Insight into Insight.

As you may remember, Gentle Readers, not too long ago I changed roles in Red Hat to work more on management and administration within the platform engineering department, where I work for Tim Burke. Even if you haven’t run into Tim at one of our Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) events in North America, you can see him in a recent customer testimonial video he did for the Fedora 14 release, as well as some of the media around the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Tim and I joke about being in a battle royale to see who can be the biggest camera hog in Red Hat media. I have to admit he’s probably pulled ahead this fall season! With my new role, I’m a lot less likely to be on camera saying wonderful things about Fedora, even though I have a lot to say. If you have ideas for how I can remedy this inequity, comments are open.

One of the Fedora related things I’m still involved with is Fedora Insight, a Drupal instance I and a few others are trying to learn and launch. We want the capability to pass on interesting tidbits from the Planet, Fedora Weekly News, and even original media in a simple way.

And we love Drupal, especially because it’s packaged in Fedora and EPEL, and because of its very practical and compatible approaches to licensing (GPL!). However, we could use some help with our work.

Theme

Unfortunately our theme ninja suffered some data loss, and to add insult to injury, the work wasn’t pushed to our upstream repo. But, since we’re quick to find the silver lining in any cloud, we realized things weren’t all bad! In the meantime, the fabulous new Fedora Project web site has been launched. We’d really like our Insight appearance to match the updated look of fedoraproject.org, so we see this as an opportunity, not a setback.

We could use the help of one or more web design ninjas to help us visualize the new theme. Then our coders can turn it into working CSS, just as they’ve done with other web sites. Actually, if you have the ability to do mockups and CSS, you’d be twice as ninja-ish, and we’d bake you twice as many cookies! Basically, the things we are working on now are:

1. Mockups for a site that complements fedoraproject.org
2. A set of CSS files, maybe a subtheme based on Zen or NineSixty, that make that dazzling mockup a reality

Plus, you get to work with really friendly people from around the world. And we may actually send you cookies, no kidding.

Administration

We are learning as we go when it comes to subjects like Drupal Views and CCK. I actually bought a bunch of Drupal books and (slowly, in my shrunken spare time) I’ve been making my way through them to understand the system better. I actually created my own module to allow our Drupal instance to authenticate to the Fedora Account System — and it works well, believe it or not! Drupal has a powerful system of hooks that allow you to customize almost every step of input and output, and I took full advantage of their ample documentation to learn how to use those hooks.

For a lot of what we need to do, we could use more experienced experts to advise us. So if you’re an intermediate or expert Drupalista we could use your participation! In some cases, we might be asking you to teach the uninitiated about how some of the powerful functions of Views or CCK might help us achieve our goals. In others, we might ask for module suggestions or implementation hints. But no matter what, you’d be lending a hand to fellow FOSS champions.

Rather than being quite as directly task-oriented, this work would be more a matter of just camping on our mailing list and maybe responding to an email or two if you find a problem you can help solve. We also hang out on IRC Freenode at #fedora-mktg if you are hip to IRC.

Other stuff

Of course, we’re also looking for good ideas for making use of the platform. To me, that’s not so much about just bringing in random modules that we might think are cool. Instead, it’s looking for ways that Drupal could be made to serve the Fedora community. Then together we can figure out the best, most scalable, most open, and most effective way to make that happen.

The opensource.com staff worked with Acquia on their Drupal instance and I think that site turned out wonderfully. You can see Drupal in use all over the place, including everyone from the White House to Warner Bros. artists (talk about a wide range!). It’s not as steep a learning curve as some content management systems, and has a fantastic community backing it. So we’re looking forward to doing more with it, and we’d love to have others join us on the team.

How we work

We work in an open, transparent way — that means we prefer talking to each other on the list, not private email. Talking to each other publicly is a lot like having a party in a common area. Anyone can come by and become part of the conversation and join the team. By having public conversations we can keep each other informed about what we’re doing and the issues we run into. That also makes it easy for us to help each other, which is what free and open source software is all about.

My friend Mel often says, “If it didn’t happen on the list, it didn’t happen.” Collaborative communication is a powerful tool for teamwork. Even if you’re a little shy, don’t worry — we don’t bite and we are happy to see newcomers! Just ask Peter Borsa, who just joined us. He’s already becoming a valuable team member of our team and I know he would love to have help too.

What to do

Join the logistics mailing list and introduce yourself. It’s that simple! We have regular meetings but you can usually find some of us in our IRC channel, #fedora-mktg. See you there!