• Work on new and existing websites used by internal/external globally-dispersed teams for Outreach and Scientific-Discovery aims over programs and platforms;
• Facilitate communication, education and retention of website users through a high-level of software quality over custom web-based and open-source software, actively working in all discovery, implementation, and deployment phases to understand functionality requirements and reliability, security, scalability compliance aims;
• Finding problems on different platforms, environments and browsers, problems with the functionality of web applications and web services, documenting cases for coworkers and following them to conclusion;
• Writing, sharing, maintaining and executing deployment scripts and automation programs, systems/user/quality control/deployment documentation, and technical knowledge bits that different teams can reuse;
• Writing, sharing, maintaining media content to assist users in installing, configuring, and using software;
• Writing, sharing, maintaining and efficiently responding to change requests by reviewing and clarifying the information with users and coworkers;
• Work with the team to seek quality feedback to identify issues with user interfaces, concepts, storyboards, wireframes during early stages of design or development;
• Creating, sharing, maintaining operational reports to measure qualitative goals that require less deterministic design and content improvements;
• Directing and developing your own professional skills; helping coworkers when asked and taking the initiative to reach out to coworkers when you think you have something to contribute.

QUALIFICATIONS

Education
• Completion of a university undergraduate degree with focus on Communications, Computer Science, Engineering or Life Sciences, or equivalent.

Experience
• Quality Assurance (or Developer) experience for interactive, multi-tiered web/software applications. Proven experience over different web protocols using different environments and browser technologies. Able to formulate quality control plans with Open source technologies, and specifications from the Agile Methodology;
• Experience with technical documentation. Ideally able to create multimedia user guides;
• Experience with shell scripts. Ideally expanding that ability into database scripting;
• Experience with case management operational reporting. Ideal able to build reports using Excel macros, between worksheets;
• Proven record of offering consistently superior levels of quality service.

Skills and Knowledge
• An appreciation of all computer devices and technologies. Project experience with open-source projects. Solid understanding over our technologies, HTTP/CSS/JAVASCRIPT, Javascript/CSS; Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP. And would be advantageous to also know and master CMS/Drupal administration and tools;
• The ability to make decisions on your own, and consult with team leaders as needed to grow. Detailed knowledge of web-browser testing, web security testing, ideally, with the ability to diagnose problems within JavaScript, CSS and HTTP using modern testing tools;
• Excellent hardware and software troubleshooting skills;
• Solid understanding of networking and computer hardware;
• Fluent in Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.

Quality Attributes of the Person
• An enthusiasm about learning;
• The ability to think calmly and rationally during a crisis;
• The ability to seek the details that produce the greatest positive changes.

Drupal Jobs

Die DrupalCenter.de-Podcast-Serie, praesentiert von Caseledde, Kars-T und SirFiChi.
Wöchentlich neu, mit den aktuellsten Neuigkeiten und Terminen rund um Drupal.

Seit November plant und organisiert die Drupal Initiative den Stand fuer Drupal auf der CeBIT 2012. Was aktuell getan wird, was noch zu tun ist, wie man helfen kann und was fuer Ueberraschungen waehrrend der Planung auftauchen, erzaehlen uns Stephan und Tobias, die beiden Vorstaende. Ihr werder vermutlich ueberrascht sein, wie zahlreich Drupal auf der CeBIT vertreten sein wird...

28:51 minutes (26.5 MB)

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Feb 6, 2012

Several months ago I wrote about a unique method of training based on replacing live lecturing with pre-recorded videos. For the uninitiated, this frees up trainers to assist students the whole time, cuts way down on preparation time, and allows students to move at their own pace which increases focus and engagement (see the short video here for a bit more info). Back then it was a theory, but now it's been tested in several different environments and proven as an incredibly effective way to both teach and learn Drupal. Plus, it's way more fun than traditional training.

This is a quick outline of what's been happening so far, what's coming up, and how to get started if you want to organize or participate in a Mentored Training for your community or organization.

