All right, I think it's time and I also figured the sooner I start the more time we have for questions later on So this session is called essential knowledge for Drupal beginners I hope to guide you through the jungle that is called Drupal and Make it possible for you to understand and survive in this jungle. My name is Iwan Falke. I live in Sweden I used to be employed at the great company Node 1 in Sweden now studying to be a teacher more on that later on And this session will be a quest will go on an adventure So you better bring out your sword and helmet and stuff And we will I will guide you help you survive in this Drupal world The quest is divided into five different quest sub quest the first one is about Understanding this Drupal thing from a perspective Second thing is some kind of essential knowledge about the Drupal technology the software that is Drupal After that, we're gonna look at the Drupal community what that is and how to understand it then I'm gonna talk a bit about how Drupal work is organized and Finally, I'll give you five tips on how to get Drupal people to love you Which of course is what all of this is about Okay, so who am I to start with I'm a Drupal trainer Most people in the Drupal world know me from the screencasts I do a quick poll how many here has seen screencasts that I have recorded one two three four five Okay, a few that's nice. I've written a few Drupal books and I do Drupal training As a kind of professional right now studying to become a teacher I'm gonna be a teacher this summer and then I'm gonna teach math and physics and my plan is to be a kick-ass teacher We'll see how that works out But now we're going on a quest. Are you ready? I'll take that as a yes Okay The first question the first quest we have is understanding Drupal from a perspective a good starting point is to ask who uses Drupal and Turns out quite a few people use Drupal and one of them you might know he's called mr. Obama He has this blog of his where he posts stuff. He wants the nation to know about He uses Drupal here's another Company or organization using Drupal the Grammys they switch to Drupal I think it's two years ago now to two Grammy Awards since and that was the first time the Grammy comm Survived the onslaught during the the awards. That's kind of fun Both these sites are kind of from one publisher to a lot of people one-way communication If we look at this site instead the Economist one Think of the world's best news magazines They have switched to Drupal because they wanted to have more interaction With people on their site So they made a pretty spectacular transition to Drupal whether where they switched parts of the site and made a like soft Transition to Drupal a really interesting project. It's has a great write-up on Drupal.org if you're interested They use Drupal as well We have this site the Twitter developer community This is much more communication between people rather than a broadcast channel They use Drupal as well. This is just a few of the sites using Drupal, of course Since I'm from Sweden. I also went to mention Ikea. They use Drupal And this is a community site a lot of people posting content discussing with each other Very rich in media as well. So Drupal is used in many different environments for many different purposes and the question of course is why People choose Drupal and it turns out there are many reasons for this and one of them I think the most important one is that Drupal is flexible Can you hear me as too much sound bouncing around? Should have turned on yeah come back off of it. Is this better? Okay Drupal is flexible you can do many different kinds of websites with Drupal And that makes it possible to use Drupal for your project right now probably but more importantly It makes it possible to use Drupal in the future as well If you build a site for your hotel and then later on you want to add a blog to it And then later on you want to add some kind of Webshop or something you can still use Drupal You're not locked in using only one kind of technology Drupal can do a lot of different things and that's really powerful One of the other really big Advantages with Drupal is that Drupal gives a short time to mark from this time when you start doing some start planning Something and you actually have it done is short with Drupal relatively short with Drupal That is because Drupal is some kind of standardized framework that and and you use Completed modules add add on products like plugins for Drupal that add new functionality and they are still Standardized so you can use standard that standardized components But tailor them to your needs and have a site made pretty quickly that suits your needs All right, let's move on a bit and see what else we have that is good with Drupal. Yeah, Drupal is open source For most people that means that Drupal is free. There is no license fees for Drupal You can download and start using Drupal right away and not pay a dollar That's nice Drupal is also free as in freedom, which for most people working with Drupal is really important When you download Drupal and start using it, it's your code. You can do whatever you want with it And compared to other proprietary systems where you basically rent the software You're not allowed to do changes. You're not allowed to continue use it If you don't continue to pay the provider And open source also allows you to customize the thing you have if need should arise. There are many advantages to this This is probably the thing that most people would say is the best thing with Drupal. Drupal has an awesome community and As you will see here and probably have already seen at the conference Drupal consists of a lot of great people When you talk about open source software, you often want to look at the community to judge How solid the product is the open source product is because the community is kind of the corporation or the company that Maintains this product and if the community is good, then you can rely on the product The Drupal has is known for having a really good community an active environment community Okay, that much about the good things about Drupal. What about the downsides then? well, you might hear that Drupal is slow and I would say it's kind of true But it's true for any framework that you have of certain size. You cannot use we cannot install a website and expect it to Be able to receive three thousand the visitors in a minute for example logged in visitors or something But what's important though is