Blog

<b>Drupal 8 won't kill your kittens - Lee Rowland</b><br />There have been a lot of discussions around changes in the Drupal core team and that many old names are leaving for a variety of reasons, however there have been many new people coming on board and any community should be able to move on from it's originators. I'm currently going through the same process myself right now with Green Renters and it can be a difficult but worthwhile process. This was a  great oversight of what is new in D8...

<a href="https://www.facebook.com/MobileMondayMelbourne" target="_blank">Mobile Mondays Melbourne</a> has been running for 8 years, which in the tech event space makes it something of an elderly character and with the plethora of new events happening around town all the time, I have had the increasing feeling that some of these older events are wondering how to keep themselves relevant. One of MoMo's big advantages is it's international ubiquity, I met several people who knew the event from ot...

The Web Directions - <a href="https://wdyk-melb-sept13.eventbrite.com/" target="_blank">What do you know events</a> are always a fun night and tonight was no exception with many running 'jokes' about some of the appalling policy decisions just announced by the coalition that will affect our industry, one which has been a boom area for Australia, but largely unrecognised on the larger national scale. Anyway, enough of Politics, what were the talks? Bear in mind there were 10, so this will be ver...

**Drupal for Education and elearning by James G Robertson and Bill Fitzgerald** One of the commonalities with packt's Drupal titles is that whilst covering a variety of themes, they often include a lot of basic material that is included in all titles. This makes the titles great for those looking to cover a particular theme or topic from start to finish, but for those looking for more depth (or reviewing titles) you will spend some time reading through familiar territory such as installing, module...

One of the things that frustrates me the most in the non profit sector is the lack of collaboration between organisations and the duplication that often occurs instead. Sophie Bartho from <a href="https://www.1dollarday.org/" target="_blank">One dollar day</a> explained her idea for helping Fundraising by for one day encouraging people to give one dollar to charity (in this case, Save the children). The organisation got to a point where they couldn't do all the work they wanted to undertake an...

The <a href="https://www.ted.com/tedx" target="_blank">tedx</a> model is a slightly strange one, fraught with as many positives as negatives for organisers, however it does create a fascinating ecosystem around the world. Tonight had a packed room, but was unfortunately fraught with technical issues and joins several other local tedx events around Melbourne. **Viv Benjamin, Oaktree foundation** The nerd in me thought it was nice to hear a reference to the original meaning of '<a href="https://en...

Tuesday was a productive day capped by two intriguing events. A stupendously early breakfast session with <a href="https://www.graniteconsulting.com.au/" target="_blank">Granite consulting</a> at their networking breakfasts, with Dan Weis of <a href="https://kiandra.com.au/" target="_blank">Kiandra IT</a> covering 'Security and Real World Threats' and the <a href="https://uxmelbourne.org/category/movie-nights/" target="_blank">UX Melbourne movie night</a> covering 'Lean UX' with Jeff Gothelf. De...

An event that can be as specific as an event for the use of Drupal within government demonstrates a growing interest in Drupal (and maybe openness generally) within government and its great that such an event can attract nearly 150 people. Myself, Martin Schwall and Chris Dubrow ran our own session on using CRMs within government which went pretty smoothly and well, <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/chrischinchilla/extend-drupal-with-a-crm-drupalgov-2013" target="_blank">you can see slides h...

One of the challenges of my new attempt to blog about all the events I attend is that some events are hard to write about there and then on the spot. Networking events being one of them, you can't keep whipping out a notebook/tablet to jot down conversations and, well, you may not find anything you want to write about. Still, a challenge is a challenge… Silicon Beach has been running for quite a while and despite a declining audience due to many other similar events now and their decision to...

Three presentations tonight, followed by usual natters at the lovely Last Jar afterwards. <a href="https://www.meetup.com/drupalmelbourne" target="_blank">www.meetup.com/drupalmelbourne</a> **WF tools FTW - <a href="https://davehall.com.au/" target="_blank">Dave Hall</a>** WF tools are about improving the Drupal deployment workflow. After having done a Drupal devops talks myself recently, I know Drupal already possess better tools than most CMSs, but that doesn't stop developers from constantly...