How to offer a free, effective Drupal training in your area

Nearly every Drupal community sees the need for training in their area, but it's a headache to either develop a curriculum, get access to existing curriculum or get an experienced trainer in at the right time. But never fear! You (yes, you!) can conduct a effective, proven training in your area with very little effort and awesome results.

You don't have to get up in front of a class, you don't have to memorize anything. Just leverage your experience in Drupal to help students as they work through a proven set of video lectures. If it sounds odd or lame - it's not. Students work at their own pace, they have a great time, and mentors also enjoy being able to simply show up and help students without extensive and exhausting preparation.

Setting up a Mentored Training is simple. It has a basic structure that you can follow exactly or adjust to meet the needs of you and your students. Build a Module.com will also give you free access to our entire video library for you and your students for a full 8 days so students have the chance to ramp up before the training, or wrap up what they were working on after the training is complete.

If you're interested in mentoring or participating in a Mentored Training in your area, a great place to start is by posting a suggestion on groups.drupal.org (see here and here for examples).

Learn more about how to conduct a Mentored Training on the Build a Module.com resources page.

Mentored Trainings so far

There's been a few mentored trainings so far, with quite a few more coming down the pikes. If you're considering organizing one in your area or for your organization, please leverage those of us that have had some experience as resources to answer questions and help wrap your mind around the logistics.

San Francisco, BADCamp 2011 - Our first Mentored Training was at the Bay Area Drupal Camp in San Francisco. We had 6 mentors and 55 students at the full-day training. During a feedback session after the training, what we heard from students was unanimously positive. One thing they really appreciated was the extensive one-on-one time they got with the trainers. We discovered that a full third of the students came over-qualified for the training, which worked perfectly in an environment where there was more advanced material available. The mentors unanimously felt the same way. Two of the mentors quickly began the process of organizing trainings in their own in Portland and Denver.

Minnesota, Advantage Labs Client Training - Advantage Labs in Minnesota piloted their first Mentored Training for 15 clients, specifically around learning about Views. The video base allowed less experienced clients work through Drupal basics, and they created a virtual snapshot of the example site partway through the "Build Your First Drupal 7 Web Site" video collection to allow more advanced users to hit the ground running.

Edinburgh, Scotland - A Mentored Training event was put on in Edinburgh for would-be mentors to evaluate the Build a Module.com material for a future pre-camp training. The event was small, but it sounded like it went very smoothly and the consensus was that it would be a great format for the upcoming camp.

Upcoming Mentored Trainings (and trainings in planning)

If you're in the planning stages for conducting a Mentored Training and don't see it listed here, please let us know so we can add it to our calendar.

DrupalCon, Denver, March 19 - We have a great line-up of talent for the DrupalCon training. With 10+ mentors with experience in site building, theming, coding, Information Architecture, it's a great opportunity to take a flying leap up the learning curve and get some great one-on-one help. Learn more or sign up.

Denver Community Training, February 18 - The Denver Drupal community is conducting a full-day mentored training with some great mentors in an awesome community. Donations are welcome, but attendance is free. This can be a great way to ramp up for the DrupalCon event as well. Learn more or sign up.

DrupalCamp Florida, February 12 - While 50 or so talented Drupalists build amazing free sites for a few non-profits, the future site owners will be working on their Drupal chops by using the Build a Module.com videos to train. The videos will also be available to the 50+ coders and themers making the sites happen (because even ninjas need help sometimes). For more information, contact Kendall.

Phoenix, Arizona (in planning) - Several community members in Phoenix are in the process of organizing a Mentored Training for the community. If you're interested in mentoring or being a student, please contact Matt at Ashday Interactive.

Portland (in planning) - Another great community is planning a mentored training. If you're interested in contributing, go ahead and post to the discussion page.

Glasgow, Scotland (suggested) - As a follow up to the Edinburgh training, there is some discussion about another Scotland. See this comment for more for who to contact about participating or helping to plan.

Australia (in planning) - We don't have the exact details, but there's been some training plans at an upcoming conference. Please feel free to send us an e-mail and we'll forward your info to the organizers.

