Planet SoC -

Understanding Input Formats

Alex UA — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:14:43 +0100

Yesterday I had to do some major filter debugging, causing me to learn a lot about Drupal’s filter system. Here are some basic and less basic observations on Drupal’s format and filter system:
Formats vs Filters
The basic relationship between formats and filters is confusing in Drupal, partly because the two words are similar. An input format is made up of one or more filters. For example, the ‘Full HTML’ format includes several filters by default (‘Html corrector’, ‘Line break converter’, and ‘URL filter’). Clicking on Admin: Site Configuration: Input Formats takes you to /admin/settings/filters where you can administer formats and their filters.
Input Formats vs. Output Filters
Though formats are sometimes called ‘Input Formats’, filtering actually takes place upon display of the text rather than input. Input format is an accurate term because text is given a choice of format when added and is saved with that format information. The raw text is saved into Drupal’s database and is not filtered until it is displayed.
Filters and Security
Any format which does not contain the HTML filter (for example, Full HTML format) or evaluates PHP (PHP format) is a security risk when untrusted users have access to it. We actually are pushing a patch for D7 which will automatically remind admins of this fact if they set their site up insecurely.
Filter Cache
The filter cache serves cached filtered content to anonymous and authenticated users alike. The more complex your filters are, the greater the performance gain from this cache. (I have been working on a site which does extensive xsl transformations to turn xml in node bodies into html on the page, making filter caching critical.) Cached filtered content gets cleared out on cron
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DrupalCon DC 2009 and the first DrupalCamp Philly!

Alex UA — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:20:22 +0100

Zivtech is proud to announce that we have signed on as sponsors for the upcoming DrupalCon DC 2009 as well as the first (of many) DrupalCamp Philadelphia. While we were disheartened to see our outlandish vegan donut eating compadres over at Chapter Three move a step ahead of us in the coveted badge color arms race with their Gold Partner agreement with Acquia, we’re glad to see that we’ve kept up with our Silver Sponsorship (and anyway, we just hired another six people, so I don’t think we’ll be behind in the Acquia badges for long).
We’re also extremely psyched to announce that we are sponsoring the upcoming DrupalCamp Philly, which will be held at the Cira Center on November 19th from 9am-6pm. The conference will feature sessions for all levels and types of users—from beginners and decision makers interested in what all the buzz is about to developers looking to improve or share their skills—and will feature prominent Drupal community members like Drupal Documentation Lead Addison Berry and multimedia wiz Aaron Winborn (whose new book on Drupal Multimedia I’ll be reviewing here over the the next week or so).
If you’re interested in coming to DrupalCamp Philly, please sign up on the Drupal Groups page. Space is filling up, so sign up ASAP if you haven’t and you’d like to go. I’d love to see more regional camps, and given the location of this event (the Cira Center is connected to Amtrak’s 30th Street Station, making it extremely accessible via Amtrak, SEPTA, Suburban Station, and the Philly Airport) it would be great for this to become the first MADCamp (Mid-Atlantic DrupalCamp). So, please consider joining us even if you’re in New York, DC, or anywhere in the Mid-Atlantic area (just don’t wear your home team’s sports jerseys). The event is free and includes drinks all day (non-alcoholic, so don’t get too excited, this isn’t another Phillies parade) and lunch.
Also- we’re still looking for sponsors for the camp so if you love Drupal and/or would like to reach out to the region’s growing Drupal community, please consider donating and, if you like, tabling at the event.
read more

DrupalCon DC 2009 and the first DrupalCamp Philly!

Alex UA — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:20:22 +0100

Zivtech is proud to announce that we have signed on as sponsors for the upcoming DrupalCon DC 2009. While we were disheartened to see our outlandish vegan donut eating compadres over at Chapter Three move a step ahead of us in the coveted badge color arms race with their Gold Partner agreement with Acquia, we’re glad to see that we’ve kept up with our Silver Sponsorship of DrupalCon DC (and anyway, we just hired another six people, so I don’t think we’ll be behind in the Acquia badges for long).
We’re also extremely psyched to announce that we are sponsoring the upcoming DrupalCamp Philly, which will be held at the Cira Center on November 19th from 9am-6pm. The conference will feature sessions for all levels and types of users—from beginners and decision makers interested in what all the buzz is about to developers looking to improve or share their skills—and will feature prominent Drupal community members like Drupal Documentation Lead Addison Berry and multimedia wiz Aaron Winborn (whose new book on Drupal Multimedia I’ll be reviewing here over the the next week or so).
If you’re interested in coming to DrupalCamp Philly, please sign up on the Drupal Groups page. Space is filling up, so sign up ASAP if you haven’t and you’d like to go. I’d love to see more regional camps, and given the location of this event (the Cira Center is connected to Amtrak’s 30th Street Station, making it extremely accessible via Amtrak, SEPTA, Suburban Station, and the Philly Airport) it would be great for this to become the first MADCamp (Mid-Atlantic DrupalCamp). So, please consider joining us even if you’re in New York, DC, or anywhere in the Mid-Atlantic area (just don’t wear your home team’s sports jerseys). The event is free and includes drinks all day (non-alcoholic, so don’t get too excited, this isn’t another Phillies parade) and lunch.
Also- we’re still looking for sponsors for the camp so if you love Drupal and/or would like to reach out to the region’s growing Drupal community, please consider donating and, if you like, tabling at the event.
read more

DrupalCon DC 2009 and the first DrupalCamp Philly!