that you can adjust it and tailor it to be able to manage this and Drupal allows this as many of the large-scale When publishing systems do this is another thing that said about Drupal Drupal is difficult to learn I'm a Drupal trainer. So I know that a lot of people think this and I would say yes It's true, but again Drupal is a really large and complex product It's a professional-sized web publishing system if you download it and expect that you can start use it right away and understand all the parts of it You have to think again. I would say that's not saying that it there are things in Drupal that could be made easier That's very true, but you shouldn't expect well any Any system of this size will be complex and difficult to learn Here's another complaint about Drupal. Drupal is ugly And I would say that's pretty often true Drupal has traditionally been created and maintained by geeks like super geeks that think that This user interface and things isn't really important the important thing is that we have rock solid API's because that's cool That has some goods and bads to it. The bad thing is that Drupal might look like not very pretty Sometimes but the upsides is that it's rock solid when it comes to functionality Drupal is one of the best CMS's on the planet Because of all the geeks that have been working on creating Drupal And there are efforts on making Drupal more pretty and especially making more making more easy to use And it's going on and that my friends is the first quest finished We are awarded with some kind of bottle that we can store and keep liquids in this is the Drupal bottle And that brings us to the second quest the Drupal technology knowledge First part I want to look at here is who works with Drupal and how could you possibly fit into this if you want to There are if you look at it three different roles and three different kinds of people working with Drupal And then there are a number of other ones as well The first role is called the site builder These are people building Drupal without writing code. Let's have a closer look at this And site builders create the Drupal sites clicking around and building site functionality in this way They can make like 80 90 percent of all the functionality you need on a site And this is like all the sites you can find on the internet you can do without coding to 90 80 90 percent Because of the way Drupal is built If you want to be a site builder it requires curiosity because there are a lot of different Modules plugins to learn to Drupal and if you want to be really good at Being a site builder then you have to have good knowledge of these modules that you can add to Drupal That's the first role. The second role is the coder often called the developer I don't like to call this the developer because everyone working with building a Drupal site is actually developer So I called the coder instead So what do the coders do? Well, they create a site functionality that the site builders cannot do they write integration stuff in the right glue code to make Drupal plugins Drupal modules talk to each other They do a lot of things like integrating with external systems and and a much more if you want to be a coder a Drupal coder Then you have to know some PHP the language that Drupal is written in if you want to be really good at coding for Drupal Then you have to be good at knowing the API's That Drupal relies on the Drupal provides Okay, and then there's the third role of the people working with Drupal the femur Femurs have a very important role in Drupal. They make Drupal look good And they make Drupal sites be more useful and user friendly and that's of course very very useful and They they not only make the sites look the way the client wants But also have talents to know what the actual site users expect and want to have that's kind of important as well If you want to be a femur, then you have to know some basic front and technology like HTML, JavaScript and CSS good stuff JQuery if you know about that is also very good in Drupal If you want to be really good at theming then you need to not only know these front end technologies But also some of the internal API's and structures of Drupal Because they will be useful when adjusting Drupal's appearance Usability research of this ad here as well Very important if you want to have a site work properly and then there are the other roles We list the three so far. I'm gonna repeat them There are called site builders coders and femurs, and then they are the others These are roles that appear in basically any web project or software project. You have designers You have project managers. You have client managers. You have editors. You have server and backend and database people and more These are not Drupal specific, but they appear in more or less every project that you find Oftentimes depending on the size of the Drupal shop and Drupal company These are combined in different people so one person can be both a femur and a site builder someone is a coder a site builder and Database guru and so on but these are basic to the roles you have when working with Drupal And that means the quest is half done. We've got the bug squashing hammer not bad But we're not done with this quest yet. We have some more Drupal tech knowledge to achieve And that is Drupal lingo Understanding what Drupal geeks talk about and I'm gonna learn you like seven words or something hang on First ones are these Core when people talk about core, they mean Drupal core and that is the default Drupal thing You get when you download Drupal from Drupal.org has some basics functionality And then you have Contributed modules or contribute modules these are the plugins you download and extend Drupal's functionality and alter the Functionality so you can make cool stuff happen on your site Finally, you have themes as well that you dress up your site in to make it look good and behave in a nice way All right course core contrary modules and themes Then we have we have three more words Nodes is a word a note is a word that you'll hear pretty often No is another word for content a piece of content that has its own page is a node in Drupal And we have content types in Drupal, which is pretty important to know about these are like templates You have when creating content on a site finally You have fields that are used on these content types to add things like file uploads or tags or extra text fields or things like that very useful and and they have been quite improved in Drupal 