India (in planning) - We're collaborating with an organization to provide mentored trainings in India. If you are interested in participating or contributing, please send us an e-mail and we'll pass it on to the organizers.

Mentored Drupal trainings happening around the world (and how to conduct one of your own)

Sidewalk Prophets were one of Warner Bros. new artists on the Word Label Group. Warner Bros. asked Drupal web development firm ImageX Media to design their new site.

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The Entity token module is part of the Entity package of modules, it provides lots of new tokens to use everywhere that tokens are currently available. It does this by being aware of the structure of fields on entities and exposing extra options for fields that reference entities. For example, it allows you to use many more tokens about taxonomy terms added to content.

Pathauto

To see this in action we'll consider a simple example.

Say that we have articles about birds on our site, suppose further that each article is about a specific species of bird. We make the simplification that each species is part of a single family of species. All that boils down to us having a 'Species' vocabulary that looks like this:

We then add a taxonomy term reference field to our article content type, field_species and we set it up to use our vocabulary. We ensure that our content editors only create articles about a specific species and not a family of species.

What we'd like to do is have nice URLs like the following:

articles/crow-family/rook/eating-habbits-rooks

For an article about Rooks.

We can use the Pathauto to set up nicer URLs, but Drupal core doesn't provide the tokens that we need. We need to get the root term (top level parent) of the selected species (which is the family) and add that to our path. Enter Entity Token, it knows that the field_species field contains a taxonomy term, and that taxonomy terms have a root term.

You can explore the tokens that Entity token provides:

And we can see that we have all the tokens we need. So we can set up Pathauto using the following pattern:

articles/[node:field-species:root]/[node:field-species]/[node:title]

Then if you create an article, you will see that the URL path generated is like the one we wanted above. Cool!

Two years ago I wrote a blog post about why not to use github. I simply was wrong. As jQuery won the JS framework war so did git won the DVCS war and one of the reasons is actually github. I have been using github to host private projects for my clients and the service / workflow is really top notch -- fork from the UI, hack, send a pull request, comment the diff line-by-line, do the minor fixes in the online editor on spot, click the merge button, done. Nicely done.

Two years ago I wrote a blog post about why not to use github. I simply was wrong. As jQuery won the JS framework war so did git won the DVCS war and one of the reasons is actually github. I have been using github to host private projects for my clients and the service / workflow is really top notch -- fork from the UI, hack, send a pull request, comment the diff line-by-line, do the minor fixes in the online editor on spot, click the merge button, done. Nicely done.

Word Label Group is the undisputed leader in the Christian music industry and has had over 57 years of music-making behind it.

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Die Übersetzung von Drupal findet über ein eigens dafür entwickeltes Framework statt, dass es unseren fleißigen Übersetzern gerade nicht leicht macht. Das wollen wir nun ändern und brauchen hierfür eure Unterstützung!

Was genau läuft falsch?

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Die Übersetzung von Drupal findet über ein eigens dafür entwickeltes Framework statt, dass es unseren fleißigen Übersetzern gerade nicht leicht macht. Das wollen wir nun ändern und brauchen hierfür eure Unterstützung!

Was genau läuft falsch?

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In this episode of Drupal Yarns we catch up with one of Australia's two nominees for the Drupal Association at-large Directors - Ryan Cross (rcross) (view the nomination).

Website design for Portal Entertainment : a UK-based premium digital entertainment company from the heart of London.

Site designed by: http://www.styleswebbin.co.uk/

Tech used: jQuery, Supersized Plugin, HTML, CSS, Drupal 7.

Normally caching pages for anonymous users is a good thing. There are times however, when a page or two needs to be excluded from the cache. Just such a situation recently occurred while I was working on the website for the Southern California Linux Expo.

As a conference website, there were the usual lists of speakers, sessions and a schedule page listing all the sessions in grid ordered by room and time. With over 100 sessions, that page was expensive to generate and since it didn't change much was a great candidate for page caching.