Alex UA — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:20:22 +0100

Taking control of your 'My Account' page

Alex UA — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 18:43:24 +0100

Some modules add sections to your ‘My Account’ page. For example, the user module adds content like ‘Member for: 4 days.’ Blog module, profile module as well as many contributed modules add in their own content. Some modules provide a configuration option to decide if such content is shown, but many do not. If you want to change that default My Account page, here are some ideas for both coders and non-coders.
Coders
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Knight News Challenge application to improve Memetracker and Content Recommendation Engine modules

Kyle Mathews — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 07:47:27 +0100

I just submitted my application to the Knight News Challenge. My application is for money to bring the Memetracker and Content Recommendation Engine modules to production ready status. Memetracker, is of course, the module I wrote this past summer as part of Google Summer of Code.
Title:
Improve modules for semi-automated news aggregation and content recommendation in Drupal
Describe your project:
All organizations, large and small, have a vital need to deliver relevant and timely information to its members. My project will be to make it possible for organizations to easily meet this need. I will work on two Drupal modules, write documentation, and build a Drupal install profile so that organizations can easily add sophisticated news aggregation and recommendation tools into their Drupal website.
The two Drupal modules I will improve are Memetracker and Content Recommendation Engine.
I wrote Memetracker as part of the 2008 Google Summer of Code. The Memetracker module uses machine learning algorithms to intelligently filter and group all types of content. The module’s purpose is to find and display to a community in real time the most interesting conversations and memes on relevant topics as they emerge.
My goal for the memetracker module is for it emulate functionality of successful commercial memetrackers such as Techmeme, Google News, Tailrank, and Megite. I want it to be a robust open-source implementation of memetracking technology that can be easily plugged into Drupal-based community sites.
The Content Recommendation Engine module is designed to provide personalized content recommendation. It learns what types of content individuals are interested in and recommends new content as it comes in.
Both modules are powerful ideas but need quite a bit of work to be usable in real-life situations. I would use the Knight Foundation money to do fix bugs, add requested functionality, and to create an install profile which makes it very easy for non-technical end-users to install a sophisticated Drupal-based news aggregation and recommendation site.
How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?
There are many tools available to communities to aggregate and distribute information. What’s missing are open source tools which leverage not just human intelligence to filter content but also artificial intelligence.
There is far too much information for any person or organization to sort through manually. These automated tools can be thought of as pre-processors that improve the signal-to-noise ratio reducing the stress people endure trying to follow news. By filtering out the noise, important news is much more likely to be identified and acted upon.
How is your idea innovative? (new or different from what already exists)
There are not any open source tools that do the automated content filtering and recommendation these two tools will do. In addition, the few tools that are similar to these are standalone applications where as my work would be built on Drupal, the most widely used open-source social publishing platform. This means two things. First, my tools would get wider adoption as they would fit into many organization’s existing technology stack. Second, they are more useful as they can take advantage of many other powerful modules available for Drupal. The tools will be the basic building blocks of a rich flowering of content aggregation / filtering web applications based on these modules and Drupal.
What experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project?
I was a Google Summer of Code student this past summer where I wrote the Memetracker module. You can read my proposal here:
http://kyle.mathews2000.com/blog/2008/04/04/drupal-memetracker-module-my…
I traveled to Drupalcon in Hungary and presented there on the Memetracker module and on content filtering in general. The session and Q&A can be viewed here:
http://www.archive.org/details/memtracker
Currently I’m building and maintaining a large Drupal-based social learning platform at Brigham Young University. As I develop tools for the site and work with and observe the 100s of student users (soon to be thousands), I’m developing a deep understanding of how information spreads though a community and how to develop technology to facilitate that process. I hope to use both modules extensively in this website. The social learning website can be viewed here: https://island.byu.edu
I have been heavily involved in the Drupal community for the past 1.5 years. From this experience, I have obtained a good understanding about how open source development works and am confident I will be able to build these tools such that they are easily modified and extensible to meet the varying needs of different organizations.
I am passionate about building tools that help organizations digest, interact around, and act upon information. I would very much appreciate support from the Knight Foundation to continue to improve the Memetracker and the Content Recommendation Engine modules and make them widely available. Thank you.

Proposal for Open Studies (Un)course

Kyle Mathews — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 02:33:29 +0200

[This is the proposal I’m making for the creation of a new course at BYU.]
Students have many different needs, one size does not fit all. In our current courses, some are appropriately challenged but many others are bored and dissatisfied. Classes are not customizable by students to meet their needs or to fit their learning styles. In addition there are many subjects students would like to learn (the long-tail of education) that there isn’t enough demand to justify allocating a classroom and teacher. Most students already spend considerable time outside of school learning things not taught in their courses. This course would give them access to resources at school most importantly their peers as they study advanced topics in small groups.
The course would be divided into three 6-week segments. In each segment, the student creates a learning project where they create both a learning goal and a learning plan. The learning plan will include the steps to reach their learning goal and a list of resources they will use which can include people and materials (books, OpenCourseWare, online resources, etc.). This learning plan will be reviewed by other students and a teacher before being passed off. Students can also “cite” other learning plans in their proposal creating a marketplace for learning plans. After learning plans are finalized, students will be organized into groups of 3-7 people who all are studying similar topics. These groups will meet weekly while students are working on their project.
Diagram of a six-week segment.