7 Which is the current version of Drupal And Then we have one more word which is my favorite one is kind of a buzzword when it comes to Drupal 7 and that is Entity when this what it was introduced it was called a thingy at first at the first discussions So if you want to appear knowledgeable about Drupal, you can say thingy instead of entity and people will start smiling at you This is a new big thing in Drupal 7 and allows Drupal to be Well it extends Drupal it makes Drupal more generalized so you can manage content and other information on your site in the same way Very useful. It's kind of the big thing for Drupal 7 And I think that's it. Yeah, the second quest is completed and we have been awarded some kind of phrase book. That's nice Let's see what we got here quest number three Understanding the Drupal community. This is I think the most important part of learning to understand Drupal and Understanding this means that we should understand that Drupal is a collaborative project We have many many people working together on the same project with the same goals It could look for example like this This is from the Copenhagen conference one and a half year ago in Europe This is I don't know a thousand one and a half thousand people And I could say that these are more or less all my colleagues in one way or another They work on the same project share the same passion as I do working with Drupal and making Drupal better and I Could more or less stop here because this is like the heart of Drupal We have a lot of people doing things together with the same goal, but I wanted I want to continue anyway The Drupal community has some unwritten rules that is good to know about them. First one is everyone is welcome You can join the Drupal community and people will say welcome good to have you here And you're not only welcome, but you're also welcome to contribute and do work There's a lot of things that should be done with Drupal and we know in the Drupal community that everyone is good at something And I heard someone say that the smartest person in the room might be the one who just entered and if We as a community don't realize that the people coming here can be really good And really helpful will be a great asset then Drupal as a project will die And I think that's why the Drupal community is so warm and welcoming to people Yeah, one more thing Drupal is some type called a doocracy Meaning the more things you do with the more influence you have over things So if you show that you can do something and and not not only complain that things don't work Then people start listening to you and accept what you say If you're interested in more things about the Drupal community and some written rules about Drupal community They can go to Drupal dot org slash DC OC Drupal code of conduct for some more information Basically, it says that we should be considerate if you want to know more about the Drupal community and getting involved in some way then Drupal conferences like this one is a really good place There are two Drupal conferences Drupal cons every year one in Europe and one in North America. They're planning to Introduce a third Drupal conference in South America or Asia But it hasn't been implemented yet. There are a lot of true local Drupal meetups in your city or your state or country or whatever If you go to Groups dot Drupal dot org you can probably find a local Drupal group that you can join and find out more about this The best way I think when it comes to learning Drupal people is to go chatting with them on IRC It's an ancient chat program chat protocol that you can use and you'll find Drupal people online at all times on all days And if you want to know more about this go to Drupal dot org slash IRC Finally you can post in forums Most especially groups dot Drupal dot org find a forum or a group That fits your interests and join it and start discussing you'll find great people and they will help you with your problems More good ideas are found at Drupal dot org slash Contribute if you want to get involved in the Drupal community Who oh? Yeah, and that means the third question is complete visit an example of what happens when you have really smart people coming to Together to do a great project like Drupal you have funny things happening like Drupal hats You can also have things like Drupal socks happening Or you can have things like Drupal lanterns Drupal pumpkins turning up at Halloween or this is maybe my favorite the Drupal suit I Doesn't show very well. It's a full full bodysuit You can wear it doesn't smell very very nice in there now because it's kind of warm But you can still wear it and that's it well quest number Four I'm moving forward in quite a high speed right That's what I do usually How a Drupal work is organized right we have thousands of people working with Drupal And I mean literally literally thousands for Drupal 7 the current version of Drupal core There were more than 1,000 people actively contributing code to Drupal core and that is like a crazy amount of people to organize the way Drupal community does this is that we have two persons usually two persons who have commit access to this Drupal core They decide what goes in and what not goes in they are the gatekeepers for Drupal core But then we have a thousand people or more actually doing code Suggesting patches. It's called suggesting for improvements to Drupal core and changes and more than these thousand people like 10,000 people maybe are discussing these changes and contributing their ideas to Drupal core in discussion in their issue queues for Drupal core For Drupal 8 the next version we had something you introduced called initiatives These are large-scale changes to Drupal core that cannot really be handled in a single issue So they branched off to Initiatives instead and these have initiative leaders and so on but you do not see very much of those For some time at least Yeah, then release cycles you might have well some of you might wonder Drupal 8. What about that? Well, should I start using Drupal 8 instead of Drupal 7? Well the official Announcement when it comes to Drupal 8 is that it's ready when it's ready And I would not wait for Drupal 8 at this point start using Drupal 7 It has been said that Drupal 8 should be released 18 months after the plateau of productivity this morning Dries the founder of Drupal you could call him Said something else. I should really update these slides. He said that August 2013 was the target release for Drupal 8. Let's