Ryan Price and Mike Anello recently talked with Jacob Redding (jredding), author of Beginning Drupal as well Treasurer and Interim General Manager of the Drupal Association.

Beginning Drupal, released earlier this year by Wiley Publishing, covers a large selection of Drupal topics. Jacob mentions that he wrote the book to be a reference for someone who is not only building a Drupal site, but who also wants to really understand how Drupal works.

The book was written for Drupal 7 - many of the topics in the book cover the changes between Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 including (but definitely not limited to): user vs. profile fields, public and private fields, content type block visibility, and localization.

Jacob, Ryan, and Mike discuss specific portions of the book and the style in which it is written. Jacob has been a professional Drupal trainer for several years, and has tried to leverage what he has learned about teaching Drupal when writing this book. As an added bonus, the subject of zoot suits was brought up as well.

Wiley Publishing has given us a couple of copies of the book to giveaway - simply leave a comment below (be sure to leave your twitter or drupal.org username so we have some way to contact you) and we'll pick two winners at random.

Want more information about Jacob? Check him out at @jredding on Twitter or on his blog at jredding.info.

UPDATE - comments and content registration is closed. Winners will be announced on DrupalEasy Podcast 42.

Listen in a Andrew, Ryan, and Mike discuss Drupal news from the past week. In this week's episode, Ryan talks about his trip to Design4Drupal, we all wonder why anyone would be against a code of conduct, and we plan out exactly how to get Drupal 7 released.

5+ Stories

• Contributors to Drupal.org CVS since 2000
• New Drupal modules contributed by Digg.com
• Adopt a Drupal Code of Conduct
• Boston Drupal Design Camp
• Drupal 7 release date
• Haitian Creole translation effort

Thanks to Webenabled for sponsoring this week's podcast. Create, develop, and deploy Drupal applications entirely on the Webenabled platform.

Picks of the Week - every podcast we each pick a module, theme, or other Drupal-related "thing" that we'd like to spread the word about.

• Mike - Semantic CCK by Ryan James and Rene Hache (rjay and rhache) - allows you to specify the HTML output of your CCK fields and labels.
• Andrew - ImageCache Actions by Dan Morrison (dman) - Imagecache.module provides the most commonly-used processes needed for basic image manipulation.
• Ryan - Omega theme and Omega Tools by Jake Strawn (himerus)- base theme based on the 960gs with an accompanying helper module - screencast: http://himerus.com/blog/himerus/omega-theme-drupal-7-demo

Site of the Week - every podcast we collectively pick a (usually new) Drupal site to be highlighted and discussed. This week's pick is Dahon Folding Bicycles - http://dahon.com/ - recently featured in a Drupal.org case study http://drupal.org/Dahon-Folding-Bicycles

If you'd like your site highlighted, please submit it here: http://DrupalEasy.com/siteoftheweek

Follow us on twitter:

• @drupaleasy
• @andrewmriley
• @liberatr
• @ultimike

If you'd like to leave us a voicemail, call 321-441-3964. Please keep in mind that we might play your voicemail during one of our future podcasts. Feel free to call in with suggestions, rants, questions, or medicinal advice for Andrew. If you'd rather just send us an email, please use our contact page at http://DrupalEasy.com/contact

The Drupal Association is trying to figure out the best way it can help DrupalCamp organizers. To that end, we've create a quick survey for DrupalCamp organizers to help the association determine how DrupalCamps are currently organized and managed.

The survey is divided into three sections: general information, finances/legal, and miscelleanous. The "general information" section has four questions about the date, location, and size of the camp. The "finances and legal" section has four questions about the size of the budget, registration fees, and legal organization of the camp. The survey concludes with a four-question "miscelleanous" section that asks about camp purchases (including event insurance), volunteers, and a text area for additional comments.

Only one organizer from each camp needs to complete the survey (we'll take care of any duplicates). So far we've collected about 30 responses, and we'd like to ensure that representatives from all DrupalCamps have a chance to respond.

The association will use the survey responses to determine how they can best support local DrupalCamps. If you're a DrupalCamp organizer, please complete the survey!

