In October 2008, NuMedia Advantage launched the new Just Racing UK website, a racing and Triathlon (running, cycling and swimming) event management website. The build process was relatively complicated, involving a lot of modules, some of which were dropped, some of which worked right out the box, and some of which required a good degree of hacking and customisation.

Requirements

Just Racing's first website was created by a different design company and offered the visitor the ability to view up and coming race events, and book races electronically through a third party. As well as bulking out the process for the visitor, Just Racing incurred very high processing fees.

We were asked to take inspiration from the exiting site, but add the ability to: -

• Promote and Process events
• Offer payment processing online
• Vary sponsorships
• Create and manage online start-lists (based upon age and swim-times)
• Display previous years race results
• Manage race-specific newsletter subscriptions
• Utilise an existing database

It went without saying, but a fresh new look was also required.

This past week, a group of serious Drupal developers assembled in Cambridge, MA to work on upgrading Drupal.org and infrastructure. This team includes Damien Tournoud, Derek Wright, Neil Drumm, David Strauss, Chad Phillips, Jeremy Andrews, Narayan Newton, Austin Smith, Moshe Weitzman, Dries Buytaert, Susan MacPhee and Gábor Hojtsy, and others helping through virtual channels. The team included performance experts, project module maintainers, an infrastructure manager and others. It was a great fit for our goals.

We worked hard, putting in 12-14 hour days, fleshing out solutions over breakfast, lunch and dinner, leaving a short time to sleep. We took on a big job: updating Drupal.org to Drupal 6, accomplishing as much as possible while in the same room. We managed to run test upgrades multiple times a day, integrating everyone’s work, testing interactions of new items as they became ready.

Now available:
Leveraging Drupal: Getting Your Site Done Right, by Victor Kane.

One week before Drupalcon DC, we will be conducting a usability sprint on Drupal 7. The first half of the sprint will involve a round of formal usability testing at the University of Baltimore (UB) led by Becca Scolan, who produced the previous Drupal usability report from UB. She will be joined by members of the Drupal community: Drupal documentation team lead, Addison (add1sun) Berry; Key members of Drupal's usability team, Brad (beeradb) Bowman, Nathaniel (catch) Catchpole and Bojhan (Bojhan) Somers.

Previous usability testing at the University of Minnesota (UMN) and the University of Baltimore (UB) highlighted a number of issues with Drupal's usability and resulted in several solutions - some of which have made it into core, some of which are actively being worked on. This will be the first time Drupal 7 has been usability tested, and the first formal testing held while Drupal is in 'code thaw'. This means we have a unique opportunity to field-test these Drupal 7 improvements when we still have some time to make adjustments before release. Learn more in the "how you can help" section below.

Drupalcon is a traditionally biannual gathering of Drupalers to learn about, discuss and advance Drupal, and to network with other community members. The Drupal Association oversees the organization of Drupalcons, seeking proposals and judging their quality, location, team, etc; selecting a North American and a European location by tradition for spring and autumn.

Drupalcon Szeged 2008 was proposed by Kristof van Tomme, and I (Gábor Hojtsy) teamed up with him to help co-organize the conference. The dates were 2008, August 27th to 31st. Having two leads helped to distribute tasks, when one of us was down or had more to do in their personal or professional lives. Kristof was responsible for all local organization including negotiations with the venue; connection with our local partner C&T and being the top person for all things related to financing. I was the lead guy for the website, speaker connections and putting together the conference program.

Executive Summary

In mid-December, eight Drupal developers held a code sprint at the Acquia offices in Andover, MA with the goal of “implementing Fields in Drupal core.” The attendees were Dries Buytaert, Yves Chedemois, Florian Loretan, Barry Jaspan, Károly Négyesi, David Rothstein, Karen Stevenson, David Strauss, and Moshe Weitzman.

During the sprint, we hashed out some major architectural breakthroughs, wrote lots of code (including unit tests to make sure the code keeps working!), and organized ourselves to help push through the remaining items which were not able to be completed during the sprint. We achieved our major goal: implement a "Field API" in core that cleanly allows attaching fields to both nodes and users and, by extension, any other entity type that wants them. The rest of the post contains more details about what we accomplished.

There is still plenty to do and we need your help! To jump in, visit our Drupal core improvements: Field API page.

We would like to give a huge thanks to the Drupal community and all of our contributors that made this sprint possible. This experience has proven how important sprints are and how effective they can be, and we hope that each of you will consider donating to see further sprints happen, such as the forthcoming Drupal.org Redesign sprints.