cross our fingers and hope that that works But still it will be released when it's ready Yeah, that's about Drupal core and then we have all the contributed modules or contributed projects There are not only modules, but also themes and installation profiles and translations and everything These are managed in a way similar to Drupal core excuse me and Anyone is allowed to start a new project in what's called a sandbox And then you are the maintainer the king of that project and can do whatever you like with that You can appoint new maintainers and have co-maintenors You can leave the project to someone else and so you get your own issue queue You can start working with issues and to have patches and bug reports and things in And Eventually if you're doing this in a good way you can apply for some kind of driver's license or something saying that I don't want this project To be a sandbox. I want this to be a real project that is listed and searchable on Drupal.org So people can download and use it And then you go through some kind of review process and then you can do that And that's it and I want to mention that Drupal has no official Certification there is no if you find someone who says I'm in a certified Drupal developer. They got that paper from some Phone a person. There is no official Drupal certification. It has been a lot of discussions about this and there are pros and cons about this the pro is that There will appear Drupal certifications if the Drupal community don't give out certifications companies will start doing that Bringing up their own certifications and that would be bad Also, if we have certifications will lessen the probability that people who don't really know Drupal sell Drupal services And then clients to those people will think that Drupal is bad And that's that's really no good the downside though of having certifications that is that people will start with developers Drupal People will start focus on the certifications rather than the Drupal project and the Drupal community and that will eventually perhaps well, I think and a lot of other people think that that will make the Drupal community less valuable and Eventually also make Drupal worse That about that I think we're done with the fourth quest. Wow. We've got some stamina potion here That will help us on our fifth quest fifth and final quest. Wow. It's going quick Five ways to make Drupal people love you Are you ready? Okay, let's go first one Say, thank you Pretty often people just hear complaints. Oh, this doesn't work If you say hey, this works. Thank you very much people will notice you and eventually they will start love you Number two you can help out in the issue cues if you have a module you're using in Drupal or you're using Drupal core Whatever there are always issues in the issue cues that are easy to solve someone saying hey I I don't know how to install this or where do I find this configuration screen or how do I do this or something? Or you can just find duplicate issues and and say that this has been been asked over here And there are some good answers to it already if you start doing that if if you do that once a week for four weeks, I promise that the module maintainer will notice you take note of you and Maybe he or she will start love you Number three. This is good one. I think work with documentation Even if you don't know how to code or write a theme or something you can help with documentation If you just managed to get Drupal installed you struggled for seven hours and finally you got this Drupal thing Going then you are in a perfect position to tell others how to do it People who have been using Drupal for four and a half year and installed Drupal in their sleep are not really fit to write Documentation about how to install Drupal you are Drupal.org slash documentation is a good entry point for this This is my favorite help others if someone has a question if someone gets stuck somewhere or just want Some guidance someone to hold in their hand if you help them you help the Drupal community and people will take note of you and They will start love you Finally, this is for hardcore people who want to do cool stuff and become heroes. You can visit the core office hours There's a person here called xjm. I don't know her real name, but I know she's called xjm xjm online She manages what's called core office hours helping people Making Drupal core better there are tons of issues in the Drupal core issue queue And there are always issues that you can help out with and she will help you help out with these issues If you're interested in this go to Drupal.org slash node slash one two four two eight five six This is what sometimes referred to as a geek number one two four two eight five six And what do you know? That's it finished the fifth quest we got Drupal Yeah Thank you That was half an hour When I did this before it took 45 minutes. That means we have a lot of questions a lot of time for questions That's great. I hope I can answer some of them. How many here are new to Drupal? How many here have used Drupal before? How many here have not used Drupal before? How many here are on their first Drupal conference? How many here have installed Drupal? Downloading on vm definitely counts. That sounds like that's geeky enough for me All right, so yeah, do we have questions? Yes, thank you Okay, so a question if What kind of platform you use for running to run Drupal Drupal usually runs on linux and patchy and php But it can and my sql database, but it can be run a number of different platforms It runs on windows and mac and linux no problem If you have some other server Software that can manage php. That's fine Drupal has support for a number of different databases and that's also fine It has limited support for non relational databases if you know about those. They're really cool. They are wicked fast But they don't work 100% with Drupal So you have combined with some standard database like my sql Yes Oh, that's the big question for me. Am I giving up on Drupal now that I'm becoming a teacher? I Don't know I've I have realized that I can't have two passions in my head at the same time and I'm really passionate about teaching and when teaching becomes my Daily job Then I don't think I'll have time to cram out five screencasts every week That's what I think Oh, is there a special name for the Drupal icon? Yes, there is. It's Drupal con Yeah, I it's very funny Drupal con like Drupal icon Not to be confused with Drupal con which we are