Kevin Bridges

When our story begins, our heroine is lost and walking on a very brittle and narrow bridge. She knew she was in danger, but the opportunity to fall was a chance she was willing to take. She knew, also, that she was going across for a reason - what that reason was, soon was discovered.

I got to go do some down hill mountain biking with Tyler and beeradb over labor day weekend. It was completely sick ... Here's a video of the route I was riding ... check it out about 6:28 into it ... that was my favorite part.

Something bit my hand on one of the berms ... here's the end result hehe

From Labor Day Bike Ride

This was sooo fun ... can't wait to do eet again!!!!!

I've been using ActiveState's Komodo for a few weeks now in response to my frustrations with Eclipse. As with any IDE there was a short relearning of my ways that was necessary, but I am happy to report that I really like this IDE. The last bit of functionality I've been wanting to tie together is directly related to debugging Drupal in Komodo. Here's the steps that I took to get a Drupal development environment with debugging in Komodo on a clean installation of a 64bit Ubuntu 8.04.

A good deal of this may be redundant if you already have your environment established, but it is recorded here nonetheless to help others become proficient at what we do. While I prefer command line interfaces I am going to lean towards providing gui tools to allow newer devs options. If you don't need or want all of the minute details skip to step 6 and get straight into configuring for debugging.

I like to develop against local virtual hosts when I work with Drupal. Here is the apache httpd.conf configuration that has served me the best so far. The first VirtualHost is the default .. .simply replicate the second VirtualHost entry and edit accordingly. A simple edit of /etc/hosts to enter the virtual host name that matches the virtual host entries in the httpd.conf and a quick reload by apache and you are good to go. I particularly enjoy the independent logging for each site.

1. Generate a public/private key pair in your dev environment. Hit enter to accept the defaults. You will only ever need to run this once ... proceed to step two if you've already done this.
   $ ssh-keygen -t rsa
2. Copy keys to remote server. Substitute server in the code below with your target machine.
   $ ssh server "mkdir ~/.ssh; chmod 0700 ~/.ssh"
$ scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub server:~/.ssh/authorized_keys2

It's official! The next Drupal Camp Colorado is happening the weekend of July 26th and 27th in Denver. Come join us in the mountains for two full days of Drupal wisdom and knowledge. We are going to host a mix of sessions and BOF's geared towards both the new Drupalers out there as well as the experienced veterans. Come join companies such as pingVision, Growing Venture Solutions, Aten Design Group, Blue Tent Marketing, Deproduction, and Civic Pixel among others.

To bad nobody listens

All great Drupal Camps leave participants thinking "what a great value" and "why not more" so to that end we have begun organizing a DBUG Camp in Denver/Boulder area of Colorado towards the last weekend in July. Many details will be forthcoming in the upcoming weeks, but for now I'd like to direct your attention to our Open Call for Logos ... yep, that's right ... we need help getting that killer logo put together so now is the time for you graphical types to shine!

Today was an amazing day in Paris. It's hard to imagine without the pictures, but we all gathered on the first floor of the facility that hosted yesterday's Drupal Camp. A good portion of yesterday was planning and thinking leaving today for massive amounts of hacking and coding. Charlie Gordon, Jimmy Berry, Roel De Meester, Erik Stielstra, Rok Žlender, Károly Négyesi, Miglius Alaburda, Dries Buytaert, Douglas Hubler, myself and our gracious host Ori Pekelman of AF83 gathered for more than 10 hours to solidify the framework that will help lead Drupal to it's next Killer Release.

Primary amongst todays developments was http://drupal.org/cvs?commit=111813 which brought a framework for functional tests to core. This is the culmination of "Three years, one month and twenty four days" according to Károly who also had this to say before he started dancing in his seat:
(12:24:52 PM) chx: YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
(12:24:54 PM) chx: YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
(12:24:54 PM) chx: YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
(12:24:55 PM) chx: YES YES YES YES YES YES YES

The Problem

During recent presentations at FOSDEM 2008 and DrupalCon 2008 Boston, founder Dries Buytaert presented the idea of bringing full testing of Drupal Core ( here and here ) to the Drupal community. When a system changes as rapidly as Drupal does, it becomes increasingly important to provide quantifiable reporting on the health of the system so that growth may continue. Without such reporting, Drupal 7 will realize a substantially shorter development cycle before a 7 month code freeze is enacted around July 15th, 2008. This will allow testers and developers a 7 month period to guarantee the quality of Drupal's next major release.