Philadelphia

On July 15th & 16th, the University of Pennsylvania will be holding a Higher Education Web Symposium, "the first and only web design conference for IT Professionals working in Higher Education." The conference focuses on a lot of issues that web developers and designers deal with on an everyday basis, such as usability and good css design, and features such notable speakers as CSS guru Eric Meyer and usability expert Jared Spool.

The conference will also feature two Drupal related sessions. First, fellow Philly Drupal evangelist, and head of the Philly Drupal Group, Nathan Gasser will be presenting as part of the panel Adopting Content Management Systems. Later that day Jody and I will have the privilege of evangelizing Drupal to the conference participants in our session HOWTO: A Drupal Demonstration.

If you're interested in the conference, you should register now, as space is filling up fast on what promises to be a great two-day conference!

Fellow Philly Drupaler Jody Hamilton has a great post up on her blog detailing some time-saving tips for working with Drupal, from mundane tasks such as using FireFox's "start searching when I start typing" function, to more advanced ones such as:

Submit a patch

This might not seem like a time-saving tip but I've come to believe it really is. It turns out the only difference between being a frightful Drupal hacker and an esteemed Drupal contributor is whether or not you submitted a patch. I used to always hear "don't hack Drupal" and wonder how the hell these people thought that was possible when surely we all know there are dark corners of code where the override and hook systems never reach. Finally I realized they probably just submit a patch and call it 'contributing' instead of 'hacking'. Actually I didn't realize this until some point after I joined them.

When you get in the habit of submitting a patch immediately after debugging or adding a new feature to a module, it will only take you a few minutes to do. The time savings comes from the fact that you now have other eyes on your work. Sometimes the module maintainer will turn around and point out to me a bug in my patch that I hadn't yet tested for. Usually they will eventually commit my patch, which may be a time-savings for me on some future project or when upgrading the current one. Or they might give me a tip like "upgrade to my latest version you idiot because it's actually way better" which is valuable to know. Maybe they will like my code so much that they will offer me marriage or employment, which could be side benefits on my time-saving mission.

While I'm not sure I'd advise anyone to propose marriage based off of a good Drupal patch (then again, I've heard many other, much worse, reasons to propose), the rest of her post is spot on!