at right now. What do we want to do now? We have a lot of time left Did we have a question? Yes Of the other stuff, sorry Okay, so so apart from just installing Drupal. What do you need to know to get started? Gits and bash and Terminal. Okay. Okay. So this is a good question and I It's kind of embarrassing that one of the most difficult things with Drupal is to just get it started I mean when you start using Drupal and and well start start being a site builder You can do a lot of cool things with very little effort and it's kind of easy to do it, but getting Drupal started is tricky and There are tools for getting Drupal started just with like five clicks or something one of them is called the Drupal Stack is the act we are Drupal stack install or something like that a good good thing It sets up a server on your computer installs Drupal and everything just works There are online Hostings that that provides Drupal installation You don't need to know how to use a terminal or use version control system or things like that to use Drupal It helps if you want to be a Drupal Coder then you definitely want to learn things like gits and and using a terminal and what's called drush in Drupal a command line tool But to get started Get an online service to install Drupal for you and get going. That's my advice Question over here What would I recommend? When it comes to learning to use a module and know which modules to use. Yeah, that's a really good question. Well, I would recommend Failing a large number of times. That's really Efficient but also a painful way of learning A better way is well talk to Drupal people talk to Drupal people. That's a The ultimate solution I guess and trying things out. There are books available That are Good, there are some books available that are less good. Don't read those And If you compare two different modules, I would go for the one that has the most the largest user base That's the quick way of comparing two modules Don't be afraid to use modules that has a lot of bug reports or issues in their issue queue That doesn't mean the module is bad. It means that it's used a lot And that's always good What should you focus on when you want to learn Drupal? This is a really good question. I I could kind of show you Path for learning Drupal. Well, the first thing you want to learn when when you learn Drupal Let's actually show you this Let's see skill sets We had a project I'm involved in Working with something called skill sets Let's see if I can have this one show show image Like this this is some kind of Skill and level up map for using Drupal And there are different kinds of skills you can have depending on what kind of Drupal work you want to do But some things you always need to learn like You need to learn how to manage content on a Drupal site regardless of what you want to do Even if you're like a project manager or a client Contact or something you need to know the basic stuff about Drupal because you're gonna you interact with Drupal in one way or another After that I would focus on site building Definitely a lot of people especially those who know how to write php They go directly to coding for Drupal and that's a bad choice You'll waste tons of hours that way learn site building first After that you can branch off either you start Learning how to theme Drupal And that's great. You learn how to code for Drupal And you know that there are modules available that solves most of your problems But you can extend these modules and make them better with your coding Or you go into advanced site building making Impossible things happen on your Drupal site without a single line of code and that's kind of cool That's what I do mostly And then it expands and expands First threshold is learning basic site building Go for that and that requires in turn that you learn how to manage content on your site Second threshold is learning the basic coding in Drupal Because when you do know that then you can do a lot of other things as well And the geek number for this issue is all this this Content here is 17 24 34. All right. Oh, and this is on groups dot Drupal.org Yeah, okay search for Drupal skill sets and you will find this Okay, the major differences between Drupal 7 and Drupal 6 and the Drupal 7 is better Drupals and one in real life one important difference is that Drupal 6 is closer to end of life Drupal come the Drupal community releases security updates and things for two Drupal releases now Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 Once Drupal 8 comes out Drupal 7 has reached end of life and that's 6 6. Thank you. Okay. Thank you And when it comes to technical implementations, uh, then Drupal 7 is more capable of doing large-scale stuff out of the box You can have multiple databases in Drupal 7 and you can have other kinds of databases than the mysql database Uh From a site building perspective Drupal 7 has the these entities the thing is That allows you to attach fields and extend the information structure on A gazillion or different ways on your Drupal site in Drupal 6. That's not really possible in the same way Is there an easy way to upgrade from 6 to 7? Yes and no Uh Drupal core has a simple upgrade path from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 is like clicking a few buttons and then it's it's done More or less if you have a lot of modules installed on your site Then these modules must have an upgrade path as well if they don't then you will have some pain Whether if you have written a lot of custom code on your site and maybe even hacked core. Oh my god I should mention this you should not hack Drupal core if you hack Drupal core That means changing the code in Drupal core than a kitten dies So if you see it's true. It's true. There are images proving this. It's horrible.  