The blog

OpenID with Google and GitHub

Vincent Viallet — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 03:25:30 +0000

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.

We had been using MyOpenID for a while; it allowed us to manage accounts for our staff in a centralized fashion. Unfortunately, the service proved to be unreliable and we could not get support from its owners. None of the other providers seemed to allow us to manage multiple accounts for our domain name, so we settled for setting up our own OpenID service. We are pretty averse to maintaining services on our own; we happily delegate to Github, Dropbox, Linode, HelloFax and the likes. Our solution had to be easy to maintain, and if possible running on servers we're not responsible for.

The approach we took, and that I will describe below, leverages Google as the OpenID provider and Github to redirect our company URLs.

Enabling OpenID on your Google account

Whether you have a personal or professional GMail account, you should be able to activate OpenID for your Google account. It is fairly straightforward, however you will be required to enable Google+ to do so:

Enable Google+ for your email account,
In your web mail interface, click on privacy on the top right,
Get the long number in the following format: https://plus.google.com/A_VERY_LONG_NUMBER - the very long number is your profile ID,

However, the OpenID provided by Google is not really convenient; I happen to address my colleagues with their surname, rarely with their Google+ serial number. Google's alias http://google.com/profiles/me ain't exactly what we call unique and not really suitable as an OpenID URL on any website. That's when Github comes in handy, allowing us to alias URLs like https://plus.google.com/A_VERY_LONG_NUMBER into http://openid.wiredcraft.com/bob.

Set up Github

We already host quite a few sites on GitHub, leveraging the awesome Github pages feature. We here just want to redirect our custom URLs to the appropriate Google+ accounts;

Create a new github repository (public or not, as long as you're fine with exposing your list of users),
Create a new branch "gh-pages" and switch to it,
Create a file called "CNAME", simply put the domain name you want to use to access the site (in our case: "openid.wiredcraft.com")

For each user, you will need to create a file to handle the redirection to his Google+ account, for example bob.html with the following content;

<html>
  <head>
    <link rel="openid2.provider" href="https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/ud?source=profiles">
    <link rel="openid2.local_id" href="https://profiles.google.com/GOOGLE+_PROFILE_ID">
  </head>
</html>

Commit and push to Github,
Update your DNS with an entry pointing the domain name you defined in the "CNAME" file to Github.

You can now use your OpenID with your own domain name; in the previous example it would be something like http://openid.wiredcraft.com/bob. You obviously need to be logged in your Google account for things to work.

You can have a look at our company repository if you're wondering how this might look like.

The Drupal Tour is in Xiamen this Saturday

quentin — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 09:01:51 +0000

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!

继在柴火创客空间成功举办了Drupal交流讨论会的深圳站之后，我们即将马不停蹄地开始厦门站的活动，你可以在Flickr 找到我们的活动照片，并可以在Slideshare 找到我们的演讲大纲。我们万分高兴可以和厦门的Drupal组织分享我们对Drupal的热爱。以下是厦门站的相关活动细节：

时间; 2012年3月24日，下午2点至5点。
地点; 福建厦门思明区洪莲路20号一楼“爱特咖啡” （牛庄文创园内）。
费用; 30元/位, 含咖啡、茶水、点心等。
参与者; Drupal爱好者、地方团队以及一些我们的同事。
内容; 我们将为您提供针对从初级到专家的不同级别点演讲。（演讲将涉及的主题如：Drupal7的介绍，如何使用Git，如何打补丁或怎样与社区协作）

当然，如果你愿意上台做一个演讲，请马上来Drupal交流研讨会的微博页面联系我们吧！达人们，我们周六见！

Second Stop of the Drupal Tour: Shenzhen

ronan — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 09:19:57 +0000

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.

We'll soon be in Xiamen, before heading to Shanghai and Beijing, and hopefully Nanjing and Hanghzou; if you're from one of these two cities and wish to help us build the local community, get in touch with us through Drupal Groups or drop us an email.

We would like to thank our host, Chaihuo, Shenzhen's very own hacker space. Highly recommended if you're living in Shenzhen and want to build stuff with your own hands or just work out of a cool space.

Some pictures of the event can be found on flickr, as for the actual presentations that me and my colleague gave:

上周六，我和Jackey前往深圳举办了Drupal交流研讨会的第二场讲演。在那里我们认识了其他近30位Drupal爱好者，并与大家一起讨论了Drupal的performance和scalability、介绍了Views 3，并回答了其他许多由各地方组织提出的问题。一些从厦门，广州和香港特地赶来的朋友都表示不枉此行。

在举办(Drupal交流研讨会的上海站和北京站)[http://wiredcraft.github.com/drupal_tour/]之前，(我们将很快来到厦门)[http://event.weibo.com/322513]。如果一切进展顺利，我们也会在南京和杭州分别举办两场交流会。如果你是南京或杭州Drupal组织的一员，如果你愿意帮助我们一起组织这次活动，请通过Groups.Drupal 或我们的邮箱随时与我们联系。