Topic:

• Drupal
• education

I've been burning to tell you about an educational experiment. The challenge of the experiment was to deal with a problem of reduced support (teachers) and increase number of students (over 300). The solution: add some community spirit. I've been using my Drupal experience to guide this challenge and did some development along the way. We extended the issue queue to work with peer-evaluations and make learning part of the solution instead of the problem.

In this blog I will only give a sneak preview about the Drupal interface. With Prof. K. Lombaerts, I will work on an academic paper in an educational journal to elaborate the strategic policy for self-regulative education. The educational experiment was done with Prof. F. Plastria course Software for Management, which is an advanced spreadsheet course that Master-level business students have to learn to understand how they can model, analyze and simulate datasets to deal with uncertainty. The magnitude of this experiment was huge. I've spend over 650 hours spread over 4 months. Let me throw some more numbers at you to grasp the magnitude of the project.

The experiment involves 410 subscribed students, where 330 actually posting something, however 30 of them barely did any work, so lets say 300 students. In total, these students posted 4276 nodes and 7980 comments. Two content types were more important then others: issues and evaluations. In the end 767 issues across 209 projects got evaluated by 1709 evaluations created by students and 223 evaluations created by two teachers. So each issue had more then 2 evaluations and average 2,5 issues per student got created. Considering that a student would spend around 10 hours for an issue and around 3 hours for an evaluation, I'm hoping your appreciate the magnitude of the educational experiment.

The setup

I've been working with this Drupal site for master-level education ever since 2006. Each year never more then 40 people, so this one experiment was as intensive as the past 6 years together. As learned from previous experimentation, we turned the classroom exercises and the homework inside out. The prior classroom exercises got replaced by videos (see http://www.youtube.com/mixelkiemen) and projects were brought to the classroom. However the amount of students wouldn't allow for much direct contact. The classroom was indented to be a workspace for students to collaborate by informal interaction. Most actual activities happened via formal interaction with the issue-queue and other structures of the course site.

A project got broken down into issues; three categories existed (model, analysis and simulations) that had three possible levels (basic, normal and advanced). Each issue would upload an Excel file, but the spreadsheet is only the base, it’s the data modeling, sensitivity analyzing and (Monte Carlo) simulations that are truly important. Each issue required at least two evaluations by another student. Of course you're not sure if an evaluation is correct, therefore a meta-evaluation on each evaluation was needed.

While I first had to bootstrap the course and so focus on developing projects, I soon find myself shifting to developing evaluations, meta-evaluation and lastly supervise my meta-evaluation team. In the end we had 60 students creating meta-evaluations. Considering that evaluators corrected some of the mistakes made by the first student and that meta-evaluators corrected mistakes in the evaluation, we reduced the required feedback significantly. Thus the teacher's focus was to correct the quality and elaborate the exceptions.

Now the real data-analysis is only starting, but we have learned how to significantly improve this process (so we think) and already consider the innovation experiment worth the effort.

The simplified conclusion is that "gamification" mediates autonomy and collaboration. Still this is oversimplified; some specific problems have to be addressed. The gamification does allowed an instantly calculated of the score (see the calculation example http://mosi.vub.ac.be/webdev/?q=node/2170), which lead to faster feedback for students, but also a reduction of the administration.

The development

From a technical point the site was pretty simple. Considering technical limits at our university I had to work with Drupal 6. I've first hacked the project module, for some minor changes, like changing "category" to "level". Then I've used 5-stars-CCK to create the evaluation type and some basic stuff like node reference. Still as time passed I would find myself programming more, in the end I've created three interfaces, one for the students, one for the evaluators and one for the teachers. The student interface was the first we developed. It was to give students feedback on their work. The total score would show the total point earned on issues and evaluations and we created some simple system of bonus points. This would lead to a score on 20:

The total score is an abstraction. On the one hand students could earn point for each of the three types (model, sensitivity analysis and MC simulations), leading to an issue score table (on 10):

Similarly a table for evaluations existed. For each issue a student uploaded 2 evaluations were needed, leading to individual criteria for all students. Students could do more evaluations then needed, which would increase their score. For example SvenM needs 8 evaluations and did 10, so the system would look at the average of the 8 best evaluations, which is 0.6 higher then his normal average. At the moment 1 evaluation is still pending, meaning it did not get meta-evaluated. Students would get 0.1 bonus-points for each meta-evaluation they do. Both the meta-points or any penalties would get calculated into the evaluation score.

