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Michael E. Meyers, VP Large Scale Drupal at Acquia, knows better than most how contributing to the open source project you are relying on to build or improve your business will pay off. He and his team did just that when they successfully built and sold NowPublic.com – the first venture capital funded, Drupal-based startup – while making massive contributions to the Drupal project along the way. He and I invite you not only to use Drupal, but also to make it better and to get involved with its community. If you're only using it without giving back, you're not getting the full benefit it could be giving you. Come to DrupalCon Amsterdam or an event near you and make a difference! Come sprint with us! DrupalCon Amsterdam extended sprints and beyond ... There are Drupal and open source activities going on almost every day around the world. Opportunities to learn, get involved, and make a difference abound. DrupalCon Amsterdam, the Drupal community's premier event in Europe in 2014, will run from September 29 to October 3. "This is an opportunity for you to send developers to work alongside some of the world's leading experts in Drupal. We have code sprints for nine days," extended contribution sprints and mentoring will run from September 27 through October 5, 2014 at DrupalCon Amsterdam. "There's no substitute for meeting someone in person. It is foundational for a relationship. Go the the DrupalCon website. You can see what sprint groups you can sign up for. You can start your own group. If you always wished that Drupal had a particular feature ... if there's a bug that you really want to fix and you need help getting it into the platform ... This is your opportunity to come in and work alongside these amazing people and make your dreams and your needs happen." If you can't make it to DrupalCon Amsterdam, find your next Drupal community event at Drupical.com – a terrific resource for finding Drupal events by event type, date, and location. Open source at scale: Drupal Working with an open source technology at scale – of adoption and size of developer community – like Drupal, gives organizations advantages above and beyond being 'simply open source,' especially when they do their part and share contributions with the rest of the community. "It's an opportunity to work together with organizations to solve common problems and challenges. It enables you to take a platform that meets 80% of your needs and close that 20% gap. That gives you tremendous room for innovation while providing amazing cost savings and expediting your time to market." LSD The Large Scale Drupal project is run as an independent group within the Acquia Office of the CTO (OCTO). "The goal behind LSD is to create a strategic alliance. We want to help all these amazing organizations that have adopted and leveraged the platform to understand the economic benefits of working together and so that working together, we can further drive down costs." "Many of these organizations are trying to solve the same challenges and problems. Strategic alliances are a common way in the business world to solve competitive problems. We can help you be much more successful with your technology. Learn from our successes. Learn from our mistakes. Let me help you get up and running that much faster. We can help each other understand what are these catalysts for success, what are the pitfalls to avoid." "The whole idea behind LSD is to get organizations working together to help each other be more successful, drive down costs, and create better software." Get more out of your open source: give more No matter how much benefit you derive from Drupal as a cost-effective, flexible toolset, you could be getting more out of it, by working with the tens of thousands of other Drupal users and developers around the world. "The more than you plug your organization into the open source communities and...

This week: Meet Adam "phenaproxima" Hoenich! Learn what the Drupal Module Upgrader can do for you! And what you can do for it! Come to Webchick's BoF at DrupalCon Amsterdam! Contribute! I sat down with Adam at Acquia HQ in Burlington Massachusetts to talk about the Drupal Module Upgrader. Adam is currently an intern with the Acquia Office of the CTO (aka OCTO), reporting to Angie Byron and dedicating his considerable energy and experience to the "DMU". Special thanks to PreviousNext and Cameron Zemek for their contributions and sponsorship of the DMU project. Thank you! What is the DMU? To help module authors get a jump start on porting their module to Drupal 8, the Drupal Module Upgrader is a Drush command dependent on Composer that lets you do a basic, initial upgrade of any Drupal 7 module to Drupal 8 "... the goal being that could at least turn on that module without crashing your site. If you're a more advanced coder, maybe you don't want a module rewriting your module for you," you can also have it analyze your code instead, "which generates a report of things that are wrong and points you to the documentation online where you can see what changed and how to fix it exactly." Acceleration: DMU "... is not a complete wizard. It can't rewrite your module for you the way a human could. It changes function calls and starts you on the way to having a Drupal 8 module that works. It's a jump start on refactoring your modules for Drupal 8. So much has changed. The way we write modules is different now. It starts you down the road," if you have a module to upgrade. If you need to write a brand new Drupal 8 module, check out the work Jesus Manuel Olivas has been doing on the Drupal 8 Console scaffolding module generator. Here is a video of his session on that for jam's Drupal Camp. How can I help? The work being done on DMU right now is mostly being done by Angie and Adam ... mostly Adam :-) ... "It's all based on plug-ins. Right now we're working on establishing an API that you can use to write more plug-ins. The point of a single plug-in is to convert some piece of your code," a particular function call, hook or what have you. "Some hooks have been removed or some hooks gave changed format, so there's plug-ins to do all this stuff. I'm hoping that the community will step up and write plug-ins for this. DMU is a very thin wrapper around a lot of plug-ins, basically." Angie Byron (in person) and Adam (remotely) is going to be doing a BoF about the DMU at DrupalCon Amsterdam: Wednesday, October 1, at 15:45 (aka 3:45 p.m.)! If you are going to be in Amsterdam and have anything to do with maintaining modules, you should check it out. Guest Dossier: Adam Hoenich Acquia OCTO ("Office of the CTO ") intern, Drupal contributor Drupal.org profile: phenaproxima Website: http://www.phenaproxima.net/cv/ Twitter: jphenaproxima (Adam uses this to track long-distance bike rides :-) 1st Drupal memory: "Making a total hash of a Drupal 5 theme ... Now my themes actually work ... and I write modules, too." Favorite thing about Drupal: "Drupal core. Developing on Drupal core, you can tell that a lot of smart people put a lot of brain power into this thing and that there's a lot that they've thought of. For me it's really pleasant to code for Drupal. The community is also amazing, but mostly, I like the code." Video!

