Happy Pixels

Drupal Media Camp Switzerland took place this week-end, less than a year after the idea of a Swiss DrupalCamp was introduced at a Drupal user group meeting in Zurich. This event was full of good presentations, exciting moments and networking opportunities, and I believe it was very successful in increasing the adoption of the Drupal CMS on the Swiss market. It was particularly interesting to have the Swiss-german Radio DRS and the news publisher Edipresse provide yet another example showing that Drupal can support large amounts of traffic and also generated some great conversation on various topics surrounding high-traffic websites.

SimpleTest has brought a technology to Drupal, but also a methodology, both of which have greatly enhanced the Drupal development process. The test automation methodology is common to all testing frameworks. It is the topic of this article and will also serve as an introduction to the Intro to SimpleTest session this Friday at DrupalCon DC.

A user of the HappyPixels theme asked me how to modify the header image, and I thought I would share the response here.

I was recently faced with the same problem in two different projects: forcing the creation of an image derivative with imagecache so that it is available in the submit handler of the same form in which the image was uploaded. By default, imagecache generates images on demand triggered by an HTTP request, which is ideal for most cases. However, this design doesn't make it possible to trigger the generation of images programmatically, which is why I created the following code snippet.

I was wondering what it would look like if you put all of Drupal's code into wordle. It turns out that Drupal has a lot of arrays, functions and forms, which is not too surprising. What's more interesting is a comparison between different versions of Drupal, and developers shouldn't take long to find some key differences... take a look!

With an attendance of 80 to 90 people, and participants from all over the United States and even Ecuador, the first SANDCAMP (San Diego Drupal Camp) was a success.

The year 2009 is starting pretty strong with a lot of events in the Drupal community. The first one for me will be DrupalCamp Germany in Köln this coming week-end, closely followed by DrupalCamp San Diego in a week. DrupalCamp Germany will be the first national Drupal event in the country, and got a lot of attention from being mentioned on Dries Buytaert's blog. DrupalCamp San Diego is also starting its first edition with a nice schedule of presentations and a documentation sprint hosted by add1sun!

A few reports have already been written about the "Fields in Core" coding sprint that was held December 15th - 19th at the Acquia offices in Andover, Massachusetts. While some of them are more technical, I decided to try to give you a good idea of what we spent our time doing. For the more technical ones check the "field in core" group.

Just today I had a last-minute opportunity to change my travel plans to make a one-week stop in Boston on my way to Germany and participate in the Fields in Core coding sprint hosted by Acquia.

After multiple iterations, the Intro to SimpleTest session has gotten pretty good at teaching people how to write a test, but one of the questions that were often asked during the testing sprint that followed the session was: what do I need to test? I submitted this presentation again for DrupalCon DC as there are still a lot of developers out there who want to get familiar with automated testing, and this time we need to be able to make a better job at responding to the question "what are we testing?"