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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology


Drupal and PostgresqlNovember 22

A while ago, I joined a bunch of groups at groups.drupal.org, thinking I’d pick up some interesting ideas, and meet some folks who were doing cool stuff with Drupal. One of the groups I joined (along with “Drupal for Good” and “Drupalchix”) was the PostgreSQL group.

Yesterday, in my RSS feed, this post showed up. It was the suggestion to remove PostgreSQL support from the Drupal core.

I was always aware that Drupal supported PostgreSQL, and I didn’t really have any plans to use it. And there are varied opinions as to it’s usefulness (which I beg to differ on.) But as a long time lover of PostgreSQL, I couldn’t let this drop. And, I’d been looking for a good solid project to get me going in Drupal, so it looks like I found it. So I’ve adopted it.

But, it turns out that with Drupal 7 (the development branch) it’s virtually impossible to install Drupal, and even though I did wrangle an install (all of the right tables seem to show up in the database), it doesn’t actually work, and I can’t yet figure out why. I don’t yet really grok the structure of Drupal, so it feels like sorting through spagetti right now.

There are several core modules with PostgreSQL problems in Drupal 6, so I might actually go back and work on those first, be

Bleary Eyed and geared upNovember 20

I don’t usually title my tech blog entries with quite that sort of title, but that’s how I feel after spending 3 days with one of the most fabulous groups of people I have had the honor of spending time with in recent memory. I was at the Nonprofit Software Development Summit, which was an event full of great sessions, meeting neat people of all sorts, and having lots of geeky fun.

It was a great combination of really detailed tech learning (like I learned a really cool trick using JQuery to generate rounded corners, which is generally not an easy thing to achieve,) and big picture thinking. I got to learn a ton, and contribute a bit.  Sessions I went to included:

The social network commitmentNovember 16

Getting involved in a social network, whether it be something like Facebook or Myspace, or a content-connected social network like flickr or delicious (I’m starting to get used to writing that without the dots,) is pretty easy. But there are SO many, and they all have their pros and cons.

What I have learned, though, is that a social network is only as good as something that you have absolutely no control over: how many of your real friends and colleagues use it. Sure, you can join a social network, and “friend up” a bunch of people you don’t know. Perhaps you’d meet some cool people. But you’d primarily be wasting lots of time.

And if you’re a nonprofit trying social networks out to figure out how to leverage your modest resources for maximal impact, it’s really important to know where your constituents are.

Over the last two years, I’ve joined more social networks than I can count (even after I vowed, and only a couple of times violated my vow to only join social networks that were based on open standards, like OpenID and ODD (Open Data Definition.)) The content-focused networks, like delicious, slideshare and flickr, I generally use as primarily a one-way method of publishing specific kinds of content to people I know (and, of course, people I don’t know, since it’s public.) I’ve learned that there are only a few that I really need to bother with:

  • Facebook: I consider it a watershed moment when my partner joined F
What is “organic” software?November 15

I was perusing the program for a local “green” event, when I noticed a full page advertisement for Firefox, saying that it’s software was “100% organic.” I kind of chuckled. I thought, what does that really mean?

For Firefox, it means, “open source, community-powered.” And I realized that they had an interesting point. In my mind, it harks back to the arguments that Yochai Benkler made in his book “The Wealth of Networks,” that a ecosystem full of open source, community-powered software was, in a sense, more sustainable, and promoted more, not less innovation than the proprietary software ecosystem.

So now I think I agree with the Mozilla Foundation that a good metaphor for open source as any is that it is to software what “organic” and probably “fair trade” is to food. Too bad the metaphor doesn’t go both ways, because then organic and fair trade food would be free, too.

And, like both of those labels are complex and not entirely easy to nail down with food, so it is with software. But I think it works.

Drupal Themeing, and other projectsNovember 13

I’m learning Drupal bit by bit - one of the first tasks was to learn how to make a new theme. It’s one of those things which is actually fairly straightforward-seeming … until you hit a snag. And then it’s opaque.

One thing I learned is that it is incredibly sensitive to typos. One space accidentally inserted between the “<?” and the “php” led to a completely blank page. Ah well. I’m certainly learning what mistakes can lead to what kinds of issues, which is good. Eventually that becomes second nature.

But, in any event, by the end of an hour or so of hacking, I’d turned a template that I found online at Open Web Design into a Drupal template. I felt accomplished! I’m going to do a few more, and see how sophisticated with it I can get.

One thing I ran into (and haven’t been able to solve yet) is that it’s not easy to have navigation that requires more than just the standard <ul><li> tags. Adding <span> tags, for instance (which makes possible some more interesting looking navigation buttons) seems, at least at first, far from trivial.

I’m making a list of little(ish) projects that I want to do - sort of like problems I think I want to know how to solve.

  • Drupal and google docs single sign on. There is already a SSO Module for Drupal 5.x, and someone submitted a patch for it, but it’s still up for review. I’d also have to cough up $50/year