This years Bay Area Drupal Camp is starting to shape up nicely. It will be this October 11th and 12th. I am a little distracted by Milo (my two week old son), but Dan Robinson has stepped up to man the helm this year. Chris and Jen are both back making things happen behind the scenes, and Dmitri is on-board to get the conference website running. And we’ve had some brand new local community members stepping up.

We will be announcing the conference website soon, but until then, the best place to keep up to date is http://groups.drupal.org/berkeley-users-group-bdug

I have recently updated two of my favorite modules.

With some prodding and sponsorship from Initiatives of Change (www.iofc.org), I ported Private Upload to Drupal 6. It turns out there is even more need for this module in D6 than there was in Drupal 5, as D6 out-of-the box offers almost no protection for private files.

I had a little free time today, so I took a look at the new SimpleTest integration for Drupal 7. The SimpleTest framework now comes as a core module, which is a fantastic choice for growing a testing culture. I have only been keeping half-an-eye on the evolution of the testing framework, but I get the impression it bears only a passing resemblance to the original SimpleTest framework.

It looks like you need cURL working with your PHP. Since my dev machine is running XAMPP, all I needed to do was uncomment the line
extension=php_curl.dll

Just a reminder to myself: In Drupal 5, don’t try to modify $form_values in validation, even if it seems logical. Logic is just a trap. Put in the optional (aka secret) third parameter, and use form_set_value on it.

I am working on my first Drupal/Flex integration project. So far I have been really impressed with the Flex Builder, and the thought that has gone into ActionScript3 and MXML.

My first useful tip has been how to get Flex to talk to Firebug: http://labs.findsubstance.com/2008/02/26/firebugs-console-log-flash-debu...

Just: import flash.external.ExternalInterface;
and then call: ExternalInterface.call( “console.log” , “Hey! I’m tracing from Flash!”);

Super easy.

As exciting as the official conference schedule is, the Birds of a Feather sessions could be where things really get done. These will be ad hoc, first-come first served, semi-spontaneous groups. It is kind of hard to see who has proposed one, but this link will show you this list.

I will be hosting two BOF groups

• Modal Dialogs - Working Group for Drupal 7 (changed from Modal Dialogs - Not Just For Evil Anymore)
• Organizing Local Drupal User Groups and Events

I have put up a wiki with the current status of my work towards getting popup modal dialogs into Drupal 7 over at http://groups.drupal.org/node/9185

I just took a look at a screencast about Panels 2 (http://blip.tv/file/600413/) and I finally get why Earl has been spending so much time on it. It is going to change the Drupal world.

I am celebrating a Drupal first for me today. I got through the entire process of discovering a subtle, yet critical bug in Drupal 6, reporting it, creating a patch, updating that patch based of feedback in the issue queue, and having my patch submitted to core (http://drupal.org/node/214329). Yay! I have contributed to all the parts of the process before, but this was my first round trip.

The Drupal/AJAX revolution continues, and Drupal 6 picks up the pace conciderabily. The cleanups in the APIs for menu and form make it much easier to use Ajax to pull in content. In particular the menu_execute_active_handler() call is fantastic for Ajax, since it returns the content of a page stripped of all the chrome.