I love pitch events, I love hearing ideas good and bad and watching people's passion in what they do… This will be the first I attempt to summarise and my first attempt at live blogging, of sorts. <a href="https://www.angelcube.com/" target="_blank">Angelcube</a> is a 'long' established Australian startup incubator offering mentorships, networks and funding for aspiring startups. It already feels a bit like the Australian (Melbourne?) startup scene  is on the verge of jumping the shark if it h...

Over the past year I've been slowly building a list of gotchas, mistaken assumptions and potential slip ups that have hit projects I've been involved with several times, or seemed so blindingly obvious after the moment that they just had to be documented. This is one of the many articles I have that may grow over time as I discover more useful tidbits. Some of these are more generic to suit any website development project whilst others are very specific to Drupal based projects, which is the m...

<p class="p1">Drupal has a plethora of ways to power your mobile apps and websites, including:<ol class="ol1"><li class="li1">Responsive design</li><li class="li1">Offline storage</li><li class="li1">Integration with frameworks such as PhoneGap and Titanium Appcelerator</li><li class="li1">Utilising services to feed apps data</li><li class="li1">And much more</li></ol><p class="p1">This session will touch upon these various options, looking at when they are relevant, their complexity, their adva...

I&#39;m working on a book/presentation/series of workshops/who knows what covering integrating lean and agile practices into a non-profit or social enterprise. As a sub set of that will also be &quot;What the non-profit world can learn from the tech world and vice versa&quot;. It&#39;s still taking shape, it&#39;s still to be completely defined, but that&#39;s the plan. Watch this space and leave any comments and thoughts in the comments below.

Developer says to designer &quot;blah blah blah&quot;</div>Client says to developer &quot;blah blah blah&quot;</div>Project manager says to developer and designer &quot;blah blah blah&quot;</div>&nbsp;</div>And so it goes.</div>&nbsp;</div>A lot of the time we don&#39;t understand each other in our projects due to a lack of clarity, explanations, context and assumptions on all sides that go continually unchecked.</div>&nbsp;</div>How can we all understand each other much better, reducing heart a...

CiviCRM like many open source tools is a blank canvas and a set of paints that different implementers will take in many different ways based on their myriad uses and requirements. This is why the cookbook concept always works so well, most implementers, developers and users will carry around their own sets of recipes, tips and tricks to accomplish particular results that may or may not be anything like someone else's. Tony Horrocks has done a great job bringing together many of these into one...

&nbsp;<p class="p1">What can the non-profit sector learn from from the tech sector and vice versa?<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Two sectors that are traditionally diametrically diverse, one moves slowly and is resistant to change, the other moves quickly, keeping up with trends and developments, constantly evolving to meet new needs and requirements.<ul><li class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">However in the changing global landscape, both need to be more efficien...

I've been having some thoughts recently on the paths that many open source projects seem to follow and who they are really designed for, the developer or the users? As always, this is work in progress and I'd be happy to maybe do a presentation on this at some point... _Do we focus too much on cramming features into open source projects, instead of paying attention to making our products/projects something that people will genuinely want to use and enjoy using?_ _Does the desire for programmati_...

He must works nights as I rarely see him, we've never spent a night together, just watching TV or anything like that, but he must have a set in his room, and a penchant for cheesy old horror films, because sometimes in the middle of the night I hear odd muffled shrieks and yells coming from his room. I think he throws out meat or something in the bins at the front of the house, there's always foxes sniffing and lurking around since he moved in, well at least I think they're foxes, they're quit...

A few weeks back I needed to create an ability for certain products in Ubercart to be available for 'price on application', there were a few modules floating around that pertained to do this, but none seemed to work in Drupal 7, so I racked my brain on how to accomplish this as simply as possible and came up with something quite tidy... I created a field on the product content type where content editors could enter the text to be displayed instead of a price, in my case, called 'field_price_on_a...