During the segment, students will be asked to share what they are learning. Each week they’ll make a post in an Island group about helpful resources they’ve found and/or how they solved a obstacle in their project. The last week of the segment is devoted to teaching what they learned. Each student will be asked to teach in a digital form what they learned and post it on Island. This could be as simple as a blog post or as elaborate as a screencast, a video, or podcast. In addition students will be asked to participate in an Ignite session (http://ignite.oreilly.com/) and an Unconference. Ignite sessions are where each presenter has 5 minutes on stage with 20 slides which rotate automatically every 15 seconds. An Unconference is a new form of conferences organized on the premise that all attendees have something valuable to say. Students will be asked to attend the unconference held the final week and either present or blog some of the presentations.
This course would produce a rapidly growing collection of valuable learning plans and learning resources useful to students and teachers alike. They will be useful to students who are taking the Open Studies class and need a good learning plan or who are studying outside of school. They will be useful teachers who are looking for new and innovative ways to help students learn.
Teachers would have a different role in the Open Studies class. They would be mentors or coaches. They would help advanced students who are passionate about a subject complete effective projects. They would help train students to be proficient, self-directed, lifelong, and wise learners.
There is a huge unmet demand for specialized classes in my major, Information Systems, and elsewhere across the BYU campus. I for one would love to take a classes on social network analysis, cloud computing, and Javascript UI design, none of which are available. I have a friend who wants to take a .NET web development class but can only find 4 other students who are interested. The Open Studies Course would meet these and other demands.

Internet reduces need for experts. Where does this leave professors?

Kyle Mathews — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 22:06:34 +0200

[I wrote this originally on Island, the student learning website I’m building at BYU.]
Clay Shirky writes:
[Credentialed] experts the world over have been shocked to discover that they were consulted not as a direct result of their expertise, but often as a secondary effect — the apparatus of credentialing made finding experts easier than finding [non-credentialed] amateurs, even when the amateurs knew the same things as the experts.
In the web2.0 world, I’m seconds away from a Google search that connects me to resources and online communities that know more collectively than any professor. In this brave new world with near ubiquitous digital knowledge, what then are professors good for?
They aren’t nearly as valuable at teaching explicit knowledge so what’s left is to teach tacit knowledge (knowledge that’s hard to learn from reading). What tacit knowledge? I’d suggest the most important tacit knowledge that professors can help students learn is how to ask the right questions in their field. How do students learn to ask the right questions? By joining and participating in communities of practice.
I see Island’s (and other web2.0 tools) greatest potential is in exposing and connecting students more easily to active participants in different communities of practice. Through this exposure and connections they can learn to emulate these experts through experiencing and doing what experts experience and do.
Good learning is learning to be something not learning about something. I might know everything a book can teach me about chemistry but still fail miserably at being a chemist. I might be able to pass every grammar test in existence but still not be able to write a sensible essay. Learning split from its context is worthless.
Some of my most valuable classes here at BYU were taught by active participants in their community of practice. By watching them practice their craft, I learned what it meant to be a member of that community and what it meant to practice that community’s craft.
So what then are professors good for? I believe as guides. They can lead students into communities of practice and can model proper behavior and attitudes. And once students are in the community of practice, professors can help students choose appropriate experiences that will help them move through the stages between novice to expert.

We're Hiring: Drupal Developers, Themers, Site Builders and Interns

Alex UA — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 20:07:10 +0200

Zivtech is an Open Source Drupal web development shop with a beautiful office at 15th and South St in Downtown Philadelphia. We build web sites with the powerful content management system Drupal and are passionate about open source, being involved in Drupal’s thriving community, and having a fun work environment. We work with many exciting clients and do not accept projects which our developers do not find challenging and enjoyable. We build political (liberal) sites, music sites, university sites, ecommerce, and much more. We also work extensively integrating Drupal with other technologies such as Flash, DocBook, MediaWiki, YouTube, etc.
We’re seeking smart, motivated people at all levels of experience from those who are fast-learners excited to enter this rewarding field to those who are already Drupal and/or PHP, MySQL, LAMP, or CSS experts.
You should be looking to work in-house full-time, although we can be flexible about many things for talented individuals. Pay rate will depend on your relevant experience and ability and will scale with your growing skills. For positions other than internships, we require a bachelor’s degree and/or 2+ years of relevant experience. You will be expected to contribute to the Drupal project as part of your work routine and will be compensated for time spent contributing on tasks of your choice which benefit the community.
Here are some of the items we’re looking to hire for:
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We're Hiring: Drupal Developers, Themers, Site Builders and Interns

Alex UA — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 20:07:10 +0200