That that's one of the reason that site building is so important in Drupal if you use existing modules the big Much used modules then you are sure to have nice upgrade paths for the next version And you are sure that the modules will work together in nice way and life will be better and no kittens die Yes Any good Drupal hosts for small personal websites? I know This might start sound like commercials now and I know that No, I don't know. That's the quick answer And I do know however that there is a Drupal host called web enabled that allows you to do fun stuff with Drupal with Little or no effort. They're good at managing Drupal that Well, I'm I'm going to stop there or I'll be fine or something Yep Ah any good Drupal books Yeah Okay, good good books about Drupal. I would like to recommend a book that I wrote myself It's called Drupal 7 the essentials It covers Drupal core and the essential modules you should know about It's I'm a Swedish guy and we didn't have time to prove free that book before the last American conference Or before the London Drupal con so the language is kind of Not perfect and the reviews on amazon is like Either this is a five star despite its language or This is a four star, but I would give it five if it was a better language It's good content and I'm going to do some more commercials if you go to dev dot node one dot se Dev is for developers like people in the Drupal community node one is the swedish The Drupal company I I'm at and dot se is for sweden Then you will find Then you will find something called learning library This is a collection tons of screencasts and and things that will help you get started with Drupal There's a screencast series here. Let's scroll down a bit English It's in English all all is in English. Well, yeah, I think everything is in English. Now this size here isn't really nice I think this is responsive. So if I scroll Okay, never mind. There's a screencast here is here called Learning Drupal 7 or something like that. That's a very good starting point And then just go on from oh, there's a screencast here is going on right now called Four weeks of Drupal that contains a full Drupal course that I did for some students Four weeks is like crazy amount of Drupal things and I did everything as screencast and you can watch it here for free Good stuff That replaces more or less this book at amazon that I bought so now I Can't sell enough of my books anymore, but I want to recommend another book as well a book called Drupal's Drupal 7 module development That I think is the best book when it comes to writing or coding for Drupal good stuff, but learn site building first There's another good book called The definitive guide to Drupal 7.  What learning resources do I miss on the web? Um I actually miss the structure of I think there are tons of good blog posts and screencasts and And the podcast and whatnot for for learning Drupal But it's so difficult to find them as difficult to know what's good and bad and things You've heard rumors that I've been working on site to aggregate this. Yeah, it's true Who told you that? Well, is that gonna be well? I don't know. It's ready when it's ready Yes Drupal 7 module development Drupal 7 module development. It's the best Drupal Perhaps the best Drupal book I've seen. I know that a company called lot about is working on a Drupal 7 version of what's called Using Drupal the Drupal 6 version of that was very good So it might be very good in Drupal 7 as well, but I haven't read it yet Yes, okay. I'm gonna repeat that statement He wants to give me an applause. Was that it? Well, thank you. Thank you It it's very well It's a privilege to be able to give away Drupal documentation for free Drupal is a passion for me And I'm so happy that I can share that passion Yes Okay, we have a plus one here plastic Pro Drupal development Yeah, that's a book as well pro Drupal development for Drupal 6 and Drupal 5 are excellent I'll stop there Okay type that's that was not the problems I had with it Well, it it lacks too many things the Drupal 7 version It doesn't cover the entities for example, and that's kind of crazy having a Drupal 7 book that doesn't cover entities is crazy That was Now I'm making bad publicity here I I want the book is called Drupal pro Drupal 7 development And It's a good book in many in many aspects Not all Sorry to the authors Yeah, oh a site that shouldn't be written in Drupal. Yeah, I can definitely give you examples of that We had at Node 1 people coming to us saying we want to build this campaign site They want to have up in in one week Well, we want to have it up and running in one month and it should be running for nine months And when you shut it down you should have this content on it and that's it You could use Drupal for that, but it would be overkill. Okay Okay, so not only the overkill Scenario, but something else is something that Drupal couldn't do or isn't fit to do It is difficult to have Drupal run well when you have a lot of logged in user Users if you have 2000 logged in you you wouldn't want to build facebook with Drupal. That's about well It's really difficult regardless of which framework you use it will be difficult um Here goes the computer um I think generally if you have a webshop That has talents in in a particular framework like if you're really good at using wordpress and you get A job that you know that you can solve in wordpress and you're considering using Drupal Use the talent you have it will cost a lot to learn things in Drupal and the first Three or four projects you make in Drupal You will not be very very good because you will learn so much during the way on the way um I don't really know of any kind of website that wouldn't work well with Drupal um That might be because i'm only working with Drupal and people who come to node 1 want Drupal Uh, I bet there are site cases where Drupal isn't a sensible solution But I can't really give an example. Sorry Yeah Okay, uh, why is it difficult to have many logged in users on a Drupal site? That has to do with caching Um, when you have a lot of people visiting a website Well, you don't want every visitor to uh make the databases do heavy queries and stuff You want to have things prepared so you can send it back quickly? That's what happening with the grammis.com For example, you have thousands of people coming every second to it and then you have a nice little layer above On top of Drupal that just sends dump html back to the visitors and it's wicked fast But if people are logged in you pretty often need to customize small parts of the page and uh Then you need some database queries and you'll have to hit the actual Drupal installation for every visitor and every page request And that becomes heavy eventually There are ways of solving that If you are using a module called page manager together with panels usually you can do Cool and very granular caching so you can solve that with Drupal, but it is Tricky it's much more difficult than caching pages for for anonymous users where everyone sees the same content It's easy to prepare that page and just serve it off to a lot of users We're getting technical here More questions Yes Oh the argument that it's open source and