John Fiala's Website

So, last night here in Denver was the original ie6Funeral party, and I showed up. There was a lot of booze, a lot of really tasty snacks - Forest Room 5 did a fine job there - and finally, there were remembrances. And here's the one I came up with:

Now, there's a bunch of others that my friend Matthew Saunders posted on his blog, so if you want to see more about the funeral, and see a picture of the deceased, I suggest heading there. It was a lot of fun.

A mixture of short items I thought I should mention.

• My friends and I have started up a coop of developers and web designers, called Vintage Digital, and now we've got a website and you can see a picture of me from when I was visiting Boston for Drupalcon there. I also posted a huge blog post going over how to update Ubercart so it can handle multi-currency. If you're interested, have a look.

Firehouse.com, the last major project I worked on with pingVision, has now been officially launched! I worked as lead developer on this project with the able assistance of Matthew Saunders & Elizabeth Hause on the web producing side; and Ben Jeavons, Matt Tucker, Al Stephen, Kevin Bridges and Zach Meyer on the development and theming side.

Firehouse is a large site which includes articles of fires and fire-handling topics, pages for each fire station who wants to be hosted there, photographs of stations and fire equipment submitted by users, editorial cartoons on the firefighting life, Webinars, an online store for buying subscriptions to the magazine, and even A digital copy of their magazine, month by month, and probably some other stuff I'm not even remembering. Oh, and some blogging, too.

I'll probably work up more of a 'this is how we done it' post later, right now I'm basking in the glow of success.

A little over three weeks ago i set into motion my big gamble - stepping away from pingVision, and starting life as a freelance consultant. I'm not really able to go into all of the reasons, but partially it's a test - can I go out on my own and find my own way, without a company supporting what I do?

And, so far it's launched very nicely. My first client has been SpireMedia, here in downtown Denver, where I've been assisting them with an ubercart site with a large number of customizations, starting with working in three currencies and custom shipping costs, moving all the way to some interesting ways of presenting and offering discounts... which have already lead to one patch for uc_discounts_alt, and probably leading to more later.

After a bit of twisting and forcing, I've got the new http://www.dasfa.com/ up and running under Drupal, a feat which makes me feel rather happy. DASFA stands for the 'Denver Area Science Fiction Association', and I've been slowly taking over the webmaster duties for a while now.

I still need to get dasfa.org migrated as well, but there's some email forwarding accounts that I need to get sorted out first. But it shouldn't take too long.

Also, I've set up a new twitter account: http://www.twitter.com/denver_sf to keep track of local Denver SF happenings.

Here's the talk we gave at Drupalcampcolorado.

Presentation at http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dxmgvdn_4c2mfkkdj

(If you're seeing this on livejournal, there's files to download on www.jcfiala.net)

Hm, seems like Twitter's Down.

I'm having some fun setting up a Drupal 5 install just so I can test that a patch fixes a problem with upgrading to 6 while using the link module.

A couple of quite notes for those of you trying to use drupal_add_tabledrag() on your sites, that may prevent you suffering through the same pain as myself... but I'll hide it after the break for those of you who don't care and want to get on to the next bit.

Fields 7 API

Barry Jaspan, Acquia, Inc.
D6: CCK with hook_nodeapi, Many field types,
But tied to nodeapi, not users or comments.

D7: Field Attach API - Field module
Node calls field everywhere it would call nodeapi, but first.

Effectively, field is a nodeapi that gets called first. nodeapi still there
Just like cck calls to field modules to cool stuff - the fields module calls the same, some in core and some like date, image go into contrib.

field.module is the field attach api
Then, the field type api is what provides the fields for nodes and such
Creating fields in D7 Field uses a CRUD API that's in the CCK UI. CCK UI creates fields, but doesn't automatically attach only to nodes.

Anyone can use field attach - Users, Nodes, Comments and maybe fields in time.

Business Analytics in Drupal with Views

phase ii technology - does a lot of contrib work.

Recurring problems are fun - every now and then try to create a generic solution that works 80% of the time - rest of the time charge money for custom development

Work with a lot ofdata, working with data is fun, but you need to visual data in different ways
Use views to visualize some data - unfortunately, it's limited to rendering data in tabular ways, and lots of clients want charts and graphs. Wondered if this was cool for other people, and

People were wondering if this was even possible - cool idea, but what?
busyness analytics is a series thing - done with sap, or microsoft - nobody really thinks about ba with drupal/php. Showed list of famous PHP website as well as list of famous/serious Drupal sites like Onion, FastCompany, NY Observer, recovery.gov. So, Drupal is big business/serious