So many Azrians born in November :)

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Goteti

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New Module BMI contributed to Drupal

In one of the projects, there was an requirement where user can input the weight and height and system will give the BMI value. I looked out for drupal modules and did not see anything available which meets my requirement.

I googled to check the functionality of BMI and i got few links which calculates the BMI. The forms are very simple with texboxes to enter weight and height and dropdown to select the unit values. Once the user enter the values and click submit, the BMI values displays and there is some text explaining the meaning of that value.

Initially i thought of just putting this in my custom module and provide the required functionality. But considering scalability in mind, i decided to write a separate module. Then later i have provided settings functionality where admin can mention the text for each BMI value and contributed the module to the community.

The project is available on durpal at this link http://drupal.org/project/bmi

Thank you all for reading the post. Please review the module and provide your comments. 

Drupal Hyderabad workshop Feedback and success party

Saturday, 15th May 2010, we had a drupal hyderabad group meetup and discussed the following points.

1. Feedback on the Drupal workshop which has been conducted earlier in this month at VNR VJIET college in Bachupally, Hyderabad. 
2. Road map for Drupal Hyderabad portal

Regarding workshop, there are many +ve feedbacks received from students of different colleges. There are proposals from students asking to conduct workshops in their respective colleges. It is really a good sign. We have also discussed about the overall process of organizing the workshop and identified few of the important points that need to be addressed in the next workshop.

• Pre-requisites to attend the workshop has to be mentioned clearly on the website.
• Students of the college where the next workshop will be conducted has to ensure beforehand that all systems have required softwares to run drupal smoothly. During the workshop, only drupal installation will be shown.
• A micriphone has to be arranged during the sessions so that speakers don't need to shout :)
• Venue address along with directions from 2-3 main points has to be clearly mentioned on the site.
• Speaker has to submit their sessions (pdf material) before a week and session timings need to be followed as per the schedule.

After the discussion on workshop feedbacks, the next point in our agenda is the road map for drupalhyderabad.com site. Presently the information we have on the site is more related to the workshops. So we have decided that we will make the existing site a subdomain of drupalhyderabad.com and will have all information related to workshops available there.

Drupalhyderabad.com will contain the following information.

• Aggregation of drupal posts from drupal.org and groups.drupal.org
• Aggregation of blogs from members of drupalhyderabad
• Events
• Meetups Information
• Case studies
• Voices
• About the Group
• drupal-hyderabad irc channel embedded on the website
• Team page
• Photo gallery

After the discussion, we all went to Paradise and had a lunch together to celebrate the success of the workshop. Below is the image taken from my mobile. People Attended are

Ramaraju, Mahesh, Suresh, Asif, Sravan, Ipsita, Aruna, Siva, Hari, Srujan, Rahman, bhuvan and Venkatesh.

Thank you for reading the post. Comments are welcome.

Developers checklist

When we buy anything from store, we check the product 1-2 times to ensure that the product is as per our needs. We do the test run of the product and if we find any defect, we will not only take it but will also give low ratings and bad reviews.

But when it comes to software development, how can we forget that the functionality we develop will also be tested by millions of users out there? They can also leave bad reviews and ratings on the company or developer who has developed the portal.

Hence as developer, we need to have a basic checklist which will help us to write better quality code and helps us not to miss few basic things. Below are few points which will help the developer  during development.

• Is the feature developed as per the specifications given?
• Will my code pass through all the test cases? Write test cases and execute them.
• Will my code covered all the use cases? Identify the use cases and test them.
• Is my code written as per the standards? 
• Will my code work in all browsers?

Drupal Hyderabad Workshop

Day 1

Started at 8 AM from home and met Siva, ipsita and few others at paradise around 8.30 AM. On 1st day, we have arranged a mini bus. We picked up prajwala and few others from Azri  and reached the venue at 10.30 AM.

The day started with few talks from professors of VNR VJIET college, kiran chandra generaly secreatry of swecha.

Then we had  a Tea break and the actual sessions started at 12.

The first session was on "How to customize core modules" and it was by me followed by talk from prajwala on Advanced theming. Then we break for lunch. After lunch, the talks started with ipsita on multi site installation, followed by prajwala on jquery in Drupal and Drupalcon SF meet. Then We had a tea break. After Tea, i started the talk on Coding standards and Internationalization.

Then we had an interesting debate on cloud computing. The debate took time to get started as there are not many having knowledge on cloud computing and few took time to understand the actual debate. Once people get hang on debate, i felt it could be never ending as the debate on cloud computing can be done for hours together.

Most of the sessions on Day1 are monologue as there are not many drupal developers attended the workshop. Most of them are newbies, students and php developers. We tried our best in explaining the concepts as simple as possible so that non drupal devs were also able to understand with lesser effort.

