in their local environments.

Rewards

Quality content and genuine community participation are foundational elements to Connect’s success. Symantec recognized this by taking the more traditional user rewards of account status and badges a step further and offering an innovative points and rewards program. Users earn points by making quality contributions to the community through posting new content, solving outstanding threads, and aiding in the general growth of the site. Points can be tracked and redeemed from within Connect for gift certifications to Amazon.com and other online retailers around the world. The rewards program is a good example of a large company valuing customer feedback and rewarding the efforts their customers make to help each other succeed.

Multi Language Support

Like all global companies, Symantec addresses a worldwide audience of partners and customers, many of whom prefer to communicate in their native languages. Concurrent with the site’s redesign, the Webwise team integrated Symantec’s existing in-house localization workflows to provide localization of Connect into German, French and Spanish, with other languages scheduled to follow. The flexibility of Drupal’s localization modules allowed Symantec to leverage their existing resources to cost-effectively translate the Connect interface into its destination languages.

Conclusion

As Symantec Connect’s content and audience continues to grow so does Symantec’s confidence in the power of Drupal as an enterprise-class application framework. The flexibility of Drupal as a platform, combined with solid design and development resources, creates the possibility for rich user experiences and large-scale web solutions. Symantec Connect stands as solid proof that fortune 500 companies can combine the robust flexibility of the Drupal platform, with the world class skills of dedicated designers and developers from the Drupal community, to build rich content work flows and social networking features into a powerful web tool sets to serve and support massive customer bases globally while eliminating licensing and residual costs from competing proprietary solutions.

With only a few days to DrupalCon Chicago, what better time to launch our traditional battle plan discussion. It is time for us to start talking about Drupal 8. If you plan to work on something, or if you are going to contribute to Drupal in one way or another, please share your "personal battle plan" in the comments. A "personal battle plan" is a summary or itemized list of things you are going to work on during the next 12 months or so.

Important guidelines

In this thread, we are only interested in what you plan to contribute, and not what you'd like other people to work on. This is not the place to request features, to talk about implementation details or to discuss Drupal's general direction. This thread is meant to be a collection of things people are actually going to work on. If you are not going to contribute to Drupal 8 development, don't post any comments. Thanks for your understanding.

In today's global society, online collaboration has gained tremendous importance as businesses look for ways to share ideas and collaborate easily. Open Atrium is a powerful and flexible Drupal installation that provides intranet solutions to businesses and organizations for sharing ideas. It is used to create intranets where co-workers or teams can collaborate easily. But Open Atrium is filled with so many powerful features that you may need some help to use it to its full potential.

Drupal Intranets with Open Atrium unlocks the power of Open Atrium and guides you through real-world examples of an Open Atrium intranet. Examples and screenshots are used throughout the book so that you can follow along on your Open Atrium installation. The examples walk through setting up your site, user administration, implementing core features, and maintaining your intranet site.

This book starts off with explaining how to set up a web server on a Windows or Mac computer and install Drupal with the Open Atrium distribution. After installing Open Atrium you will learn how to add and maintain users. The book also covers some exciting topics such as the different "spaces" or "workgroup" micro-sites that can be created to match your organization's structure. Reading each of these sections, you will understand and become familiar with managing the Open Atrium interface. Once you comprehend the Open Atrium interface, you will learn how to create a blog, document library, and issue tracker for each group's dashboard or site page. The book covers everything from editing a single piece of content to arranging the layout of that content on each page.

By the end of this book, you should be able to establish your own intranet site for your organization or workgroup using the Open Atrium Drupal distribution.

A how-to guide with examples and screenshots to guide you through every step of creating an intranet with Open Atrium

What you will learn from this book :

• Add all the major features of an intranet to your site with Open Atrium
• Get to grips with Open Atrium's interface and its features
• Install Open Atrium and customize it for your organization or company
• Create sub-sites (spaces) for each of your teams, departments, or workgroups
• Manage users and create a member directory
• Add core features packaged with Open Atrium such as Blog, Calendar, and Issue Tracker
• Extend the functionality of Open Atrium by adding pluggable features developed by the Drupal Open Source community
• Maintain your intranet by performing routine maintenance tasks
• Analyze your site's logs and reports to ensure that it is running in tip-top condition

Approach

Packed with screenshots and clear instructions, this book allows you to follow along with your own site and ensures you won't get lost. It's a how-to guide that guides you simply through each step.

Who this book is written for

This book is intended for beginning to intermediate computer users who either have not worked with Drupal before or want to expand their Drupal knowledge by installing Open Atrium. If you want to learn how to quickly set up an intranet to improve your organization's communication and workflow, then this book is for you.

About the Author

Tracy currently works as a Web Developer for Phase2 Technology, based in Alexandria, VA. He is the founder of Alpha Geek Tech, LLC, a technology consulting firm. His web experience began in the dot-com era when he worked for Flipside.com. He is actively involved in the developer community and while working as the Technology Director for Quiddities Dev, Inc he spent his free time as the lead programmer and architect for 12seconds.tv.

Get 20% off!

If you order the book through the Packt website, you can save 20% off the cover price. Use DrupalOA20 (case sensitive) when ordering through the official book web page.

Note: you must be logged in to PacktPub.com for discount code to be applied

Sample Chapter

Chapter 5, Dashboard

Neil Drumm (drumm) has been an active contributor to Drupal for over 7 years. He has attended every DrupalCon, often as a presenter. Besides contributing to many Drupal modules and other projects, Neil can be found working as:

• Lead architect for drupal.org, hired by the Drupal Association
• Maintainer of api.drupal.org
• The (recently retired) Drupal 5 maintainer
• A member of the Drupal Association General Assembly
• A member of the Security team

In addition, Neil is whip-smart and great to work with. He has a lot of friends and fans in the Drupal community (he even has a Twitter-based impersonator)!