Part 1 of a 2-part conversation with Angie Byron in front of the cameras at NYC Camp 2014. In this part of our conversation we go over some of the inspiring and thought-provoking ideas we encountered there, and then jump to some of the benefits to users of the technical improvements built into Drupal 8. What are the consequences of your technology? Angie explains why she was excited to be at the UN for NYC Camp, "I felt really energized coming in here. I got into Drupal from a humanitarian angle. I love the whole open source ethos around empowering other people. I am really excited that an organization like the United Nations is using open source and especially Drupal (!) to make a difference in the world." Inspired by the keynote and subsequent panel discussion with the CITO of the United Nations, Atefeh Riazi and thinking about the role of technology in change and what the Drupal project could do to make the world a better place, Angie points out, "We always thing, as idealistic programmers, that everything we do with technology is going to make the world a better place. It was interesting that she challenged that notion a little bit to actually look at the full picture and really think 50 years ahead at what the actual social, economic, and environmental impact of those things will be. That was really thought-provoking." Developers often get caught in technical minutiae, fixing bugs, and such, "but then ignore the other ways that those things could be used both to the benefit and detriment of humanity. That was a neat angle, pushing us to think broader than our own selves in terms of our impact on the world as open source developers. Empowering others with Drupal Atefeh Riazi's suggestions for where Drupal might make a difference included mapping and predictive analysis, she mentioned the challenges of limited bandwidth and mobile devices. "Drupal can play a really big part in this [helping and empowering others]." Here, Angie expresses very elegantly what I consider the fundamental decision that has informed how we design and build the software itself. What I get excited about is that in Drupal essentially, what we do as Drupal developers is we make really abstract complicated programming concepts accessible to non-developers. When we write things like the Views module, you can do very sophisticated queries, and charts, and maps, and all kinds of things just by clicking a few buttons without having to understand all the code that comes underneath it. What I get really excited about is the idea that Drupal – particularly in Drupal 8 – could be this vehicle through which we create really easily accessible things that could be piped through a mobile application or usable on the internet, and used as a tool to help those people who are on the front lines trying to make the world a better place. We can build technology to enable that. This is not top-down. Drupal empowers anyone with access to the internet to communicate with the world: their peers, their neighbors, or even create communities of common interest and common action with others in similar situations around the world. "One of the core pieces that Drupal helps people do is community. It helps people engage with others even if they can't do that physically. Drupal is a wonderful tool for enabling that, as long as we can get the user experience right so that it is accessible to as many people as possible." Drupal 8's role in empowerment Empowering people in developing countries with technology today often involves mobile networks and devices, limited bandwidth and other challenges. There are a few features of Drupal 8 that will really help empowerment. The Web Services Initiative is probably the biggest one. It will transform Drupal 8 from from this thing that assumes that everything it is serving out to is a desktop browser rendering full HTML pages. Instead, it just turns everything into a request and a...

