Drupal

At the DrupalCon Portland community summit, we discussed how local meetup organizers could support each other by maintaining a shared slide show for meetups. I have started a slide show and am looking for volunteers to join me in building it. Leave a comment on the issue in the Event Organizers Working Group if you can help.

Last week, I wrote about how free software has to break out of the customer-vendor mindset. The customer-vendor mindset doesn’t work with free software because users don’t pay and developers don’t provide customer service. The free software community works on a build-what-you-use model. I ended by saying that the build-what-you-use model is not enough to sustain hero developers—people who contribute at a level that cannot be sustained by their own use of free software.

I was able to spend some time in the DrupalCon Community Summit yesterday. One of our topics was how a paid ecosystem could align with Drupal core values. We have developers who are not getting paid for the work they do to support their projects, and users who complain about the support they are given as if they had paid for it. Developers feel like users are bad customers because they don't pay, and users feel like developers are bad vendors because they don’t provide support.

Yesterday I had my fears confirmed about the Drupal Automatic Updates initiative. It requires sites to be able to modify core Drupal files. While this makes it easier to fix vulnerabilities, it is not something you want when your site is actually being attacked. The best way to protect against someone exploiting a vulnerability to modify your Drupal core files is to change the file permissions so that your site cannot modify them.

I have been hearing warnings for a while now that distributed services and JavaScript running in the browser are about to reach the point where no one will want to work on Drupal any more. That would be true if no one cared about vendor independence and future-proof investment. If you’re building a disposable site or afraid that your client will run out of work for you, it may not pay to worry about those things.

Dreditor is a browser extension that provides handy buttons for working with issues on drupal.org in a consistent way. The Safari extension is no longer being distributed, but you can build it yourself and install it as a custom extension. It does not require a developer certificate.

I recommend reading this article by Shawn McCabe of Acro Media.

Today I was listening to Talking Drupal #168. The topic was how to ensure that open source project developers can afford to provide updates to their users. As an open source developer myself, I have to disagree with the premise that we should support a distinction between users and developers. The projects that I develop for are the projects that I use. As a user-developer, I do not care how many users a project has. I care how many user-developers it has.

After some hard-coded links stopped working when I moved a site to a subdirectory, I wondered why Drupal doesn’t use a <base> tag and relative paths for URLs. According to a 2007 article by Barry Jaspan, the <base> tag was removed in version 4.7 for reasons he did not know.