thus not supported that I approach it with its bullshit Um The The thing with with Getting service is that you need a service provider And that's it when it comes to open source You will need to find a service provider to give you service on the platform you want to use When it comes to proprietary software You buy what you rent the software from someone and that one is your service provider You don't have any option to stop getting service You don't have an option to Choose another service provider You're locked in when it comes to open source You're free to select your service provider and you're free to not even have a service provider if that is what you prefer But you definitely have service provider Especially when it comes to Drupal Drupal is a large open source project and it has a lot of providers Good question. It makes me agitated Is that it let's see what what time is it? Oh a question. Yeah If I build a site today would I do it with six seven and I'd use seven Any day well any day from now to A foreseeable future Yes Yeah, okay. How do you use a framework a framework is something that you start off with it's a one It's like lego lego bricks You have components you have some kind of starting point But it's nothing you can't really use but you can use it to build a car a house or or whatever It suits your needs. That's the framework. It means that you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time and that's kind of nice Yeah, what's that? Oh, how do I choose framework? What you mean if I was was not to use Drupal In oh a framework in Drupal. Oh that oh that's an interesting question How do I choose which framework to use inside Drupal? I Well, I've spent a lot of time as a site builder now. Sorry coding as well And I have become very fond of a few modules that are frameworks that can do a Gasillion of different things and they interact with other parts of Drupal and other modules in a very good way And the more a module or a framework interacts with other parts of Drupal The better it is according to me and that's how I choose my frameworks The the modules I like very much use the the essential modules according to me are page manager and panels That those two modules go together one module called views which will probably heard here Drupal geeks talk about It's the most used of all Drupal modules And then there's a module called entity reference and things but let's stop there. No, no, no the rules module the rules module of course Rules page manager and views and you're pretty good off good frameworks As a developer, how do you know when to use hook alters and preprocess and different apis? and Well, that's a good question Huh I was going to say by experience, but I guess that's not a really good answer Yeah, you can get to the same results in many many many different ways um No, I don't know. I don't know For me, I'm still so new at coding that I don't really know how to explain some kind of feeling that I can do well when it comes to preprocessing It's a part of the Drupal theming So it's if it's theming thing I want to do then I want to use preprocessing for example If I want to make well, no, no, I can't explain it in a good way. I'm sorry Yes And apply links to it or migrate Are you talking migration or embedding? Yeah, okay So so the question is if I have a site already in dot net and I want I want to build another site in Drupal And I want these kind of to interact with each other Do I have to change the first one to Drupal as well? No, you don't have to do that There are several different ways of doing it if you just want to pull content from one site and display it on another side You can write some things that queries your your dot net site and gets information out and shows it in Drupal Uh, if you want to have content actually pushed between the sites is a bit more tricky Like if you want an article to be on both sides and you can update them on any site and it will sync That's more tricky, but it can be solved as well. It will take a coder to do that But it's definitely doable. I've seen it on several times All right, I think that's it. Thank you very much


Listen to me the moment you give an emotion and meaning it becomes what's called a feeling and feelings are emotions on steroids. So before you start to respond to an emotion, give it a meaning, give it a narrative, and let it take a residence in your life about that person, about the boss about the company about whatever.  It's just data. It's not a directive.


First of all, I'd like to acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay my respect to the elders of the Ngunnawal people past and present. I'd like to acknowledge their contribution to this place and also to this institution. So my name is Ann Evans, I'm the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Arts and Social Sciences and I'd like to welcome you to this CAS inaugural professorial lecture series. So this series is an opportunity for us as a research community to welcome and to celebrate new professorial appointments in our college. So today we are celebrating the promotion of Professor Carolyn Strange from the School of History in the Research School of Social Sciences. So this lecture today also forms a part of the ANU Gender Institute's Inspiring Women of ANU series and so before I introduce Carolyn I'd just like to ask Professor Margaret Jolly to come up and say a few words from the Agenda Institute. And very few words because I think we want to hear Carolyn in all her glory. So could I just say what a thrill it is, this is an inaugural series. There were eight women promoted to professor across the university last year and it's fantastic to be able to partner with the diverse colleges and schools that people are from. This is the third in our series to date and I'm really, really looking forward to it. For those of you who don't know what the gender institute is, who would that be in the audience? Oh a few people, right okay so this is something that's existed for seven years at the ANU. We're the kind of portal for everything that we do around research, education and outreach around gender and sexuality. We have a very inclusive and intersectional approach to gender and I'd just like to ask those of you who aren't yet signed up for our newsletter if you want to sign up and I'll pass this around. Most of you here? No Carolyn. Carolyn Strange specialises in the transdisciplinary history of gender and sexuality in modernity. So Carolyn studied in Canada