The blog

Views on technology, Open Source and the rest.

OpenID with Google and GitHub

I doubt I need to explain what OpenID, the decentralized authentication standard, is. You may actually use it without knowing it as quite a few companies are indeed OpenID providers. We find it especially handy for providing admin credentials to our staff when we build products, and doing so without having to specify user passwords in clear in our code base.

By Vincent Viallet on Jul 17, 2012

The Drupal Tour is in Xiamen this Saturday

Drupal Tour in Xiamen

After our last stop in Shenzhen at Chaihuo, Shenzhen's hacker space, we are now heading to Xiamen (you can find some pictures of the event on Flickr and the presentations on Slideshare). We are very enthusiatic to meet the Xiamen community and share with you our interest on Drupal. The event information are as follow;

  • When?; 24 March 2012, from 2pm to 5pm.
  • Where?; Atcafe Me situated at 20 Honglian road, Siming district
  • How much?; 30 RMB per person which includes coffee, tea, cookies, etc
  • Who?; you, the local community as well as some of our staff.
  • What?; various presentations will take place, for beginners but also Drupal experts (presentations will include topics such as Introduction to Drupal 7, How to use Git, How to make your patch or How to collaborate with the community).

Of course, if you are willing to make a presentation, do not hesitate and contact us via the Drupal Community Weibo page. Let's meet you all next saturday!

By Quentin Berder on Mar 20, 2012

Second Stop of the Drupal Tour: Shenzhen

Drupal meetup in Shenzhen

Last Saturday, myself and Jackey headed down Shenzhen for the second stop of our Drupal Tour in China. There we met with roughly 30 other enthusiasts for an afternoon of nerdiness, discussing performance and scalability with Drupal, introducing Views 3 and answering the (many) questions of the local community. Some people made the trip from Xiamen, Guanzhou and Hong Kong to be there that day and it seems most got what they came for.

By Ronan Berder on Mar 14, 2012

Kick started Drupal tour China in Chengdu

Drupal meetup in Chengdu

As a first start of the Drupal Community tour in China we headed to Chengdu on February 25. In addition to the support of the Drupal official foundation, the local community provide us a strong support; providing us a place to hold the meeting, all the necessary equipments as well as pushing on the advertisement. We particulary want to thanks HyperGlide (Harley) who help us from the preparation until the day of the meeting, as well as during the whole event.

We let the community choose the topics (once again thanks HyperGlide) in order to propose them relevant presenations (you can see the discussion thread here.

The main topics of the meetups ranged from Drupal 7 core to the use of Git and Drupal 7 theming. As a show starter we were still tweaking our presentations and the necessary steps of the organization. We are confident that through this experience the community and ourselves are growing.

You can find some related content at the following links;

We are heading to Shenzhen on Saturday the 10th and are thrilled to meet more members of the Chinese Drupal community.

By Makara Wang on Mar 8, 2012

First stop of Drupal Community tour; Chengdu

Drupal Community Chengdu

As we previously announced, our application for a chinese community outreach has been accepted by the Drupal Association in this year cultivation grants. We decided to connect with the various local communities of China (namely Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Xiamen, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Shanghai and Bejing) and help them organize meetups; as we believe this will strengthen communities at a local level as well as a national one.

Our first destination is Chengdu, widely known for its pandas. With a great deal of help from the local Drupal community (thanks HyperGlide for your strong support), we finally ironed all inherent details of such an even and are happy to share the relevant information;

  • When?; 25 February 2012, from 2pm to 5pm.
  • Where?; an event place and book store, The Bookworm, located at 2-7 Yujie East Road (near Ren Min South Road)
  • How much?; it is completely free!
  • Who?; you of course, as well as other members of the local and chinese community.
  • What?; various presentations will take place, for beginners but also Drupal experts (presentations will include topics such as Introduction to Drupal 7, How to use Git, How to make your patch or How to collaborate with the community). Of course, if you are willing to make a presentation, do not hesitate and contact us via the Drupal Community Weibo page.

We are very excited to make our first stop of this 4 months trip around China promoting Drupal and the Open Source community in whole. See you all in Chengdu.

Drupal交流研讨会的第一站：成都

一如我们最近发布 的，我们关于Drupal的中文交流活动 得到了Drupal协会的支持。我们决定联系一些中国的地方团体（成都，广州，深圳，厦门，杭州，南京，上海和北京）来帮助他们组织Druapl交流会，我们相信这将有助于全面提高各地方组织的Drupal水平。

我们的第一站是成都——这座以熊猫闻名的城市。有幸得到HyperGlide的帮助，我们非常高兴地与各位分享如下信息：

  • 时间：2012.2.25 下午2点至5点
  • 地点：老书虫吃喝读，地址：成都市武侯区玉洁东街2号（近人民南路）
  • 费用：完全免费！
  • 参与者：舍你其谁！当然还有各Drupal地方组织的成员
  • 内容：针对从初级到专家的不同类别的演讲（演讲包括如：Druapl 7介绍，如何使用Git，如何与社区协作以及提交补丁等等）当然，如果你愿意上台演讲，别犹豫了，马上来Drupal的微博活动页 联系我们吧！

我们非常兴奋历时4个月的Drupal中国巡回演讲将在成都站拉开序幕。让我们成都见！

By Quentin Berder on Feb 13, 2012

Avoid WYSIWYG Editors

Y U NO LIKE WYSIWYG?

A few years back, I would probably have not thought twice about this; shipping a site with a WYSIWYG editor seemed then as natural as ensuring Google Analytics is set. It was a feature that many clients would just assume you'd add. Over the past few years however, I and my colleagues grew tired of WYSIWYG editors; mentioning TinyMCE or CKEditor would probably earn you a squint of disapproval from the team.

By Ronan Berder on Dec 7, 2011

Cultivation Grant for Community Outreach in China

DrupliCon going to China

A few weeks ago, the Drupal Association announced its second round of Drupal Community Cultivation Grants; this pilot program is dedicated to funding various initiatives from within the Drupal community, focusing on events (meetups, sprints, DrupalCamps...) as well as various community outreach and evangelization projects.

By Quentin Berder on Nov 24, 2011

Hacker News Shanghai Meetup #4

HN Shanghai

The next edition of the Hacker News Shanghai meetup will be held on October 27, 2011 at Abbey Road starting 7:00 PM; as usual, look for the table with a "招财猫" ("Lucky Cat"). First round of beers will be on us, along with some snacks.

By Quentin Berder on Oct 17, 2011

Open Source meetups in Shanghai

Some of us have been organizing Open Source related events in Shanghai since 2008; BarCamp, Drupal meetups, Geek Out... Somehow we feel that Shanghai still lack of regular events for the tech crowd. We've tried to grow local Open Source communities in the past and recently stepped down from leading the local Drupal meetups to focus on preparing alternative events. We'll still be attending these meetups, and others such as the SHLUG for example, but we will spend our resources organizing events for the Open Source and tech audiences at large.

By Vincent Viallet on Sep 5, 2011

Why We Advise Against Most Starter and Base Themes

Drupal theming with Tao

I recently gave a presentation about performance and scalability at one of our local Drupal meetups here in Shanghai, an got confronted with questions on Drupal theming and more particularly the type of starter theme we use here at Wiredcraft. Well, the answer is quite simple; basically, we don't, at least not the major ones. No Zen, Omega or Fusion, no custom base theme either or CSS framework such as 960 Grid. What we do systematically use though is Tao; let me explain...

By Ronan Berder on Jun 24, 2011