I decided to upgrade my Samsung S2 to a Nexus 4, there were several reasons for this...<ul><li>I dropped the S2 on a rock and it had a large hairline crack in the screen, not that bad but noticeable.</li><li>I rooted the phone and installed Cyanogen Mod, it ran really well until recently, and a stable version of 4.2 looks like it was never gong to happen.</li><li>I came into some money and thought I'd treat myself</li></ul> So why is this review entitled "The Android iPhone", well some of the...

I am honoured, happy and excited to have been asked to speak at a Web Directions event, <a href="https://code13melb.webdirections.org/" target="_blank">Web Directions Code</a>, here in Melbourne on the 2nd and 3rd of May. I am talking on how to debug and test your mobile web apps, somehow squeezing all I know into 15 minutes, it&#39;s going to be fun!

Take your Drupal sites offline with HTML 5 AppCache and turn it into a webapp, perhaps with something like PhoneGap. <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="356" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" mozallowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" src="https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/17141240" style="border:1px solid #CCC;border-width:1px 1px 0;margin-bottom:5px" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="427"></iframe><div style="margin-bottom:5px"><strong><a href="https://www.slideshare.net/_...

That snazzy website your looking at took a while to make didn't it? What do you reckon? Maybe it took the developers a few months to make. Perhaps its taken them a few years of iterative development to create and perfect something more complex. But what about everything else you're using, ever given any thought on how long they all took to make? Did you know that php, the language behind many sites you view was a year in the making before its initial release, mysql, the database engine that h...

Completing the tricefta of talking about <a href="https://civicrm.org" target="_blank">CiviCRM</a> at every user group for every platform it&#39;s available on in Melbourne, I&#39;m talking about CiviCRM and <a href="https://joomla.org" target="_blank">Joomla!</a> at this weekend&#39;s <a href="https://melbourne.joomladay.org.au/" target="_blank">Joomla!Day</a>. it will be a brief features overview on CiviCRM and how it integrates with Joomla!. I&#39;m talking on the 20th of January at 10am. Se...

Someone recently put me on to <a href="https://www.insynchq.com/" target="_blank">insync</a>, a new way to use <a href="https://drive.google.com" target="_blank">Google drive</a>. I've had two main issues with Google's drive application:<ol><li>That it will only work with one Google account (with three active ones, that's not very helpful).</li><li>That when you open a file in finder/explorer it opens up a browser, which seems a rather pointless user of a desktop application.</li></ol> Insync so...

I've been using buffer for ages, but not got around to writing anything about it, so now I met appear to be following the pack somewhat. I go through phases of having time to read through news and blogs, generally with a few days between opportunities. So I'll find a bunch of articles and links I want to share across one or more social networks but don't really want to share, say 20 at once. Enter buffer. It allows you to 'buffer' (or post immediately) several social shares across your network...

I&#39;ll be delivering the new improved version 2 of my &#39;<a href="/presentation/extending-drupal-crm">Extending Drupal with a CRM</a>&#39; talk at <a href="https://www.meetup.com/drupalmelbourne/events/97620592/comments/143010552/" target="_blank">Drupal Melbourne&#39;s inaugural meetup for 2013 on the 8th Jan</a>. It will be new and improved with a tour through integrating external commercial CRMs with Drupal, Drupal native CRM tools and more pictures of cats. So see you there for great...

A CRM (Contact Relationship Manager or Constituent Relationship Manager depending on your sector) is a fantastic way to take your Drupal installation further and streamline your business practises. We look at integration existing external CRMs with Drupal such as Salesforce and Blackbaud as well as more native options such as Red Hen and CiviCRM. The talk contains explanations, examples, case studies, pictures of cats and much more. &nbsp;

<span style="line-height: 1.538em;">In this sessions we look at utilising a variety of Drupal modules, tools and techniques to create standalone campaigns for your non-profits (or company&#39;s) site. These could be sub sites, micro-sites or pages with a different look and feel. <span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The sessions will cover changing layout and design, accepting donations, displaying different menus and much more.