By the end of the semester 60 students got selected after showing some good evaluation skills. They became part of the meta-evaluators team, in next table you see students with more then 20 meta-evaluations. Considering all the pressure and work, we got surprised how much good meta-evaluation these students did:

Still we got equally surprised of the continuing spamming of some of the worst students. It seems as the classroom setting would hardly have any influence on community dynamics, with the exception that some of my meta-evaluations got phoned up by bad students and became threaten …. not something we had anticipated at all !

With the evaluations in full progress we saw the need to create different interfaces. The meta-evaluators would be in constant email traffic with me and other students mailed too. During the evaluation period (January 2012) I would get to 477 emails that need instant reply, that is over 15 mails a day! Next to my daly quotum of 20 issues and the programming, this lead to very long working hours. One of the conflicts led to creating a table for meta-evaluators to get a holistic view on some of the students' behavior:

We also created some extra views for students so they could get a selective list with all issues that needed review or all issues that required dummy evaluations (issues that only had bad/poor evaluations).

Finally I also created some interface for the teacher, with some general info, but also a list of meta-evaluated issues and a list of candidate evaluators:

The most work was all the calculations and the terrible complicated mysql queries to create this. This probably could have been programed easier, but I was on time pressure and so created some ugly solutions that worked. I didn't upload the code; it could be implemented a lot better. It was just to run the experiment. The goal is to use this experience to design some good software architectures. Still I'm only interested in designing, not build them. I wish there was a way to collaborate with some developers on this or maybe some shops as an R&D project, however I lost my fait that such a thing will happen … let me elaborate.

Drupal & Academics, closure, finally.

Drupal is fast, compared to any development. Academic development is often slow, but can be significant even for fast projects like Drupal. With Drupalcon Brussels (2006) I understood the challenge for education and got the opportunity to apply this almost instantly While I took on the challenge only days after Drupalcon, it took me 5 year to run experiments and I've only been able to express it properly some months ago: see my presentation @ DrupalGovDays.

Still, this has not been relevant for Drupal, none of my students became part of the community as far as I can tell. In contract Summer of Code (SOC) students have been vital to Drupal's core. I've been trying to have a debate on getting from SOC to something more sustainable, but the discussion has never lead to strong plans. Today I understand the magnitude of such efforts and now I understand this can't be solved easily. It will be doable, but a big investor would be needed.

In Drupalcon Szeged (2008), I've tried to organize a BoF on research, but it got mixed up with another BoF lead to no follow up. In Drupalcon Copenhagen (2010) & Chicago (2011) I did several interviews to get an overview of founding companies that pioneered Drupal's business ecosystem. This fit my research on "self-organizing innovation", which I relate to open innovation, as I'm elaborating in my papers. While I made a first working paper in 2011 and have been publishing in some conference proceeeding, the actual academic paper for a journal is still work in progress. In fact it has been split up as a case for two papers, the first journal publication is plan to appear in 2013. So it is better then 5 years that was needed for the first experiment, but still 3 years after the event took place. Inside the Drupal community 3 years is long, so I see the bought in peoples eyes when they talk to me. In all the years fighting for this mixture of R&D development, I'm loosing fait. I will finish the papers and they probably will have no impact for the Drupal community, just as 5 year teaching a Drupal course had zero impact. I'm getting more and more convinced my energy is directed wrongly.

For London I did more effort to organize an open space "DrupalEdu", while the open space was successful, the follow up was not. As expressed in my last blog, I'm tired of tilting at windmills. I see a problem of "architectural failure", which is ironically, as it is something that shows up in my radical innovation research all the time. I feel lost, burnout and becoming an outcast in respect to Drupal community. I've made some friends along the way, but I've seen good friend leave too. I've got plans to go to Munich, but I'm not exactly sure why. One thing is sure, I don't intent to push anything without serious support.