Photo by Robin Pam (http://www.flickr.com/photos/psrobin/5096045718)

Neil was nominated for the Community Spotlight by Angie Byron (webchick) and Lisa Rex (lisarex). We like Neil a lot, and we presented him with these questions:

How did you get involved with Drupal?

I got involved with Drupal through Howard Dean's 2004 U.S. presidential campaign. Zack Rosen (zacker) asked me if I wanted to help out. We started hack4dean, later renamed DeanSpace. Taking advice from #php on freenode, we started customizing Drupal 4.2 for local campaign groups.

Do you have any advice to anyone just starting with Drupal?

We were hesitant to join in the Drupal community; I wanted to focus on our customizations. Moshe Weitzman (moshe) said something along the lines of “anyone worth their salt wants to patch Drupal core,” I think that was a turning point. I had been using Linux and knew how open source worked; the extra invitation helped put that into practice.

Can you explain some of the benefits of getting involved with the community, and what you get out of it?

I’ve able to work with great people around the world on interesting problems.

What Drupal presentations have you made, and when?

I’ve been to every DrupalCon and presented at many. I’m a generalist on Drupal topics; there is always someone more expert than me at any given niche skill. I do currently consider myself an expert on Drupal.org, that’s what the project managers and myself are speaking on at DrupalCon Chicago.

Can you share names any of your other lesser known Drupal projects?

I’ve learned to not over-commit on small side projects.

Any interests outside of Drupal?

I do some road biking and cooking.

How people can reach you/learn more?

I have a sparsely-updated blog at delocalizedham.com. I’m continuing work on Drupal.org and blogging about it on the Drupal Association site. The best way to contact me about Drupal.org stuff are the Drupal.org Project issue queues, which I read a lot of. Otherwise, email drumm [at] delocalizedham.com.

Was it hard to decide whether to be the branch maintainer for Drupal 5?

Dries asked about this during DrupalCon Vancouver 2006. I don’t think I could have said no to such a great opportunity. I was working either 4 days/week or 3 weeks/month at the time, so it was easier to work out with my employer at the time, Advomatic.

What made you decide to get involved with api.drupal.org?

This was one of the many big projects started by Jonathan Chaffer (JonBob). It has some interesting data, especially when all of contrib is indexed; I’m looking for interesting ways to use it. I’ve been doing refactoring to better support modules and classes. Much of the user interface code will be refactored this year.

Drupal has recently been described as powering 1% of the internet. What's your projection for 5 years from now?

Projection-making is not one of the hats I wear well.

What's the deal with the @fakeneildrumm Twitter account?

A friend registered that with a guessable password, a few friends use it. Some tweets are based on things I actually said, others are just random.

What's the recipe for your favorite veggie scramble (or other vegan dish)?

I do variations on this tofu scramble recipe. I strive to make vegan food that everyone likes, no nutritional yeast & Bragg piles. I make a good butternut squash soup.

What's your favorite San Francisco restaurant?

I don’t want to name just one. For fanciness, Millennium; for burritos, El Metate; for sandwiches, Jay’s Cheesesteak; for bar food, Bender’s; for coffee, Ritual Roasters.

More Neil Drumm goodness

Drupal.org Profile: http://drupal.org/user/3064
G.d.o: http://groups.drupal.org/user/984
Personal site: http://delocalizedham.com/
Drupal Association blog: http://association.drupal.org/blog/50
Twitter: http://twitter.com/neil
Fake Twitter: http://twitter.com/fakeneildrumm

How Google sees Neil.

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Drupal.org will have approximately 12 hours of scheduled downtime, Thursday, February 24, 23:00 UTC (3PM PST, 6PM EST). We will be performing the CVS to Git migration. This is the most comprehensive and extensive change to Drupal.org in recent history - perhaps ever, therefore, the Infrastructure & Git Migration teams need an adequate time buffer to perform the migration, verify the data, and check for and resolve any issues.

What does “downtime” mean?

The following parts of the *.drupal.org will be inaccessible for the duration of the migration:

• The main drupal.org website, including all download pages, issue queues, forums, and search.
• Write access to cvs.drupal.org.
• Account creation on any of the Drupal.org sub-sites, including groups.drupal.org, api.drupal.org, and chicago2011.drupal.org.

We regret that it was not feasible to provide a read-only copy during the downtime and apologize for the inconvenience this extended downtime will cause to the community, but it’s hard to overstate the incredible transformation this move will enable for our community’s collaboration. With Drupal 8 development kicking off soon, and code sprints happening in DrupalCon Chicago in just over a week, having a strong platform from which to work is vital for our project’s future.

Some areas of the drupal.org infrastructure remain unaffected, including:

• Drush commands such as drush dl.
• Read-only access to cvs.drupal.org. CVS repositories will be maintained in read-only mode for at least a year following the migration.

We apologize for the inconvenience this extended downtime will cause to the community, but it’s hard to overstate the incredible transformation this move will enable for our community’s collaboration. With Drupal 8 development kicking off soon, and code sprints happening in DrupalCon Chicago in just over a week, having a strong platform from which to work is vital for our project’s future.

Thank you very much for your patience and understanding. Please keep your eyes on https://twitter.com/drupalgitgremln and http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-org-git-migration-team for updates.