在这里，我们要感谢柴火创客空间为我们的Drupal深圳站提供的大力支持。如果你生活在深圳，如果你想通过自己的双手制作一些有趣的玩意儿，强烈推荐你来这个超酷的地方一展身手！

我们已将深圳站的活动照片发布在flickr上，以下是我和我同事的当天演讲内容：

Kick started Drupal tour China in Chengdu

makara — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 04:18:30 +0000

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;

Pictures
Videos (coming soon)

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

2012年2月25日，我们为期3个月的 Drupal tour 全国巡回座谈会在成都拉开了帷幕。

这次座谈会除了由 Drupal 官方基金会直接支持外，还得到了成都当地 Drupal 社区的大力支持，他们为我们提供了非常棒的场地和设备，并且承担了大部分的组织和宣传工作。对此我们要向社区的主要负责人，HyperGlide (Harley) 等人表示感谢。

当天到场嘉宾共有二十几位，我们做了简单的问卷调查，HyperGlide 发表了调查结果。

这次座谈会的主要演讲题目是《Drupal 7 core》，此外还简单地介绍了 Git 和 Drupal theming。大家都表示有所收获，但同时也表示缺乏针对性。我们将在今后的活动中逐步改善。

附上活动照片及视频：

照片
视频 (即将发布)

我们已经准备好了本周六的深圳 Drupal 交流会，欢迎大家支持和参与！

First stop of Drupal Community tour; Chengdu

quentin — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:38:49 +0000

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！

Avoid WYSIWYG Editors

ronan — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 08:27:15 +0000

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.

What's our grief with WYSIWYG editors?

First, I'd like to acknowledge that these editors are, for most, great pieces of software; they integrate in a wide range of projects, "get the job done" (depending on your interpretation of what "done" is) and really ease the adoption process with a certain type of audience. They offer an overwhelming volume of extensions and settings which can really cater to the most bizarre use cases.

That being said, we see some of these strengths as issues;

Ease of adoption is usually the biggest reason invoked for using these editors; "We don't have time to train people to write for the Web, provide them with an interface as close as possible to their beloved Microsoft Word and they'll be set". Except we don't think letting people bring their regular word processor habits online is that great of an idea. The Web is a medium of its own, with specific constraints and capabilities; you do not think of layout, semantic or media in the same way as you do for, say, print.
Feature-rich; oh the intoxicating power of adding every single feature the client ask for. Want to have buttons to add pictures, form elements, special characters or iframes? Easy peasy lemon squeezy! Now, I understand why these things get added, but will it really benefit the end user? We are big proponents of simplicity; the Explorer UI improvements proposed by the Microsoft team is a perfect example of how an attempt at empowering the end user with a wider set of features can go really wrong. KISS.

This usually translates in a plethora of symptoms, some of which you may have experienced first hand;

Poor SEO, caused by a lack of semantic, markup sugar-coating (think about the wonderful code that is being dumped in an editor when people are copy-pasting their content straight from Word) and about a gazillion other bad things that happen with that copy-pasting magic or "power user features" (aka "The Button of Doom").
Broken layouts and styles, because people like to customize (understand cyan with a Comic Sans font), or simply dumping content from a Word document. There is nothing more frustrating than a user taking down the front page you carefully crafted by simply posting a blog post with unclosed markups.

And the list goes on. Moreover, as time pass, people ask for even more "essential features" which in turn leads to even more ways of breaking things up. The complexity piles up, and you end up with a pretty nasty piece of code sitting at a crucial bottleneck of your publishing workflow.

We believe that, overall, the use of WYSIWYG editors tends to reinforce the spread of bad practices with regards to Web editing.

So what do we propose then?

We've been going all Markdown for the past few years; it's clean, easy to pick up and covers 99.999% of your needs (seriously).

And this is what we strongly encourage our clients to go for. Users may complain at first, pointing at the difficulty of learning yet another way of editing their content or its (intentional) lack of functionality. But there is an inherent efficiency to writing, for example, a link as simply as [Text](http://link.url.com); no three steps process with a modal dialog or weird shortcuts, just write it as is. And we think there is a lot of value in this approach;

It keeps things simple for developers; no heavy JS plugin to load, no complex modal interactions to add markup, no browser compatibility headache or integration debugging. It is easy to put in place, rock solid and easily extensible.
More importantly, it ensures that the generated code is semantically correct, clean and ultimately help writers focusing on content; when you use Markdown you have no way of fiddling with complex layout, advanced table features or image alignment. You focus on what you're supposed to do: writing content. Well structured, lean, straight-forward content. And if the end result is not satisfying design-wise, then it may be a good idea to bring your design suggestions as a site-wide style improvement, as opposed to hack your way through with the help of a WYSIWYG editor.

There are a couple of things that could use some improvements. Media handling In particular, like inserting images, would be nice if slightly more streamlined than manually uploading a file in one place and then pasting the URL in your content; we're actually working on some UI improvements for these specific problems. We have as well in some cases used our Markdown capable version of BUEditor on some Drupal 7 sites to help the editors ramp up with the basic syntax.

Let's sum it up; WYSIWYG bad, Markdown good.

