Our very own Drupal Dev Days in Szeged

In every year there are a lot of interesting Drupal-related meetups all around the world - Cons on two continents, Camps in one of each countries' cities and a lot more. The diversity of topics is the strength of these events- business, frontend and backend are also covered.

But! There is only one Drupal Developer Days per year, and usually it's all about code sprints, techie sessions and a lot of learning. This time it was organized in Szeged, Hungary, between the 23 - 30 March - 6 years after the famous Drupalcon in 2008! More than 340 Drupalers bought tickets in advance to the event, which is an awesome number!

Having such an interesting Drupal event in Hungary warmed our heart, because we as Brainsum found this the greatest opportunity to support the Drupal development as silver sponsors! It turned out absolutely great! From the company Péter, our CTO and Tomi, our software developer joined the sprints and had a lot of fun.

Our CTO, Péter receiving a beer from Julien Dubreuil, Customer Success Manager of Commerce Guys,
after a Commerce platform demo .

Besides sponsoring DDD, the event offered us a great chance to participate in the code sprints and meet the Drupal rockstars by travelling only 170 kms - what else could a Drupal deveoper dream about?
And finally because I (Zsófi, writing this blogpost now) had the chance to offer my time and dedication as a volunteer, being part of the core organizer team as responsible for the sponsors, which was pretty exciting, and I never experienced a Drupal event from this point of view.

The core organizer team: István Palócz, Márta Maczel, Gábor Hojtsy, Zsófi from Brainsum, Andrea Radó, Viktor Janurik and Péter Cseh (and the photographer's daughter, Bogi :)

As Drupal 8 is coming soon, there are a lot of things to do and work on, so when it was decided that the next Dev Days were gonna happen in Szeged, Hungary, we thought we could build the whole event around fixing issues for Drupal 8 and making it better on the go. When we started to marketing the event, soon we gained a lot of interest - not only because it was all about Drupal 8, but because people had a lot of fun in Szeged in 2008 at DrupalCon, and now they had the chance to come back to this beautiful, cosy city.

The event venue was IH Event Center, just two steps away from the hotel, where most of the Drupalers stayed, and this was the perfect combination. Originally in the schedule there were 3 full days of code sprints, from 9am to midnight, but when the venue had to close, a lot of the coders went to the hotel lobby and continued working on the issues. On Thursday the actual conference started with an opening keynote by Jam, Jeffrey A. McGuire about why Drupal 8 is so important to the whole community.

From an organizer perspective I can say that this was the best event someone could imagine - it went really smooth and the only thing we needed to take care of were those things that we originally expected. All the Drupalers had fun at the code sprints and the sessions during the day, and during the nights they had the chance to eat great food (Fishsoup 'Szeged' style was really popoular!), have some drinks with the others and go out to party!

Gábor Hojtsy, who was also part of the core organizer team showed some numbers in his closing session (before singing the Drupal Dev Days song with hurdy-gurdy and other instruments) and shared some of the results of the whole week.

Consumption in the venue:

• 240 liters of beer
• 1000 servings of coffee
• 120 kg of bananas
• 300 kg sweet snacks
• 480 liters of water
• 5500 sandwiches

But this is only the food. The real purpose of DDD was working on Drupal 8, so here are the numbers:

• 115 core commits, 706 files, 11k+,7k- lines
• 7 change records (ALL)
• 19 beta blocker/targets fixed
• 7 "hard problems" discussions

To summarize I think this was a really productive and awesome week. Thanks to all organizers, volunteers, sponsors and attendees for contributing! See you at the next Drupal event!

And to properly say goodbye, here's the DrupalFolk song!
Gábor Hojtsy singing, Kristof Van Tomme on hurdy-gurdy, Alexandru Badiu on the Marvin Drum, László Csécsy on flute and Péter Kohán on guitar!

So long and thanks for all the fish!

Preparing our minds for DrupalCamp London

Meet us this weekend at the DrupalCamp London

AnimGif and ImageCache plays well with Image Magick

The good old animated Gif is a cool format again. It works on everything, no Flash or HTML5 video needed. You can handle it as simple as a static image... or not? By default the majority of Drupal installs are using GD to create thumbnails (image styles). But the stock PHP GD extension  (coming with mod_php) lacks the functionality of properly handling animGifs and your mainpage or lister pages will remain static and boring.

