Drupal Social Web Application

Week 4 meeting - Saturday 2010-10-09

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Tokbox: http://www.tokbox.com/conf/j6xtxgfp56v77i3b

Pirate Pad: http://piratepad.net/sxRu1HeLxl

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How's everyone in this course doing?  Those of you who haven't been participating... P2PU and I would like to know what's holding you back.

(I met the co-founder of P2PU last week, talked about a lot of things but obviously, the low usability of this website was one of the main topics!  I'd love to hear about your feedback & suggestions in regards to this... what can be improved??!)

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Alright people, the core Open Hippel development team has been busy at work pumping out features for its upcoming beta release as a "Minimal Viable Product".  Go check out http://github.com/openhippel - fork the new repositories to your accounts and clone them to your local machines to try them out!  For older repositories that you've already forked and cloned, you need to pull the latest version from upstream and merge the changes to your local files.  You can do this via Github's UI by going to your fork's "Fork Queue" and manually apply the changes in green.  Or, do it on command line - http://help.github.com/forking/

For tomorrow's meeting, let's all have the latest features installed, and just try things out!  We still haven't done the Heartbeat activity feed feature yet... so may be we can talk about that or even do it together.

Hope to see some of you online tomorrow.  Cheers.

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Only Jim showed up for tonight's class, he signed up for an account on http://openhippel.org and we went through how some of the features are built.  Then we touched on Features and there's one module that I forgot to mention: Strongarm!

Strongarm allows you to take your settings in Drupal stored in the variables table, and put them into your custom Feature.

Then, this brought us to the fact that there are thousands of modules out there, and there're like these "Super modules" outside of core that everybody should know about, but being new to Drupal it's hard to find out which ones are one of the "Must have" "Super module"... well, here's a good podcast for that!

http://www.lullabot.com/podcasts/lullabot-podcast-80-top-40-drupal-modules-revisited

Finally, we moved on to Heartbeat, and talked about is difference from the Activity module.  I've only just gotten started on Heartbeat as well, I'll be creating heartbeat templates and rules to log the user activities.  Read this guide:

http://heartbeat.menhireffect.be/docs/short-step-step-guideline

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Finally, Jim asked about class participation.  There was actually a thread on P2PU's mailing list about this, and it turns out other courses also are seeing similar participation rate... may be 5 or 6 people show up for class.

We have to understand, this is a new learning model.  Jim said it pretty well, the way I just put up a task, instead of having us read a book or learn from 1 person, this model allows us to do the research and learn from a lot of different sources!  And that's the value of P2PU.

I'm just happy to hear that at least 1 person thinks I'm doing something that helps :P

-Nick