Cultivation Grant for Community Outreach in China

quentin — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 10:01:56 +0000

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.

Having been involved in the Asian community for the past few years, we decided to propose launching a 6 months community outreach campaign in China intending to, through organizing Drupal meetups in various cities, help grow local initiatives, identify community leaders and improve the overall collaboration between these isolated communities.

We are thrilled to announce that our application was accepted and will, for the next few months, help organize meetups in Nanjing, Beijing, Guangzhou, Hanghzou and Shanghai. We will send a Drupal expert to each of these locations on a schedule that we'll publish very soon; they'll deliver a couple high quality presentations and will intend to imrpove collaboration on the ground.

We're already busy at finalizing the logistic of the whole thing but are eager to hear from local Drupalers (or Open Source enthusiasts really) who want to participate.

Hacker News Shanghai Meetup #4

quentin — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 07:11:53 +0000

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.

We'll be happy to chat anything nerdy enough; may this be the latest technology we're getting excited about (node.js, Elastic Search, Sphinx, Python, GIS, Puppet, Android, jQuery, Drupal, backbone.js...), the latest big acquisition or your own project, come for a couple hours of discussion with likely minded folks. This event is pretty informal; no definite track or presentation, just a bunch of tech addicts chatting around a few beers and snacks.

Open Source meetups in Shanghai

Vincent Viallet — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 13:19:33 +0000

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. We definitely target the locals, meaning we want to cater to the Chinese geeks before anything else. It could mean that some of our discussions will be Chinese only, but we think it is the best way to go.

We will kick things off this Wednesday with a Hacker News meetup at Abbey Road, starting 7:00 PM. We'll happily pay a round of beers to the first ones at the bar. We welcome anybody interested in anything tech or Open Source; we ourselves will probably be eager to chat about the whole range of technologies we play with (node.js, Elastic Search, Sphinx, Python, GIS, Puppet, Android, jQuery, Drupal, backbone.js...) and are happy to hear about what you're working on. This event is pretty informal; no definite track or presentation, just a bunch of tech addicts chatting around a few beers and snacks.

We intend to hold such an event once to twice and month and are in the making of the first instance of the Shanghai Open Source meetup, which will happen every month. Let us know if you want to help; sponsoring is always appreciated...

Why We Advise Against Most Starter and Base Themes

ronan — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 13:35:42 +0000

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...

Why don't we use starter themes?

I believe that starter themes can be interesting in a couple cases;

It can help beginners get started with Drupal theming by setting up a lot of defaults for a somewhat overwhelming number of elements you need to get familiar with.
It can provide administrators with a quick way of adjusting layouts; combining Panels and the 960 Grid (using the NineSixty theme) can be an interesting approach, allowing for easily adjusting the layout by simply assigning classes to panes. However, while they may prove useful through the designing and prototyping phases, grid frameworks create semantic issues and can be very rigid to deal with. Moreover we never, ever use Panels; we're Context guys and have been from the very beginning.

The problem is, we think that for experienced Drupal developers there are quite a few drawbacks to these starter/base themes;

They tend to slow down developments by adding another layer of complexity; additional APIs, functions, "hooks"... I can't remember the number of times I struggled with a very straightforward preprocess or theme override in a theme because Zen was adding some "helper" functions around things.
They often introduce bugs or incompatibility with some other modules (Zen with Context for example) as well as performance concerns. All that sugar-coating has an overhead that can be very costly; we quite regularly do performance audits of Drupal sites and haven often advised for a complete rewrite of the theme.
Our opinion is that more often that not they lead to poor practices (or at least enable them), the biggest one being the proliferation of template files and CSS spreadsheets, instead of relying on preprocessing and properly thought through layout and styles. How many times have you open a custom theme folder to find an insane amount of views-view--XXX-block.tpl files?

We're suckers for Tao!

We have been using Tao as a base theme since the end of 2009. I am unsure as to why, but many people either don't really acknowledge its existence as a full blown base theme, or don't really understand what it does. Maybe this has to do with it having been hosted on Github in its infancy, or the fact that it was mainly built as a dependency of Rubik (an admin theme that we've shipped with all our sites since its first release, give it a go...).

What Tao does really, is dealing with the bulk of the issues anybody has with Drupal theming. Let me paraphrase the project page here to list what it does (well);

Resets browser and Drupal core default styles (die admin.css),
Unifies the template family into a consistent format (node.tpl.php, block.tpl.php...)
Various other small fixes and bonuses, such as a proper print stylesheet or theme overrides for fieldset and pagers.

In brief, it gives you a solid, clean foundation both in terms of CSS and HTML to build a theme upon.; if you stick to it and leverage the power of preprocessing functions, you should be able to build leaner and more robust Drupal themes. We strongly advise anybody doing Drupal theming to give it a try; we've already converted quite a few clients and partners to it.

But...

This approach has been really rewarding for us in the past couple years, the only thing is that it does require you apply the same type of concepts to your design approach; we believe that building lean, simple, information oriented interfaces is the way to go, and if you do so, your graphical concepts should translate properly with a Tao based approach. But that's a whole other discussion.