About serious support, I'm proud to announce that Yuri Milner has taken a fast interest in the research of my advisor and he has just co-founded the "Global Brain Institute" (GBI) as our main sponsor. The first target of the GBI, which we call the first pillar, is a mathematical model. 4 PhD students have just been assigned to work on this research for the next 5 years. This first pillar of the GBI has little to do with my own interest on radical innovation, but with my advisor we designed a second pillar related to self-regulating education. This second pillar is important to us, but we don't have any investment for it yet. We are allowed to attract co-financing for the GBI.

My first focus during 2012 will be to finish my PhD, but if I can find any opportunity for the second GBI pillar, I won't be neglecting it. In fact there are some discussions going on, but talking is cheap. Research plans are only real once the contract is signed, past disappointments have made me grim and skeptical, they taught me not to get my hopes up high. Patience is a blessing I've still got to learn. Still this month GBI first pillar is founded, so let' s think positive and try to smile to the future.

Hi everyone

I've been using AWS (Amazon Web Services) and their EC2/Cloud Formation services for the past week and have been testing the instant Drupal sites via the Cloud Formation. After much trial and error I have everything working with the exception that I am unable to upload/download files to the server as it requires SFTP utilising public/private key pairs. I've done everything possible and have viewed umpteen articles in relation to this but still cannot find any answers on how to do this via my mac.

I have setup a .ssh directory in my home directory, have set the .pem files so only I can read/write them, including allowing access to the server on port 22 but I'm still having no joy in connecting to the server. Most of the the time I'm getting 'Permission denied (publickey)' and I have no idea what I'm doing wrong.

Just so you know the server is working correctly and displaying the test site www.agentfame.com so it is purely an access issue.

If anyone can advise, help or even direct me to some suitable articles it would be most appreciated.

Thank you

Stephen

Mobile User Experience & Design

Submitted on Sun, 02/05/2012 - 17:00

Last week brought two episodes with Mike Carper talking about Drupal Performance. This week brings one more performance episode, this time with Khalid, then another special Wednesday episode to talk about the User Points module. (Don't get used to two episodes a week... It's just a fluke that it happened twice in a row! ;-p)

Khalid works for 2bits consulting on Drupal performance.
Some things he talks about include:

Hi,

Hopefully someone can help me out here.. Firstly I am not a coder but I have a problem that needs code to be resolved..

I am creating a feature using "features" and I need to create a static block where the content is a simple HTML table.. Features doesn't export blocks so my plan is to add it in code to the .module file of the exported feature..

I haven't been able to find any code examples for a simple block to start from so if anyone can give me a pointer and perhaps a sample that would be great!!

TIA

EDIT: I am using Drupal 7 if that makes any difference..

Drupal Dojo

Liebe Community,
wir haben mehr Transparenz gelobt – und hier ist sie: Wir treffen eine schwierige Entscheidung.
Nicht zuletzt, weil eine Entscheidung für die Alternative auch schwierig wäre. :-)

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Guten Tag,

als erstes gilt unser Dank dem Team vom Drupalcenter, das uns bereits vor einiger Zeit angeboten hatten, im Drupalcenter einen eigenen Forenbereich anlegen zu können. Ein besondere Dank gilt Floh Klare, den wir immer wieder vertröstet hatten und der sich trotz allem nicht aus der Ruhe hat bringen lassen. Danke.

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A lot of different people has started experimenting with Phonegap and Drupal. You have Jeff Linwood and his Drupal plugin for Phonegap for iOS, and I just discovered Drupalgap as I was planning this post the last weeks, which does more or less (actually it does more, but not all) some of the same things I will try to do in this post.

If you want to get up and running real quick, Drupalgap seems great. If you want to learn the code behind it, and extend it yourself (this was my motivation), keep reading.

Tags: planet drupalappsjavascriptphonegapservicesdrupal 7