With DrupalCon Amsterdam and The Prenote right around the corner, it seemed like a good time to revisit this recording from when I had the tables turned on me at DrupalCon Portland and got interviewed by Ray Saltini from Blink Reaction. He asked me some great questions about Drupal, and especially why you should come to Drupal community events like DrupalCon. See you in Amsterdam! Take six minutes out of your day and learn: How spending time in person helps long-distance collaboration, and cooperation later. Who comes to DrupalCon and why. Why you should come to DrupalCon. Why you should join the Drupal Association. The benefits of sponsoring DrupalCon. What was new for DrupalCon Prague (Community Summit! - Labs Track!). These were both great successes and were repeated at DrupalCon Austin. If you need any more convincing, just have a look at this Flickr set of us in Portland. Glorious! Or this one of us at DrupalCon Prague! Here's how things looked at DrupalCon Austin. Oh, and moustache suits ...

Fixed! The version originally posted on August 5, 2014, got cut short by technical difficulties in production. Here are the complete audio and video versions of that conversation for you! Drupal 8 theming layer co-maintainers Joël Pittet and Scott Reeves sat down with me at NYC Camp 2014 at United Nations Headquarters in New York City to talk about how Twig and the new theming layer in Drupal 8 empowers front- and back-end developers, convergence and contribution in PHP, and more. Twig: empowering developers Scott explains, "A lot of the work I do in my day job is bridging the gap between the back end and the front end. Twig really helps us there because it brings more power to both. Front end people who don't want to learn PHP can look at something that looks a lot more like HTML, more like what they know. It's one less thing they need to learn; front end developers already have to know a lot: HTML, CSS, Javascript, and what all the different browsers do with these things. So it gives a lot more power to front end developers." "It also gives some really cool power and toys to back end developers because Twig is very extensible. We've been very careful integrating Twig into Drupal to not do anything that would mess up people who already know Twig. We're adding a few Drupal-specific things to Twig, but that's about it. We're trying not to change the experience too much." "A lot of people are skeptical when they come in and say, 'What if I need to do this in the template?' You still can. Twig gives us a nice separation of concerns: Your template should only have [arguably] display logic. Logic is fine to have in a template, but it should be display logic. Back end developers might say, 'Well, now I don't have access to all of my PHP functionality.' But there are still a number of tools. In Drupal, you still have the whole pre-process layer. If you need to prepare some variable or output to a template, you can still do that 100% in PHP. And there are a lot of cases where you might want to provide functionality to your front end developers and give them tools they can use day-to-day." Front end security with Twig "With Twig, no PHP scripts can be run in there," Joël elaborates on the fundamental security features built into Twig, "no database calls, you can't run scripts against the file system. Your templates are safer now because of that." The team has added another layer of security, mitigating XSS security holes by activating auto-escaping by default." "You could actually provide a template to your site-builder," or external themer, "and allow them to edit the template," since the templates prohibit many insecure practices by default, multi tenant hosting environments and Drupal shops contracting out theme work can be a little bit more relaxed about who can touch the theme layer of their projects. Drupalist Dossier: Scott Reeves – Drupal 8 theme system co-maintainer. Dreditor co-maintainer. Job: Developer at Digital Echidna Drupal.org: Cottser GitHub: Cottser Twitter: @Cottser Drupalist Dossier: Joël Pittet – Drupal 8 theme system maintainer Job: Freelance developer Drupal.org profile: joelpittet Website: pittet.ca GitHub: joelpittet Twitter: @joelpittet Video!

Michael Schmid, CTO of Amazee Labs, and I got the chance to talk in front of my camera during the Drupal Developer Days in Szeged, Hungary. As the technical lead of a successful and growing Drupal shop, I was keen to get his perspectives on how the technology of Drupal helps him do business and how Drupal 8 might help him and his clients even more than ever before. Clicking v coding - love it or hate it? Early in the interview, Michael talks about how Drupal 7 and 8 look like "tools with a lot of brainwork behind them" with which you can do almost anything, "everything is built so you can configure it on the site, you don't need to code a lot." Amazee Labs employs three back end developers, but nine site builders. Michael hits the nail squarely on the head right here: "All the [non-coding site builders] use modules. That's one of the fundamental things people love and hate about Drupal. Basically a site builder can build a whole site." Drupal remains the only open source CMS of significant complexity, flexibility, and power that is designed from the ground up for the end user. I don't mean for site visitors, I mean for the people who put the sites together, who run the sites on a daily basis, and now with initiatives like Spark, also for authors and content teams who work in the administrative interface day in and day out. Customers as partners and contributors Michael talks about how customers nowadays often not only have already done CMS evaluations and specifically ask for Drupal, but that they are now often prepared to pay for more than just the bare minimum of code necessary: Customers don't just want to use Drupal as a tool. They also want to invest in it. The conversation goes something like this: "We can build that specific, new feature for you and it'll take one day of work. It won't be test-covered and it won't be tested by the community [for compatibility, security, etc.]. In total it would take 3 days of work to get it to the point where somebody else can use it. And they say, 'Yes! We want to invest the time!' Most of the time we say let's go 50/50 and Amazee contributes half that work and the customer the other half. So the customer pays more than if there were just getting that simple, untested feature, specifically for that single website. They tell us, 'We use so much of the community's code and work already, we want to give something back.'" This is also a smart investment by Amazee Labs in their own toolset. Drupal 8 means better business In response to the question "What in Drupal 8 is going to benefit you as a Drupal business and how is it going to benefit you?" Michael first talks about how Drupal 8 being fully RESTful internally and externally makes it easier to do massive, multiple integrations: "We used to do maybe one integration with another blog. Now we have integrations into CRMs, we get and push data in and out, updates sent to iPhones ... and the underlying technology is now baked into Drupal. We did all the stuff we ever wanted to do for customers; it was just hard because there were so many different ways and now it's just baked in ... and I think in the right way. This all allows us to think outside of the box. It's not just 'We can build websites.' Now we can build whole systems, whatever the system is." "The other point for me as a Drupal business owner is that I hope it will be easier to find people who can just help us. Especially in Switzerland, most developers who use PHP use it more as a side project, but the really big stuff happens in Java, and .NET. Now that we use patterns that are used in other languages and object oriented programming, I hope that it's easier for people to come in and help us build sites or maybe even allow them to write modules. In the end, I am interested in efficiency for the customer." Drupal 8: better for clients, too Still thinking about the benefits of Drupal 8, Michael proposes, "I guess their...

Thomas Seidl and Nick Veenhof took a few minutes out of the Drupal 8 Search API code sprint at the Drupal DevDays in Szeged, Hungary to talk with me about the state-of-play and what's coming in terms of search in Drupal: one flexible, pluggable solution for search functionality with the whole community behind it. "What are you most excited about in Drupal 8?" ... "Search!" Thomas Seidl: "I am very excited about the new Search API module in Drupal 8 [obviously!]. We've had a lot of improvements planned, bug fixes, new flexibility and possibilities. For example, we'll probably make indexes have multiple item types, so you can easily make a whole site search, which was very hard to do previously. There are a lot of great improvements that will come with the Search API in Drupal 8. One other great new improvement is that while there are two Solr modules in Drupal 7, there's now a huge, combined effort in Drupal 8 which will benefit everyone," ... and only one solution: instead of Search API and a standalone Apache Solr solution, Drupal 8 will have the Search API with pluggable backends: Apache Solr and others. Nick Veenhof: "In Drupal 5 and 6, there was the Apache Solr module, which was a direct integration from Drupal to Solr. In Drupal 7, there was this new module called Search API, which was an intermediary, [so Drupal could plug in and use different search backends]. The two modules were offering very similar experiences, but with a very different technical point of view." "A year or more ago, Thomas and I sat together to combine the configuration files for Solr. From there we started to grow into a direction where we saw we were doing a lot of really similar things and that it would be nice for Drupal 8 if we combined forces. There was a blog post written about the reasons and what we were trying to do and this week we're actually doing it!" That blog post is still an interesting read, both for its historical perspectives and the shape of the plans that are now coming to fruition. Battleplan for Search & Solr in Drupal 8 also gets off to a great start. The first lines are: "tl;dr Contrib Search maintainers are committed to make Drupal 8 kick ass with Search API." Presenter Dossier: Nick Veenhof Job: Lead Search Engineer, Acquia Drupal.org profile: Nick_vh Website: www.nickveenhof.be Twitter: @nick_vh 1st Drupal memory: Assessing (and rejecting) Drupal for a university assignment. "We had to make a community site, and tell our teachers if Drupal was worth it and our answer was no. Then I started looking for a job after I finished my bachelor's degree and the only cool technology that was out there that offered me free travel was a Drupal company. The first week of my job, I ended up here in Szeged," at DrupalCon in 2008, "and I had a blast." 1st version of Drupal: 4.7 Presenter Dossier: Thomas Seidl Job: Freelance developer, specializing in search Drupal.org profile: drunken monkey Website: Search gun-for-hire over at drunkenmonkey.at Help Thomas's work on the Drupal Search API: Learn how you can contribute code, documentation, or funds at drunkenmonkey.at/contribute Twitter: ThomasMSeidl 1st Drupal memory: Getting roped into Drupal contribution through the combination of a university assignment and some fellow students who are part of the the (now legendary) Drupal Austria crew: fago, klausi, and mh86. 1st version of Drupal: 6 "Talk about being an open source software developer" Thomas Seidl: "It's interesting because you can take other people's examples and learn a lot from them. You have all these clever people working on their own stuff, which might be similar to yours. It's also great to think that when you work on something, there are tens of thousands of people who might use it, and you're really helping a lot of people. Even if you're...

Bojan and I chatted at Drupal Dev Days 2014 about one of the newest and most important weapons available in Drupal's eCommerce arsenal: recurring billing for digital commerce in Drupal Commerce. Enabling Digital Commerce – recurring payments and more in Drupal Commerce Commerce License is "a small ecosystem of modules," also including Commerce File, Commerce License Billing, and Commerce Dunning, "providing everything you need for digital commerce – basically anything that you're selling but not shipping: a download, a support ticket, a subscription," and so on. Bojan explained to me the complexity and importance of flexible and recurring billing when dealing with purely digital products, which can have the complex billing use cases. For example, your mobile phone: "Look at how you use your mobile phone. You usually have multiple, possible plans with your operator. You are billed on the 1st of the month. If you subscribed in the middle of the previous month, you are only charged for a part of that. There's some kind of free usage that you get, some amount of minutes you can use, but if you talk more than that, there's a special price ... And there's a whole set of processes about what happens when you don't pay your bill on time." This is a complete billing API that is configurable in the user interface. "This is something that we had to build and make possible," within Drupal and Drupal Commerce, "For the first time, we can tackle absolutely any kind of billing use case. You can flip your switches [set all of the options mentioned above and more in the back end UI] based on the discussion you had with your CFO and the system will figure out the rest for you. It's particularly interesting in the usage part." Bojan goes on to explain how you can be the billing logic provider for others. "We [the commerce provider running Drupal Commerce License infrastructure] are the ones who track the usage for your license. If you're a mobile operator, we are the ones who are tracking the minutes and applying to figure out what's free and what's not and what should be done. If you are using a commercial solution, you need to do all of that in your own code, but [Drupal Commerce License does] all of this for you and it is a huge time and effort saver. That is something I haven't seen on other places." I want to underscore that Bojan is talking about setting up and running freely available Drupal infrastructure, not about a commercial service that is already in place. "This opens Drupal to a whole new rage of use cases that it previously didn't address. Suddenly, if I am a startup with my own product, I am going to want to install Drupal to handle the billing. Why? Because it's so easy! I can click together my payment plan and it will just work from that point on, which is amazing to me." ... And this from the guy who wrote it! :-) Presenter Dossier: Bojan Živanović Commerce Guys product team; co-maintainer of Commerce for Drupal 8; prolific drupal contributor; worked on: Commerce Kickstart 2, OpenID connect single sign-on, and Commerce License. Drupal.org profile: bojanz Twitter: @bojan_zivanovic 1st Drupal memory: trying to be a wallflower at the pre DrupalCon Copenhagen beer tasting and failing due to relentlessly welcoming community members :-) Favorite part of being in the Drupal community: "It is so prone to collaboration. The fact that someone is willing to spend their professional time helping you help the project. It's not that common for an important professional to spend his evenings helping you just to write a patch and in that process, making you become a better developer." Favorite Drupal superpower: "The ability to model complex data structures entirely through the UI." Most excited about in Drupal 8: The Entity API and how completely it lets users – admin UI users, not just developers – model complex data and business logic....

Brant Wynn, Acquia Solutions Architect, and I covered some interesting ground in our conversation preceding his jam's Drupal Camp session on selling Drupal to potential clients via beautiful, out-of-the-box demos. Listen to hear about working as a professional open source software developer, the potential wins from having migration tools built into Drupal 8, how Drupal 8 is bringing so many open source technologies and communities together, and more. Professional open source: the more you give, the more you get "I don't like to work on projects when we can't give back in any capacity; especially in Drupal because we've already taken so much to begin with," says Brant referring to the 10+ years of development that has gone into Drupal when you download it. "That's something I really get heated about at times when people say, 'Oh, we don't have time to contribute ... We're really busy ... We have all these cool modules and we'd like to open source them, but our company doesn't make any time for it.' I just want to strangle those managers and tell them: 'You're really doing yourself a disservice here. You've bought in to 35-40% of open source, but there's that whole 60% of getting other people looking at your code and fixing it and working together.' All they've bought into at that point is, 'Oh, I got some stuff for free,' and it's so much more than that." Cathy Theys and I have talked about this a lot (and some of it is in the two great videos on this page: "Give and get good patch reviews session AND SymfonyCon interview!"). If your developers are allowed to work with a community of developers on an open source project like Drupal, they learn best practices, they're exposed to the latest and greatest technologies. It's like ongoing training; you get better developers and better (and often happier) employees by simply letting them work on the tools you've based your business on. There is no downside :-) Migrate in Drupal 8 When asked what he's looking forward to most in Drupal 8, Brant talked about the inclusion of tools to help move sites from Drupal 6, Drupal 7, and also other CMSs onto Drupal 8. "I talk to so many people who are 'stuck' on previous versions of Drupal," who could just as easily move to another system as fight through a difficult upgrade path from Drupal 6 through Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. "Now Drupal's not going to be losing all these Drupal 6 sites. Showing that there's a clear path for them to get upgraded," straight to Drupal 8, "and re-architected at the same time without losing anything from a content perspective. It's great. It's the first time we've had something like that out-of-the-box in core." Staying on Drupal and moving to the latest and greatest in Drupal 8 becomes the most efficient choice, the 'path of least resistance'. Migrate in core also allows people to evaluate Drupal more easily using their own content currently in another CMS, "People will be able to evaluate whether or not Drupal works for their organization much more directly, by actually seeing their content [in Drupal]," as opposed to building out the whole site in Drupal before you can get a feel for what it has to offer. Drupal demos for organizations considering a platform change become a whole lot easier. "If they're able to provide us a data source, we'll be able to bring that in, so we can do a look-and-feel for them and actually use their data to build a proof of concept. I'm looking forward to that." Presenter Dossier: Brant Wynn Acquia Solutions Architect, prolific Drupal contributor, Drupal mentor, CADUG (Chicago Advanced Drupal User Group) co-founder Drupal.org profile: brantwynn Website: whaaat.com Twitter: @brantwynn 1st Drupal memory: "Why do all the PHP job ads on Craigslist want Drupal experience? I should probably learn about this Drupal ... oh wow! It took me 20 hours to write this custom login; I could've just installed Drupal." 1st version...

Drupal is the perfect tool for building SaaS and product businesses. A late night hotel room conversation about Drupal's agility, power, and flexibility above and beyond powering great websites with Bálint Kléri during Drupal DevDays 2014 in Szeged, Hungary. Bálint is the technical lead of Indivizo, "The fastest way to the perfect candidate", an online HR tool built on Drupal for interviewing job applicants. Bálint's favorite thing about Drupal "My favorite thing about Drupal is that it enables me to build things that are important for people. It gives me joy to create those things," he explains it let's him build interesting, essential new functionality while Drupal, "and the rest of it is solved by Drupal core or contributed modules. I know how to configure those, so basically, I feel really empowered. I am capable of doing everything with Drupal." Indivizo.com - Drupal-based, video hiring-interview platform In a bit of modern-day workspace kismet, Bálint met his future business partners at a Budapest co-working space. They were already successful HR consultants and had just gone through an exhausting, year-long hiring process for a client, which gave rise to the idea for a platform to accelerate candidate selection: "'Is it possible to record videos in the browser?' ... Sure! ... 'Can you do it?' ... Yes, of course! They introduced their idea of a video interview solution in the HR recruitment process. Their vision was to use that as a pre-screening tool. You can really narrow down the number of candidates that you are willing to talk to in person," which is clearly a big time- and money-saver for all involved. The process provides HR teams a way to set objective standards for assessing job candidates. For each job or hiring phase, an HR team has candidates each answer the same set of questions in a "one-way" interview on their own time, from where they are. The responses can then be rated in a standardized, comparable way. Beyond websites - building agile, Drupal-powered products How is Drupal enabling you to make a Software-as-a-Service-based product business? "I believe the biggest thing here is that I was able to create the prototypes in a very short time. We could validate our business idea, our whole startup idea, and iterate on top of that. Doing that is really efficient in Drupal because you can build things very quickly. You have great tools." "My approach to product development is to build something very rough in the beginning and release it, show it to real customers, and then iterate on top of that. I had a session about that at Drupal DevDays. Drupal really allows me to do that." "Imagine you have a new feature and basically, it's just a new View [here's a quick description of what a View is and their power in Drupal] of a certain type of users, and you build that View, but you don't theme it properly. Maybe later you want to use nice icons and other visual stuff that enhances the whole experience ... but first you just build a very plain looking View and you show it to real customers. They can say 'This is good, but can we have that [other] thing in that View?' Sure you can! In the next iteration, we show them. Is this what you want? ... 'Yes, this is how we want it.' Then in the next iteration, we give it a really nice look, nice icons, everything. And that's how we do every new feature." Drupal as a functionality engine. Regarding the classic problem with wireframes and mockups (the client gets preoccupied with the look rather than the functionality), "If we tell them that this is a development process and you are part of this, and you are in control right now, they don't care about that. They get the idea. They get really excited. 'Okay, so I get to tell you how to build the thing?' Yes, just show me what you want. Sometimes they get excited and throwing a lot of ideas around. Of course, we have to say no in a polite way ... Okay...

Gábor and I sat down for a chat at United Nations headquarters at NYCCamp in April 2014. We talked about the very productive contribution sprints at the NYC Camp; effecting positive change in the world with technology and how Drupal 8 will enable anyone to communicate using tools in their own language; and the incredible energy and quantity of contributors at the Drupal DevDays in Szeged Hungary. Not just multilingual, how about omni-lingual? Regarding how Drupal can empower people everywhere to communicate and improve their lives and world, Gábor describes some of the benefits Drupal 8 brings to the global internet: "The primary goal of our initiative is to make it seamless and very easy to get Drupal to any culture around the globe. It's called the Multilingual Initiative and it is in part about having capabilities to handle multiple languages; it's also about having capabilities to handle any language in Drupal. We are succeeding in making that very easy to do now in Drupal 8. That should contribute a lot to making it very simple for anyone to set up a site in Drupal 8, whatever their language is." "In Drupal 8, out of the gate, the first screen in the installer asks you for your language and from there on, the whole thing is in your language. If you write right-to-left, then it will be right-to-left from the second screen on. It will be a familiar environment and you can understand what's going on." DevDays Szeged: Turning pizza into code! The DevDays events in Europe are technically-focused and bring together developers and site-builders – "those who make Drupal happen and those who use Drupal to build things" for a week of learning and contribution. The Szeged event ran from Monday to Sunday, "Most people were there for the whole week, which blew out our expectations. In the initial planning, we thought there would be 20 or 30 people on Monday, based on previous event experiences. Instead, we had 150 people come in on Monday [for the code sprints], which was totally unexpected." On the busiest days, 320 people were attending sessions, sprinting on a variety of important areas: a responsive theme for Drupal.org, improvements to the Drupal test infrastructure, and Drupal 8 itself. These events are rife with learning opportunities. "There's a lot of people who come for sessions, but this time a lot realized that there's a lot of value in some of the sprints as well. They can come in and they can sit down with big names in the Drupal community. You can work with them. You can see how they work. You can see how they solve problems and you can learn a lot from just working together with them. A lot of people got that opportunity. We mentored a lot of new contributors to Drupal 8." The contribution energy in Drupal now, "is amazing. What we've seen at the sprints, people were coming in. We had the rooms open from 9 a.m. till midnight. People were working all the time, solving problems, self-organizing into groups. It was really amazing to see. Somebody ordered half a ton of pizzas to a sprint room one evening." I think it was 70 actually, but that is still a lot of pizza ... The Gábor extravaganza: All Gábor, all the time Be sure to check out my previous conversation with Gábor and his jam's Drupal Camp appearance, "A whole new world for multilingual sites with Drupal 8", which includes audio, video, and the slides from his session! Interview Video

More than 800 (yes, eight hundred) people participated in the issues around improving multilingual features and APIs in Drupal 8 for the past two and a half years. Almost 500 issues have been resolved in this initiative as of this submission making Drupal 8 a truly outstanding release for everybody looking to create even single language non-English sites but especially those making multilingual sites. This session aims to show you around all the great improvements and give tips as to how to best utilize the new solutions. Presenter Dossier: Gábor Hojtsy Drupal 6 Lead, Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative Lead, Acquia OCTO (Acquia "Office of the CTO") Drupal.org profile: gábor-hojtsy Website: http://hojtsy.hu "A personal Drupal resource site" Twitter: gaborhojtsy 1st Drupal memory: 2003. Migrated Hungarian developer community website from PHPNuke to Drupal; began filing and solving language issues against Drupal. 1st version of Drupal: 4.3 Favorite Drupal module: Localization update (it's now in Drupal 8 core!) Coolest thing built or done with Drupal: Co-organized DrupalCon Szeged 2008 with Kristof van Tomme, aka "DrupalTown" :-) Interview Video Session Video Session Slides A whole new world for multilingual sites in Drupal 8 - jam's Drupal Camp session from Jeffrey A. McGuire