Much has been written in the past couple weeks about the recent DrupalCon SF, the vast majority of it overwhelmingly positive. By most accounts, it was a successful event, with the overwhelming majority of attendees leaving satisfied. Granted, the accounts I read come from sites whose posts are aggregated via Drupal Planet - an admitedly very pro-Drupal crowd. But in the spirit of continual improvement, one area we should address is providing better insight to newer members of the community about the quality and expections of individual sessions.

During the conference I had the opportunity to speak with people who were new to Drupalcons and the larger Drupal community. While most of the newbies I talked to were psyched to be there and getting a lot out of it, there was a common thread: the quality of the sessions was not consistently high. Kieran Lal, the Director of Business Development of the Drupal Association noted this in a recent blog post:

In order to grow Drupalcon, we need to focus on the quality of the main program. Drupal sessions are still wildly hit or miss, both in session quality and session attendance. As a community, we need to take a hard look in the mirror and raise consistency and quality of every Drupalcon session. With more than 400 sessions submitted, there should be a better way to select quality sessions, and set higher standards in presentation preparation and delivery. With a quality approach, we will attract attendees not just because the conference is about Drupal, but because the sessions are worthy of attending on their own.

As Drupalcons get bigger every year, we're gaining large numbers of people not just attedning, but getting involved. The makeup of the community is changing - we're diversifying from an informal group of coders to professionals that include designers, project managers, and executives. We need to make sure we serve new members better than we serve the pioneers. A good way to start doing that, based on many conversations I had with these new Drupalistas, is to do a better job in delivering high-quality Drupalcon sessions. Someone new to our community that sits through multiple mediocore sessions at their first Drupalcon is not the first impression we should be making.

Everybody who presents a session at Drupalcon has the best intentions. But without preparation and practice, best intentions often don't get the job done. We're extremely fortunate that we have some stellar speakers and presenters in the community. We need to foster an envioronment where that group continues to grow.

As a veteran of 5 Drupalcons, I tend to pick sessions to attend based on the speaker, rather than the topic. This type of information is easily transferable to newbies. If we aggregate this type of data and make it part of the session proposal and program presentation, it will not only provide newbies with a measure of the strength of the speaker, but it will also encourage speakers to prepare and practice more in order to garner more positive feedback.

In addition to the obvious approach of recruiting quality speakers, I think we can address the problem from two directions.

Motivated Presenters

Clearly, presenters require some additional motivation to better organize, prepare, and present their session. As an open-source community, we review every single line of code and documentation; why should our Drupalcon sessions receive any less attention? Let's incentivize speakers to practice their presentations at DrupalCamps and meetups by not only taking note of it, but also by actively encouraging people who have seen the presentation to provide thumbs-up (Plus 1) type feedback. The idea is not to slam presenters when they do a poor job, but to encourage them to improve their material and presentation skills.

A positive peer-review should then be used as one of the selection factors. I don't think it is a wise idea to use this information as a filter, but rather providing it as additional information that conference organizers can use as needed.

Additionally, if a peer-reviewed presentation is selected for Drupalcon, a badge should be displayed next to the title of the session in all conference materials indicating that the session has passed a vetting process. This should act as an incentive for speakers to prepare more effectively.

More Informed Attendees

Those of us who have attended Drupalcons in the past have a pretty good idea of which speakers consistently provide top-notch sessions. This information should be aggregated and shared with both conference attendees and organizers. By integrating a similar thumbs-up type rating for speakers, this information should also be used as a factor by conference organizers.

Just like with the peer-reviewed badges for presentations, consistenly good Drupalcon speakers should also be noted with a badge of their own. A similar method can be used to indicated speakers who have presented sessions at previous Drupalcons as yet another measure of quality.

Conclusion

Collecting and aggregating both peer-reviews and speaker quality will help all attendees make more informed decisions about which sessions to attend, which will lead to a better Drupalcon experiences for everyone, especially those who don't have the benefit of familarity. It is also a great way to motivate presenters to step-up their game when thinking about submitting and preparing Drupalcon sessions.

Postscript

One of the Drupalcon newbies I alluded to earlier sent me this link to a great article about how to deliver a great presentation. All future Drupalcon presenters should be encouraged to read it before presenting.