A few months ago, Adriel Hampton convinced me through his incessant tweeting to give Empire Avenue a try. For those of you, who are not familiar, Empire Avenue—or EAv, as it often goes by—is a stock market for social media, where you can invest in people based on how they use social media.

If you haven’t tried it already, you can check it out at empireavenue.com. My stock ticker on the Ave is e(WEBDRUM).

I have been looking forward to upgrading sites to Drupal 7 for a while now. While I have played around with it a bit, you never really know how things work until you use it for a real working site. So I might as well test the upgrade process on my blog here. Before I do, however, I have to make sure everything is in place so that the site still works. Does everything have to be the same? No. But I do not want to lose major functionality

One of the first things to check is whether or not contributed modules will function in Drupal 7. Is there a Drupal 7 version? Is there an upgrade path? I started by taking a cursory look at the modules I currently use to see their Drupal 7 status.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about responsive web design, mobile design in general and the argument over web applications vs native apps. Here’s my take.

I attended Drupal Camp Twin Cities May 20 and 21, 2011: what a great experience!

Like many, I taught myself Drupal through books, online tutorials and the school of hard knocks. While I’ve been at this for three years or so, I haven’t met with all that many fellow Drupalers. I attended the Drupal 7 launch party in Minneapolis, so there were a few familiar faces at Drupal Camp, and now I’ve made a few more. I’m hoping to get more involved in the Drupal community, and Drupal Camp was a great way to get started.

My time at Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011 came to a close with the keynote from Jen Lampton, “Taking Drupal Back!” Jen is the director of training for Chapter Three in San Francisco and maintains several modules on drupal.org.

My notes follow after the break.

I have worked with large sites that have become completely bogged down. The next time I launch a large site with Drupal, I want to make sure that does not happen. So to learn how, I attended a session on “Better, Faster, Stronger: Designing Large / Enterprise-Level Drupal Environments” by Jason Burnett at Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011. Jason is director of infrastructure for NeoSpire, a hosting company.

Here is the session description.

Power and performance are key deliverables for any enterprise or large organizational website and Drupal is no exception. The goal of this session is to help you understand what a highly available environment consists of so that you can avoid the common mistakes and pitfalls when designing a highly available and scalable architecture to support Drupal.

My notes follow after the break.

Panels is one of those very important Drupal modules that many people use: not quite as common as Views or CCK, but it’s up there. Panels allows you to place content in various areas beyond the default regions in a Drupal theme, to put a complex multi-column layout in your content area, for example. To this point, I have not learned how to use Panels, but at Drupa Camp Twin Cities 2011, Will Jaspers gave a presentation on how to “Become a Panels rockstar in just one day.” Here is the session description:

Panels is a fantastic module which provides much needed flexibility to aggregate content from varying sources and help users and administrators alike use and re-purpose the information your website provides.

Assuming we can cover all of this in just one hour, you’ll learn:

• What a Panel, a Region and a Pane are.
• How to use the Panels Editor
• How to put custom content into a Pane
• How to use Contexts and Relationships
• How to put views into your panels
• How to make your Views re-usable for Panels
• How to use the Page Manager
• How to make Custom Access Rules
• How to use Views as Contexts
• A few themes that provide custom layouts
• How to code your very-own layout plugin
• How to use Panel layouts in Views

My notes on the session are available after the break.

Nearly half of all website visits now come from mobile devices rather than from traditional desktops and laptops. So developing a Drupal site without considering mobile is now impossible. At Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011, Maksim Pecherskiy presented a session on “Mobile Development with Drupal.”

Maksim went to DePaul University, then did two years of freelancing. He has done mobile work both with and without Drupal. Now he is at allplayers.com

Here is the session description:

Mobile web consumption is on the rise. Of the 4 billion mobile phones in use around the world, over 25% are smartphones, and over 75% are sms capable. By 2014, mobile internet usage is expected to overtake desktop internet usage. Numerous people today already access the internet exclusively on their smartphones and do not own a desktop/laptop. (dotMobi)

As Drupal developers, designers and themers, it's foolish for us to continue to assume that our work will only be viewed on a laptop or a desktop screen.

Today’s website must deliver a tailored experience to the mobile web user that utilizes unique capabilities only available on such a device—geolocation, screen rotation, etc. Furthermore, this experience must be just as flawless as it is on their full size device. The mobile user expects personalization, interactivity, and most likely will not be paying full attention to your web app as he / she is using it.

The following topics will be covered:

• What does a user expect when using a mobile site / web application?
• Planning your mobile web site and its content (either a from scratch mobile site or an add-on to an existing site)
• A classification of different devices and their capabilities
• Technical challenges and how to work around them
• Unique feature sets of mobile devices and how to use them to their full potential
• Device Detection
• Mobile web development tools
• Drupal modules for mobile web

My notes from the session follow after the break.

If I have a Drupal headache, there is a good chance I am working in Views. Views gives you all the power of the universe, as it is an interface to approximate how SQL queries works. However, when you get into the weeds with things like arguments and relationships, things get complicated: fast.

Thankfully, at Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011, Aaron Couch presented a session on “Developing with Views.”

Session description:

Views is a super-powerful way to use all of your Drupal data in multiple ways. But it gets complicated quickly. So I of course had to attend the session at Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011 on “The new Views user interface: How it works and how it was made,” led by David Rothstein.

The session description was:

Recently, the Drupal 7 version of the Views module got an entirely new user interface, thanks to a months-long partnership between designers and engineers working for Drupal Gardens and major Views contributors from the rest of the Drupal community. Working together, we revamped almost every part of the interface, with the goal of exposing the most common functionality in easy-to-use "wizards" while still preserving the full power of the module for advanced users. The result is a totally new experience for site builders who are using Views to build sites in Drupal 7.

• Go over the new Views interface and demonstrate how to use it, as well as give some background on the process by which it was made.
• Discuss the interface from the perspective of new usability patterns introduced in Drupal 7 core (highlighting places where it follows those patterns and places where it creates new ones), which should be useful for anyone interested in making usability improvements to other Drupal 7 contributed modules.
• Talk about lessons learned from the process of doing a design-driven overhaul of an extremely popular Drupal module.

Here are my notes: