Drupal

There are a few things we do as a community at Drupal that really warm my heart and recognising those displaying the very best values and principles of the Drupal project through the annual Aaron Winborn Award is one of them.

Whilst everyone in the Drupal community can, and should, nominate those they think deserve such an award, it is one of the few truly lovely tasks of the Drupal Community Working Group to read all of the nominations, select a recipient, and present the award at DrupalCon North America.

So, it seems that this website does pretty well from an energy usage point of view - a good sign for an essentially "out of the box" Drupal 9 site. The Drupal community working on the new Olivero theme should be proud of themselves.

Whilst I fully appreciate I am no fan of Slack, for many reasons, not least who they seem to like to associate with, I do accept that not everyone shares my views and that Slack is at the heart of many open source communities.

Whilst I have really enjoyed building this little website, and slowly beginning to write a little more, one thing that has troubled me the whole time is how to facilitate conversation on the topics I bring up in a way that I can believe that the person making a comment is actually who they say they are. Or, at least, they are the same person I interact with on other platforms as that identity.

"Oh that's easy!", I hear you say, "Just use a tool that allows someone to login using their identity elsewhere - lots of ways to do that, such as OpenID."

Having had the joy of experiencing organised events etc from both sides of the coin, as a participant and as an organiser, I have had ample opportunity to notice one thing — people in open source communities can do one thing that makes the experience of organising so much more pleasant: commit early.

I see again and again organisers of conferences, from small meet-ups even up to DrupalCon itself, worrying whether people will buy the tickets they need for the event to be a success, right up until the last few weeks (and days!)

The huge, huge advantage of using an off-the-shelf, soon-to-be-core theme is that the quality is high, like really high. 

Of course, there is always a possibility I would want to add something (and I have an idea for a little animation in the back of my mind) so I wanted to find a way to do that without making any changes to the actual theme.

When Lewis Nyman tweeted about a funky little way to add a "dark mode", I saw my opportunity...

A whole team have people are working on a new default theme for Drupal 9, to be introduced in version 9.1, called "Olivero" and I think it is so beautiful, it finally prompted me to make a blog for myself simply so I could use it!

Well, to be honest, I do rather like the default content we make on Drupal 9 site install these days:

As Community Liaison, I find it important to liaise face-to-face whenever I can, and an opportunity presented itself to visit a community I have not been able to spend time with until now; that in India.

This was going to not only be the first time I’ve worked with the community in India but also my first time in India. I couldn’t help but wonder, “Will I see any elephants?”

After spending a great Saturday at @nwdug’s Unconference in Manchester at the weekend, I found myself reflecting upon what actually makes a great Drupal Camp.

I’m going to keep saying this — these are my personal thoughts — not those of my employer.