Today is my last day at Morris DigitalWorks. After a ten-year run in the newspaper industry, I am leaving to work full-time with Drupal development.

I am joining the team at Palantir, where I will be doing some programming, training and consulting for Palantir and their growing client list.

Tiffany Farriss and George DeMet have put together a great young team, and I am very excited to be coming on board. The company just moved into its new offices in order to keep up with demand for their award-winning services. Palantir is hiring more developers, too.

I also get to work with Larry Garfield, whom I greatly respect. We worked together on the GoPHP5 project, which helped chart a course for the future of Drupal.

For me, the decision came down to priorities and passions. I think that the Drupal community can do some amazing things, especially supporting the goals of free speech and freedom of information. I will continue working on the Knight Drupal Initiative as a central part of my Drupal contributions.

I am staying in Augusta, where my wife is about to start an exciting new career as well. More details to come over the next week or so, as I get organized in my new home office.

We had a very successful BoF on Wednesday. The goal was to discusss how the Drupal community would manage our relationship with the Knight Foundation.

For those who were not at DrupalCON, here are the basics:

– The Knight Foundation (KF) provides funding for open-source development, products and innovations that are in line with their core goal: improving communities through the free exchange of news and information.
– KF needs help from the community to review proposals that are specific to Drupal.
– The program will be ongoing, with the deadlines and length of projects to vary on a case-by-case basis.
– KF handles all the project management and grant management issues for accepted proposals.
– The Drupal community will try a two-step process for applications.

1) Submit an idea for community consideration.
2) Ideas that get community support will become project issues in a special project queue. These proposals will get serious review from the community in preparation for passing to the KF for final evaluation.

Let me stress that this is not a contest; it is an ongoing program that is an extension of work that KF is already doing. They are looking to the community to help, since we agree that Drupal and KF share some common goals, particularly about the purpose of open-source software and the desire to enable open communications.

There will be some additional detail forthcoming over on g.d.o in the KF group. For now, you can see the meeting minutes from the BoF.

In summary, here is where we stand on the process:

– Moshe and Josh are working on some CCK and voting widgets for use in submitting proposals via g.d.o.
– Gary Kebbel and his team are working on some language so that we all know exactly what types of projects they wish to fund.
– I will be creating a project page on drupal.org.

We are going to have a check-in on or about March 21st, to make sure that we are on track with the work to be done. At that checkpoint, we will create the next round of tasks — which will be focused on three aspects:

– Defining and communicating the goals of the program.
– Marketing the program to the community.
– Lining up volunteers to help manage the process.

I have to say that I am very excited about the potential here. And I think that the members of the KF who participated in the BoF were equally excited to see how the community responded and began to self-organize.

As a final note, let me stress that this will be an open process. We are striving for complete transparency regarding the proposals and the process for recommending them to the KF. If you were not at DrupalCON and want to participate, come on over and join the KF group. Everyone is welcome.

Now this is a very cool idea. Dries has the details of Google’s Highly Open Participation Contest for high school students. In short, it provides incentives for students to help out on open source projects.

Drupal is one of the projects, and this program is a great way to get started with open source.

As a Summer of Code mentor this year, I’m thrilled that Drupal is participating in the project.

Update: When PEAR signs on, you know the movement to PHP 5 is real.

Well, that was pretty fast. Php.net announces:

The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

I’m not taking any credit here. The writing was on the wall, and GoPHP5 was a symptom; this announcement is the cure.

Late in the day today I surfed over to the Poynter Institute’s “E-media tidbits” column* (which I’ve been reading daily for over five years now).

And what did I see? Me**.

In a post by Amy Gahran about Open CMS systems for newspapers, Lisa Williams was nice enough to mention MySite as an example of “current efforts to push the news CMS envelope.”

Lisa is a member of Newspapers on Drupal along with other recent Knight Foundation winners. And we have a MySite user group, too.

* Poynter is a non-profit journalism foundation that also owns the St. Petersburg (FL) Times.

** The picture is an old photo I took of myself in the mirror, using the first digital camera I ever used (in 1999) while working my first newspaper job. Then I PhotoShopped it to look cool. I think the photo is a goof, so I use it for an avatar frequently.

[Note to self: maybe you should apply for a Knight grant….]

How many people does it take to start a movement? I guess we’ll find out.

GoPHP5.org launched today, after a lot of hard work by Robert Douglass, Larry Garfield and Marc Delisle. I know that Larry has been evangelical about contacting web hosts and PHP projects for the last month.

The purpose is to coordinate the movement of Open Source Software (OSS) projects to the exclusive use of PHP 5. Why exclusive? Because there are some incompatibilities between PHP 4 and PHP 5, developers often write workarounds to cover both cases. And, in other cases, we have to avoid using functions that are PHP5-only. Frankly, that just doesn’t make much sense to me.