The solution: switch from GD to Image Magick 

The ImageMagick (tested with version 7.x-1.0) module supports the command line Image Magick tool. On Ubuntu you can install it with a simple apt-get install imagemagick command. Once your php can run the convert command you can switch to it on /admin/config/media/image-toolkit . Don't check the Enable the GraphicsMagick support - we experienced problems with thumbnail generation when it was enabled and it's not needed anyway. With enabled Image Magick the Image javascript crop module gives crop functionality for animGifs too.
A further advantage of Image Magick is that the quality of your simple jpg thumbnails will be much better with the same compression than they are with the stock php gd.

AnimGif has reborn, Drupal should not miss the new golden age of funny movie clips! :)

Will you come to DRUPAL DEVELOPER DAYS SZEGED 2014?

Once there was a legendary DrupalCon in Szeged (Hungary), and now again: the Developer Days will take place there.

Session schedule looks great, http://szeged2014.drupaldays.org/program/sessions , a ticket is just 30 EUR for the whole week (24-30 March) so don't miss this great opportunity.

Our company is proud to sponsor the event so come and meet us in Szeged.

A short look-around for new Drupal alternatives

My friend and co-owner of our company ( http://www.brainsum.com ) asked me to check out some alternatives of Drupal. Maybe we should use some of them for some project types he said.

http://jekyllrb.com - this toolset provides a very interesting approach for creating and maintaining static html websites. It could be useful for developers (requires knowledge of technologies such as Markdown and Liquid) who have to create their personal blog-like pages or documentation sites but without interactive elements such as comments. 

For our Drupal shop this is not useful since our developers are not blogging or they prefer to use a public blog engine such as blogspot.com :) with interactive features. Brainsum is currently not maintaining public documentation-like websites we are using Google Docs for creating and sharing documentation with clients. Altough for a startup with coder minds could be a good toolset for creating and maintaining a global introduction site free on github's infrastructure.

http://strikingly.com - yet another wysiwyg drag'n'drop create your website (self-service) tool.  Sorry, I don't have the time to test it deeply maybe we will try it out as a wireframe / "clickable demo" creation tool in the future.

http://getkirby.com - a file based cms. One step ahead from a wysiwyg site towards a real CMS but simplified, no database. I think this is still not the way for a Drupal company for 30 EUR / site and a limited feature set.

http://www.wix.com/ - I think this is the biggest modern wysiwyg drag'n'drop website creation tool. I've already checked this earlier. It provides an e-commerce offering and you can even hire a designer for a custom design so this is a serious service for a wide range of projects from personal sites to company solutions too.

I think the biggest disadvantage of wix.com is the commitment. You have to host your site on wix.com, you can't even backup your HTML5 site (currently). The whole technology is closed, your project's future will be inseparably linked to the wix.com startup. For an enterprise project I think these facts are enough for exclusion.

My decision for 2014: we will continue to use Drupal as the primary platform for our new web projects altough the importance of client side development will rise (We use Cordova/ Phonegap for mobile app development). 

I prefer to use a low number of programming languages/technologies but on a higher level so if we choose a static site creation and management tool (http://staticsitegenerators.net) for our mobile apps it will be a javascript based one.

For simple, short-term web projects such as simple Facebook apps for a campaign we will consider to build the backend without a full Drupal installation, maybe we will just pick a modular PHP framework like Symfony - which is inside Drupal 8 :)

Drupal will remain the best choice for complex / heavily customized / high traffic sites as it's shown in this  w3techs.com report:

Happy and effective new year for everyone! 

Route planner website launched

The website I told about at DrupalCon Prague just went live: routing.palivovekarty.sk finally!

Route planning with Drupal + OpenLayers and powering Phonegap mobile apps

I had a session at DrupalCon Prague yesterday. I just created this blog to have a place to share and discuss more details about this ongoing real-world project.
I will share details in separate posts topic-by-topic and I promise I will try to answer all the incoming questions.