Drupal 8 Initiatives
In Drupal news, the core initiatives for Drupal 8 are chugging along: the HTML5 initiative has posted its roadmap, including links to a pile of specific issues. CivicActions posted a good overview of the effort a couple of weeks ago for those who need an idea of what it's trying to accomplish. Meanwhile, the Configuration Management initiative had a successful sprint during DrupalCamp Colorado, and has produced some early test code for developers involved in the effort. If you're interested in presenting a core conversation at the upcoming DrupalCon London, don't wait to apply: the deadline for submissions is July 7th!
Lorem Ipsum Random
While the pros and cons of "Lorem Ipsum" have been debated across the net, tools to generate filler text for your site's dummy content continue to multiply.
The classic Lipsum.com site spits out text to your specifications while DummyTextGenerator can mix in HTML markup. Recently, the Bacon Ipsum site made the rounds on Twitter -- it generates meat themed dummy text. Tuna Ipsum caters to pescetarian designers, while the classic Postmodern Essay Generator spits out dynamically generated incomprehensible term papers. For FireFox users, there's a FireFox plugin called Dummy Lipsum that adds lorem ipsum text to form fields. If you're looking for placeholder images, LoremPixum and Placehold.it can help, but neither can equal the powerful cuteness of Placekitten.com. Naturally, Drupal developers have added PlaceKitten integration....
Drupal Rocks Education
Elsewhere, the Web Technology Survey has published an interesting statistic: of the CMS-powered educational sites they assessed, 27% used Drupal. That's a pretty spectacular number, and it bodes well for the growing community of educators using our favorite open source CMS.
Agile Arguments
Earlier this year, a group of the project-management movers and shakers assembled in Snowbird, Utah to discuss the reality of the popular Agile project management methodology. Philippe Kruchten's thought-provoking essay on the meeting's conclusions is a must read for anyone interested software development. Meanwhile, other developers and writers are talking specifically about what has and hasn't worked on their projects. The consensus? If you have a fixed budget, timeline, or feature set... you're not fully Agile! If you're looking for useful tools to help with your own agile projects, EvolvingWeb has published a great overview of a Google Docs and Git powered workflow that can eliminate some of the grunt work when synchronizing tasks, bug reports, user stories, and so on.
Easing The D7 Transition
For those of us building sites with Drupal (rather than building the next version of Drupal itself), an interesting series of projects are dedicated to backporting and maintaining key Drupal 7 APIs in Drupal 6. The new DBTNG database layer, the new Caching system, the Queue API, the new Contact module, limited File API improvements, and UX enhancements like Vertical Tabs and the improved Password field are all available. If you're maintaining custom code across Drupal 6 and 7, they can smooth the bumps quite a bit.
RoombaCam Makes a Splash
Lullabot's Module Development Deep Dive was a hit last week, and Providence-area Drupal users showed up at our new Activity Center for a meetup on Wednesday, June 15th. In addition to hearing about the alpha release of our Videola IPTV hosting platform, attendees constructed a makeshift iPhone harness for the office Roomba. Who said iPhones aren't hacker-friendly?