For me, the whole thing started in Sunnyvale, during Dries Buytaert’s “State of Drupal” talk at the last Drupal/OpenSourceCMS meeting. After his informal talk, there was open Q&A. And, since we were at Yahoo!, Rasmus Lerdorf was handling the microphone for the audience.

The two had a friendly exchange about why more OSS projects didn’t use PHP 5 (Drupal 5.1 and the upcoming 6.0 both run on PHP 4 and PHP 5). The basic answer, from Dries (as I recall it) was so many of our users rely on shared hosts and most shared hosts still only offer PHP 4. Now, pride in his work aside, Rasmus has a vested interest in getting people onto PHP 5 as a platform: if the developer community doesn’t use it, support for new features will fall off, and the proect will suffer. Dries discussed this right after the Sunnyvale conference. Rasmus also faces the challenge that the PHP working group can’t force people to drop PHP 4. The code is loose, and people can do as they like.

But there are great benefits to moving development to PHP 5 (especially if you like to pass data around using XML).

My position on the issue is simple, but its a complicated kind of simple.

• I work for a large company where we use PHP 5.2 exclusively in production.
• On my development machine, I code and test on PHP 5.1.6 (thanks to Marc Liyanage).
• My web host (for this site) runs PHP 4.4.x
• I develop and maintain a Drupal module
• The company I work for runs Drupal and Joomla sites, and Jonah Braun is on our staff.

So one day Jonah was having a barbecue and we started talking about the PHP 4 / PHP 5 debate, and the role of Drupal and Joomla. We agreed, in theory, that the problem for both projects is this: If one declares a move to drop PHP 4 and the other doesn’t, the project risks losing users not based on quality, but simply based on the availability of PHP 5.

Now we work on different projects, but Jonah and I agree (I think) that your decision to select software should be based on the merits of the product, not forced restrictions. So we thought: Hey, if we both declare that we’re moving to PHP 5 on some arbitrary future date….

After that conversation, I sent a note to Larry (who I knew was working on cool PDO features for Drupal that, yup, require PHP 5), and he thought it sounded like a good idea. That exchange spawned this soon-to-be-infamous post to the Drupal development list.

Since then, thanks to Larry and Robert and everyone else who has commented on, worked on, or debated about the proposal, the GoPHP5.org movement has gathered steam and leaked out to the greater world.

And that’s a good thing.

OK, MySite 5.x.2-beta4 (the final frontier) is out and will be the final public beta before the next release.

Download the beta from drupal.org and please file issues there. (Note that the beta requires an update for current users and installation of the jQuery Update and jQuery Interface modules.)

You can also see the online demo and a preview of the developers API documentation, which will make it easier for you to extend the MySite module.

To do before the final release:

1. Finish the documentation
2. Fix any reported bugs (currently there are none)

And, on a side note, greggles just released April’s download stats, and the MySite module (v 5.x.1.10) cracked the top 100 at number 95 with a bullet. :-) Acually, if you only count contributed modules, MySite comes in at #59.

If you haven’t used the Coder module yet, and you develop for Drupal — what are you waiting for?

Written by douggreen, Coder helps with Drupal coding standards and a whole bunch of automated tests for your module.

Cool stuff for Drupal geeks.

Still grinding away at the new MySite release. Getting very close, though.

I started to update the documentation and ran across some API docs that Gabor was hosting for his SoC project last year. I then found out that the API module is Drupal 5 compatible (get the HEAD tarball).

Now, there are a ton of cool modules on drupal.org, but the API module is awesome. I’m now rewriting the comments inside of MySite in order to create module API documentation that functions like api.drupal.org. When the next MySite release comes, I’ll have a full, searchable API at therickards.com.

Very cool (if very geeky). Thanks JonBob!

Two great Drupal additions this week.

The first is Gutenberg, Eaton’s new uber-theme that allows Moveable Type themes to be dropped into Drupal. Why is this cool? Because it explodes the universe of available themes for Drupal 5. I thought it was so cool that I built a Theme Switcher function into the MySite module.

I also built out a demo site for MySite, and if you visit the site, you’ll see that I use a green version of Garland, the default Drupal 5 theme. But if you visit My therickards.com page, I’m using MySite’s theme-switcher and the StarCrash theme from The Style Contest. The MySite theme switcher only affects page views for the MySite module, and everyone sees the theme that the user has chosen.

The second is the new Update Status module by merlinofchaos. Awesome. The discussion of this module has been going on for a while on the developer list, and it’s very cool to see in action.

Update Status phones back to Drupal.org and checks the latest release for each of your installed modules. If you aren’t running the latest-and-greatest, it tells you. Awesome.