The Executive Director of the Drupal Association, Holly Ross, and I sat down to talk at NYC Camp 2014 at United Nations Headquarters. Roughly one year on from her appointment to the Drupal Association job, I got the chance to ask her about her Drupal "origin story", what she thinks about the community now that she's in the thick of things (we're a welcoming and diverse bunch), and the role of technology and especially Drupal in making the world a better place. How did you end up at the DA? "Like all good English majors from UC Berkeley, I went into community organizing after college. At a certain point in that job, I realized we don't have to run the world on index cards, maybe we should try this thing called Excel! I became the person who was always trying to move things onto the computer and I realized I like this stuff! From there, I started working with technology and helped to run a lot of advocacy-based websites. I landed at the Non Profit Technology Network [aka NTEN], which is an organization whose mission is to help non-profits create social change using technology." "One of the great things about the NTEN community is that there is a group of really strong open source advocates. One of the things we started hearing about in 2004 or 2005 was this Drupal thing. Eventually we moved our own website onto Drupal. Within that open source community, the Drupal fans just started amassing at NTEN. So much so that we have a monthly Drupal meet-up online for folks who are in non-profits and using Drupal." "That was my intro to the community. When the position was available, I thought, 'These guys have something going on and I like where this is going. It'd be really fun to see if I could play with them.'" Vitriol, Hugs, and Beers - The Drupal Community! After most of a year on the job, I asked her what the most unexpected thing she'd seen along the way so far. "I knew that the Drupal community was really diverse. Because I was more of an end-user of Drupal, not a developer, I was a little bit surprised to get into the issue queues and realize how much vitriol can live inside of those issue queues. That was shocking to me at first. It's not the vitriol, the shocking thing is that at DrupalCon Portland, I would see two people that I'd just seen fighting to the death in the issue queue hugging and having a beer together. It was sort of shocking ... in the nicest way possible." I contend that meeting in person a lot at events and meet-ups makes the human connections in the Drupal project the most important factor. Knowing the people you're dealing with, you remember they are people when they're remote, too and that we all want the best for the project; even when we disagree on how to get there. Holly agrees, "I've seen that all over the place. One of the great joys of being part of all this is that sense that we're all trying to go to the same place. The connectedness we feel from that is really wonderful. I want to figure out how to tap into that feeling more. It's such a great feeling to be part of that current." Diversity means better solutions Regarding the incredible diversity of the Drupal community, Holly points out, "It's really important, too. I am a believer in the fact that we have to challenge each other in order to come up with the best solution possible. I don't mean 'challenge' in a combative way. We need challenge that comes from a diversity of experience and thought. The idea that you could put a solution on the table that absolutely solves the problem ... But is it solving it in the best way? Or most inclusive way? Or in a way that aligns with our values? Those are the other kinds of things we have to think about. Having people from different backgrounds and different experiences means that they'll ask those questions." The 50 year challenge Atefeh Riazi, the CITO of the United Nations challenged us in her NYC Camp keynote address to think about...

Every DrupalCon, there's a moment I especially look forward to: the First-Patch "ritual". This time around, a patch written by Matt Moen, Technical Director at Kilpatrick Design, was selected for fast-track testing, approval, and was committed to Drupal 8 core in front of a few hundred of us at the Austin convention center. In this podcast, I talk with Matt about becoming a core contributor; we hear from Angie "webchick" Byron about how it takes a village to commit a patch; and I've included a quick refresher on how version control works with the Gitty Pokey from the DrupalCon Austin pre-keynote. You can see the full patch approval and commit process in the 2nd video embedded on this page. Celebrate good times! The in-person code sprints at community events do produce new patches for Drupal, but I contend their primary purpose is to create and strengthen the interpersonal relationships that make our otherwise remote collaboration on the project so successful. The First-Patch "ritual" is a celebration of what we do in Drupal and open source software (check out the energy in the room in the 2nd video on this page!). Remote collaboration can feel abstract and lonely. By highlighting one patch, its creator, and all those who got it ready for approval and inclusion in the Drupal codebase, the community has a concrete moment to focus on when it is "really real" and happening right in front of you. I hope you enjoy this as much as I do. The full patch approval and commit video also contains a bunch of useful tips and information about the process. Podcast video! Full approval and commit process video!

Kris Vanderwater (eclipseGC), and I got together in a Google Hangout plagued with technical difficulties to discuss DrupalCon Austin and Kris's new job as Acquia's Developer Evangelist. In the sections I could save and keep reasonably useable after editing, we talk about Drupal 8 and the incredible energy present in the Drupal community recently; a couple of hot topics DrupalCon Austin; and Kris's new job as "a developer for the community". Resources "The Great Multisite Debate" DrupalCon Austin BoF session recording Headless Drupal group on groups.drupal.org Notes and discussion from DrupalCon Austin on Headless Drupal The Worx Company where Kris got his start in Drupal. I’m Kris Vanderwater, Drupal Developer and Acquia’s Developer Evangelist. Acquia Cloud API Applications: A quick tour Video!