Day 2

The Day 2 started by Medhamsh on web development basics or rather i should say networking basics. The session is more about networking commands, setting up the domain, etc. The next session is by Ramakrishna on Introduction to drupal followed by drupal installation by Srujan. This was the fun part.

Since day 2 is more of hands on sessions, everyone has to install drupal in their systems. Srujan is guidingg the students through the projector and telling the commands. We all (volunteers) were helping the students whoever are facing the issues.

There are few students who have not used ubuntu before and there are few systems which does not have required packages installed. Moreover while installing drupal in 50-60 systems, we have faced diff. issues of installations which we have not seen before. The session went for more than 1 and a half hour to get drupal installed successfully on all the systems.

Then we break for lunch. During lunch, we have taken a group photo.

After lunch, the session started by me on Drupal core modules and configurations. I tried my best to cover the basics of drupal and at the same time give them an idea of what drupal is capable of. I have shown how to manage content, users, permissions and modules.

The next session is by Saitanay on Cck and views. This was one of the sessions which had been bouncer for newbies. Nothing against the speaker, he did his best in explaining the things. But the problem was since drupal got installed only couple of hours before on student systems, the contriubted modules cck and views were not available in their instances. So they were unable to follow the settings which saitanay is showing on his instance.

Then we had a tea break.

After tea break, prajwala took session on basic themes followed by ipsita on community support and usage of irc channels. After that, siva collected the feedback from students and we had a valedictory session.

Overall the 2 days of workshop is satisfactory and i felt that the effort spent over the last 5-6 weeks by drupal hyd group members have paid off.

Thank you for reading the post. Comments are welcome :)

The night before Drupal Hyderabad Workshop

It was early morning arund 1.30 AM i.e. when i returned home after watching the balakrishna movie Simha with my friend. So all telugu film watching people by now would have understand the state of my mind. Fortunately it was not so bad and this movie is better than his old movies Vijayendra varma or Chennakesava reddy :)

Feeling sleepy, but I have to 2 sessions on the 1st day of the workshop. Moreover, the first session of Day 1is by me and i have not yet prepared anything. I opened my laptop bag just to realize that i forgot my laptop charger in office. Disappointment and frustration. Soon i remembered that i am using my new laptop battery which i got it just 10 days before from US. It gives good 2-3 hrs of backup. That much of time is more than enough for me bcoz i knew i just need solid 45 mins to 1 hour to make the presentation.

I opened the laptop and then another shock. I don't have microsoft powerpoint as i have started using Open office from last 6 months. I never used openoffice Draw before. I am using openoffice word and it is more or less similar to MS Word, so i was confident that i can make a presentation in open office.

So i opened Open office Draw. 30 minutes gone and still i am on the 1st slide. I am unable to create new slide or make regions in the slide. It has plain 1 blank slide. Tried to use it as much as possible and finally gave up. Again frustration as the time is already 2.30 AM.

Then i realize that there is a desktop of my brother-in-law which got MS office installed. So immediately i went there and this time no shocks. The system was super fast and i am able to create the presentation in 30 mins. 3 AM, i am done with my 1st presentation. Do not worry about 2nd presenation, i did not made that. I went to sleep. I prepared the 2nd ppt in the workshop :)

Thank you all for reading the post. Comments are welcome.

Note: Even though msoffice is licensed and proprietary, the software rocks. It has addressed the usability in the best way it is possible. Open office is way too behind for that.

Drupal Hyderabad Group

It was month of Feb 2010 when i got an thread notification from drupal hyderabad group about the drupal meetup. Later i have received few more notifications of other members showing interest in the meetup. One of them was ipsita whom i know from long time. We both tried to conduct drupal meetups in 2009, but during that time we did not find any drupal devs. One meetup happened where myself, ipsita and few more azrians met and discussed abt drupal.

After that there was no meetup again for almost an year.

So it was surprising and happy to see the drupal devs showing interest in this year 2010. So i decided to attend the meet. Dates keep getting postponed form last week of feb to 1st week of march to 2nd week off march. Finally we had the 1st meet on 13th March 2010.

There are around 15-20 people who attended the first meetup. I was very happy to find so many drupal devs. We had introduced ourselves and discussed about each other for an hour on drupal support, irc channel #drupal-hyderabad, hyderabad portal drupalhyderabad.com and many other things. During the discussions, i come to know about Siva, Sarath and Medhamsh. Siva is the drupal developer, Medhams is more a system admin guy where as Sarath is the drupal hobbyist :).

At the end of the 1st meet, the group of hyderabadi drupallers are formed with the members being Siva, Sarath, Ipsita, prajwala, Medhamsh, Myself and many more students.