It's funny how quick things happen - Really it is!

Just a week ago I posted I am a Follower & Thinker describing some of my experiences from Open Source. Then, just days later, someone had left me a message in an open Drupal chatroom. What happened after is the result of a chain of interesting - but more or less isolated - events and situations.

Quick background

I'm currently spending some of my time working on an open initiative called Baksteg. I have quite a bit of experience with Drupal and for me it is more than good enough to build the site I have in mind with. Just recently I begun doing some real prototyping of ideas too. Most of the testing have gone very well, but some not so and for those I have started to seek the online community more - poking for help to find solutions or alternative ways.

Online communities are everywhere

www.drupal.org is a fantastic resource to start with. Many problems can quickly be solved doing a quick search there, or it's related sites such as groups.drupal.org and api.drupal.org. Then, when you struggle to find useful help by just searching, you have already started to find other channels to communicate on. In fact you find people using, working with, Drupal everywhere these days. That even includes the same social networks everyone else uses, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Personally I prefer Twitter as it fills my needs and interests good enough, both with Drupal and other ones.

Over the last few months I have worked on tuning my own use of Twitter. I wanted it less as a *megaphone* and more a communication tool to have meaningful, while at the same time a bit entertaining, conversations on. It has worked out really well, while also - as an welcomed bonus - helped me much better appreciate what others actually share out there. My two main feeds are now @tsvenson (personal, mainly in English) and @Baksteg (mainly in Swedish). They both play important roles for my daily needs, which - totally coincidently - works really well with how I now see open source collaboration works out to ;)

Kinda one of the original Social Networks, not that long time ago

However this story happened in the Swedish Drupal-channel on IRC - a social network for geeks and nerds since long ago. It was from kristofferw_ (Kristoffer Wiklund) asking me about this entity ID *problem* I was having troubles with. Some days earlier I had posted a description of it in the Swedish Drupal Group. While that post resulted in some nice advices and ideas, they all turned out to be dead ends. Still, it gave me opportunity to play around with some other modules that later will be used.

- Practice is always good I'm told ;)

Kristoffer was one of them who had helped there. We also go further back, including several Drupal events around. Thus we already know each other, at least when it comes to Drupal stuff. I explained that testing been good, but the work had to, for good reasons, be *pushed* forward. That's when Kristoffer offered to help and write a simple module, if nothing else just to get some coding experience poking around.

As things often end up then, when passionate nerds and geeks find an interesting problem or challenge, brainstorming starts and ideas flows back and forth.

IRC is an important channel in the Drupal community, but it is not because of it's fancy features. It's its simplicity that makes it into such a useful tool to use as a communication hub. A hub that connects us to worldwide chatrooms that can run in the background only to be brought forward when needed or when we have a moment to spare. Or just as inspiration...

Just following the discussions is itself educational and often spurns new ideas. There are many different specialized chatrooms too, one simply called #Drupal-support, most often filled with several hundreds of users, helping each other. It is in these chatrooms many of the toughest challenges with improving the project is ironed out.

A new project is born

It is also here many new projects are born, small as larger ones. As Kristoffer and I began to talk, we quickly found a much more interesting approach. This one had much better potential and many more use cases as well as better flexibility and UX benefits too - So we created a sandbox project on drupal.org. It is now used so that we can experiment further in a better collaborative, open and efficient way.

If this module turns out the way we think it will, then we can take the next step and apply for it to become a Full project. This is a form of quality assurance process that includes us behind the project too, but to get there we need to pass gateways. These are not put in place to stop us though, quite the opposite. Many members in the community voluntary spend their own time to help others to pass. The whole guided process is filled with tools, tips and personal advices about how to make the project work as good as possible, not just for one self but for others too.

Once a full project, access to new features to organize and administrate is granted. Includes proper name space and better ways to manage versions and releases. These are features rarely needed when just poking around and testing ideas in the sandbox.

What I have also learned is what an amazing way to improve my own skills this is. Not just coding related, but also the way to collaborate and how great knowledge transfer can work too. All while at the same time get to know new interesting people and getting exposed to new cultures and ideas.

For me the Drupal community encapsulates all this, and more. Then, taking its size and success into count, it is a pretty remarkable achievement that shows how things can be done quite differently.

Add this to the mix:

• Drupal is used on millions of sites
• Drupal probably already generates a multi billion dollar ecosystem around it

Still there is room for practically anyone, like myself, to feel welcomed and included.

Even if it just starts out as a learning experience!

What this module does

At first glance it looks to do little more than adding an extra step, when creating new content, while hiding parts of the form from displaying. That's right, that is basically what it does and one of its main purposes.

Some might now say - Hey, you just going to end up with tons of garbage content! - and they would be right too. Sure, this is going to make it quicker to create a lot of content - Yes, it can certainly be used for that!

But it also makes some other quite interesting new things possible - This is why:

• Entities in Drupal have unique ID-numbers, which can be used for all sorts of interesting things.
• A new entity doesn't get its own ID until after it has been saved the first time.

Therein we find my initial problem! There where no smooth way to get around the fact: Users filling in those forms must remember and manually save once before adding content to certain fields. Worse, it would be tricky to notice, when forgotten, as in most cases the data would evaluate, just with something much different than the entity ID needed.

As I played around, with several other modules to see if it was possible to circumvent this somehow, I always hit the same brick-wall. Problem was: Every new idea that showed promise resulted in a solution with tons of complexity, not just in one place but several. Gladly, that complexity was what Kristoffer and I could avoid with just a little bit collaborative brainstorming!

What this module now does is simple:

1. Hijacks entity create (just for content types yet)
2. Allows to limit to content create form down to only display the Title field
3. Creates the new entity
4. Immediately reopens it in normal edit

Content type settings:

Adding a new node:

Thanks to this, I can now avoid displaying any fields that needs the entity ID, minimizing the risk of mistakes. At the same time it also means this new - pre create content - step can be used to only show the bare essential fields while opening up to new interesting possibilities. Any rarely used, and other optional, fields can be dealt with better as they come into play.

This new, less complex, solution will also be much easier to improve upon. It has actually already allowed me to visualize and identify a whole bunch of interesting uses and UX-benefits. It will improve for many roles, not the least site builders and content editors.

So, for me, this is no garbage creator. Instead I see how a small improvement can open up many new creative ways to work and collaborate on content. However that depends, after all it is still just a sandbox project on drupal.org a kind of - Open Source playground - for nerds and geeks like myself.

Not everything is as limited as what is usually read on the tin. For me, this is a few good examples of how things in Open Source can work out just nicely.

Note: What *specifics* Kristoffer gets out of this I know little of. Those specifics are his to share and actually not that important for me - As long as I sense we both get something of value out of the collaboration.