Drupal | 森路歷程

What’s new in BarCamp Hong Kong 2008

Posted by Sammy Fung

九月 7, 2008

Starting from 3 days before BarCamp HK 2008, I started to help its promotion and posted the event information on Drupal Hong Kong group, opensource.hk, OAKA & Linux The Gathering mailing lists, and facebook. It is targeted to invite Drupalers and Linux/FOSS friends.

I was wearing my T-shirt from offical Pythong foundation store online, insteads of any my love England Premier football jersey. Originally I want to wear a Manchester United FC jersey labelled with Hargreaves #4 to BarCamp, but I still didn’t buy it yet. (Explain later why I would like to get this jersey and love MUFC)

I also introduced myself as “Sammy Fung… Linux, Drupal, Basketball.” in barcamp style.

Drupal in BarCamp!

It is first time to have a topic about Drupal in BarCamp Hong Kong. It is a good start for HK Drupalers. We got >20 people to attend this 45-min long Drupal session in BarCamp HK.

I think Drupal is the best open-source CMS along all PHP and Python CMSs at this moment!

Yes! some python content frameworks likes Django or Pylon are great too. I didn’t study on it yet, but I think it is not suitable to compare Django and Drupal. Because I guess django is somewhat lower abstract layer in CMS, easier for programmer to make simply and smaller piece of codes to get CMS work (in developer’s view), but Drupal is aim for a easier implementation and deployment to user, ease of use (in user’s view).

Fairly to say, I likes to coding in python more than in PHP. :-p

But its ‘node’ concept is the scalable thing to attract me to try and use Drupal. All content types are linked to its node system. And taxonomy of Drupal keeps easier and simply catalogues of content, or you can use it for free keyword tagging.

It is my pleasure that Edison Wong got our event news from Drupal group, and he talked Drupal 6 theming in BarCamp today. And John Britton introduced about Knight Drupal Initiative before Edison’s talk. Thanks for both of your sharing.

And we are happy to forming Hong Kong Drupal User Group today, and Edison created the facebook group. Let’s join us now, all HK drupalers!

I look forward to our upcoming offline events and next show in barcamp HK.

Other news in BarCamp

So, what are news in BarCamp HK 2008 with compare to 2007 ?

Creative Commons - CC in Hong Kong will be launched offically in October 2008.
Making iPhone apps - Newly released iPhone 3G makes developers are hot to develop iPhone apps.
Augmented Reality - with open-source software, credit to Ben Lau.

And lastly we should thank

Organisators: Napoleon, Aaron, Belle, Ben Lee (many Ben I know in same community), and others I may missed. I think I should actively help Ben Lee earlier next year.
Sponsors: Turner for nice/big venue and brewed coffee (I like this), Doodaz for T-shirt, Adobe for another $20 T-shirt, Drinkazine, hkday.net (for your free beers, do it again next year! thanks Ben), Outblaze for lunch, and other sponsors.
Our local open-source software community!!!: Ben Lau, Ben Lee, Ben Cheng, Karl and his friends, Zheng Le, Wily Yuen, Edison and other HK Drupalers, Roger, Hilary, Thomas Lau, Henry Law, Wong Hang, Chris Chan, Jacky See, …. (sorry if I missed your name here.) Thank you for your participate, and some of you pay attention to my last-minute call to this event.
Surely some of our event organisators and barcamp friends with open-source background: Ben Lee, Aaron Farr (Apache), Steve Fleischer, Richard Cohen.
Other speakers.
and all participants! (It makes we got >200 attendees)

What I should apologise ?

I should prepare a small and simple Drupal or Python talk but no time for me to prepare for it. (Actually I wrote a old 10-page slides about basic Drupal module development on March, but it was my notes, so it look likes a manual. I don’t want to do presentation like a documentation reading machine. XD)
My late show up to promote it to our local community, just a 3-day advance notice. Sorry to barcamp and OSS. (Otherwise Karl will repeat this again: Why didn’t you invite me to xxx ? XDDD, just like he missed Debian birthday party Hong Kong, haha!)

Reference

BenLauPedia: 今年在Barcamp講的題目

Gull Blog - barcamp hong kong 2008 完成！

d. otted rhythm - ’tis barcamp again!!!

Digital Anthology - BarCamp Hong Kong 2008, A Great Event Experience!

網絡暴民 - Barcamp HK 2008

BenCrox - BarCamCamp

Reality - BarCamp Hong Kong 2008

Belle - Reflections on BarCamp Hong Kong 2008

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barcamphk2008, drupal, opensource

4 Comments

Moving forum posts to stories in Drupal

Posted by Sammy Fung

七月 18, 2008

I feels Slashdot-like stories in Drupal are very similiar as posts in oldie discussion board (aka forum). The only big difference between story and forum are discussion grouping, old-style forum are grouped topics into hierarchy style, but story with taxonomy provides free tagging.

So I decided to move forum posts in opensource.hk to stories, and disabled the forum function 2 weeks ago.

Forum and Taxonomy

Taxonomy module is required for forum operation in Drupal. So firstly, we look at how taxonomy module works in Drupal.

Table *_term_data got few fields. tid, vid and name are important fields which represents each terms in taxonomy, vocabulary type (forum/…) id, and name of terms.

Table *_term_hierarchy got 2 fields - tid and parent, which are term id and parent term id for a many-to-one hierarchy relationship of taxonomy terms and their parent terms.

Table *_term_node got 2 fields - nid and tid, which are node id and term id for many-to-many relationship of nodes and taxonomy terms.

So, I should move forum related taxonomy terms to normal one, or simply remove them. But I think old forum name were not good tags for stories, number of posts in forum are few, so I removed them in database and added much suitable tags to them myself.

Changing node types

I run the following SQL to change the node type of all forum contents, and promote them to front page,

update node set type=’story’ and promote=1 where type=’forum’

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