and the US and she's held positions where she's taught in criminal law, in criminology and cross-cultural studies prior to joining the ANU School of History in 2010. She's published on topics ranging from the history of the Antarctic exploration to circuses to sails but she specialises in the history of crime and justice. So in 2016 she was nominated as a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. In her presentation today, Professor Strange is going to be drawing on a collaborative research project funded by the ARC on the history of sexual offences, legal responses and public perceptions in Canada and in Australia. So over to you. Thank you Margaret and Anne and thank you all for coming. It's lovely to see you all here. I think it's probably fair to say that for most people being promoted to professor is an unalloyed pleasure. In my case it may mean that I'm less likely to be mistaken for a superhero. However, it does come with compensatory upsides including the pleasure of course of addressing you here today on my research and publishing over the past 33 years. To sum it up, most of my publications as Anne has mentioned concern the history of gender and criminal justice in modern Canadian, US, Australian and British history. But fear not, I'm not going to subject you to a recitation of my CV. I'm just going to be talking about my current project. The Canadians in the room, and I think there are a few, may recognize the background image in the advertisement for this talk as a depiction of the treason trial of Louis Riel prosecuted by the Dominion government for leading the Métis people's uprising against the central state. Riel was hanged in Regina Saskatchewan on the 16th of November 1885. The only person in post-Confederation Canadian history to be executed for a crime other than murder. And this alone makes it arguably the most significant case in the nation's history. The book I'm working on currently concerns less famous capital trials, 83 cases in all in which men were sentenced to death for rape, carnal knowledge or sexually motivated murders. None of these cases resonates in public memory to the extent of Riel's with one possible exception, which I'll discuss toward the end of my talk. Instead, my object is twofold. First, to identify the confluence of factors that led to executions, commutations, and successful appeals in capital cases. And secondly, to connect the changing politics of the death penalty to those dispositions. Because Canada abolished the death penalty in 1976, I focused necessarily on the past. However, in writing this book, I remain mindful of present day responses to crimes of sexual abuse, cruelty, and lethal violence, which trigger not only revulsion and outrage, and we can think, of course, of the murder of Euridice Dixon last week. But also in many parts of the world, including Canada, calls for the reinstatement of the death penalty. To analyze the history of the death penalty in most Western countries is to study a process of decision making that was an all male affair. In the period I examined from Canada's confederation to the moratorium on the death penalty in 1967, a chain of decisions made by male law enforcement agents, prosecutors, jurors and judges, and Justice Department bureaucrats linked up to the federal cabinet, which had the constitutional power to recommend mercy or to advise that the law take its course. It won't surprise you to hear that each cabinet member over this period was a Euro-Canadian, white in either Anglo-Celtic or Francophone. The cohort of capital sex offenders was more diverse, but not much more so, and more on that in a moment. More surprising, probably to most of you, is the fact that Canadian women did not serve on juries and criminal proceedings or were granted gender-based exemptions until the 1970s. Consequently, an exclusively masculine cast of death penalty decision makers judged men's sexual violence and men's victimization of women and children in the entire period I'm talking about. I should note only one of my cases deals with the victimization of an adult male. My analysis of these 83 capital-y convicted offenders began with a profile of their characteristics. Of the 27 men convicted for rape or carnal knowledge alone, two were black and 25 white.  The remainder of the 83 men resembled those who determined their fate, but the capital-y convicted were marginal in other respects, most significantly class. Over 93% of the men sentenced to death for sex crimes were dependent on defense counsel appointed by the court, who typically, and these men typically, had less than a week to prepare a case. In many trials, including ones conducted in the 1960s, defense counsel presented no evidence and confined themselves to cross-examination and a closing address. Occasionally, a seasoned lawyer accepted the brief to defend an accused sex criminal as a matter of professional service, but Canada lagged behind England and many US jurisdictions in providing no state-based legal aid when the death penalty was still in force. In fact, it was the proud custom of the courts to appoint a junior member of the bar to serve indigent defendants, including those accused of capital crimes. For example, the last man to be hanged in Canada for a sex murder was defended in 1961 by a lawyer who was called to the bar six months before the trial opened. Although the lawyer went on to lead the Civil Liberties Association of Canada and specialized in criminal defense, he was disbarred in 1982 for bilking a client of half a million dollars. Evidence of this nature cannot be uncovered through quantitative analysis, but it does provide the tools to trace patterns of severity over time and the means to compare the fate of capital sex offenders with other cohorts of murderers. If we look back at the first chart, you'll see that the appearance of capital sex crime cases was uneven over the century after confederation. The appearance of rape and carnal knowledge cases, the ones depicted in yellow, is confined to the first decade of confederation with one exception, this one here, which I'll turn to momentarily. Aside from one sex murder in 1873 and two in 1878, all of the murder cases occurred in the 19, sorry, from the 1880s onward. The most notable spike in these convictions, as you can see here, occurred in the 1940s and 50s. This means that as far as executive capital justice was concerned, many federal cabinets formed and dissolved without the executive considering clemency for any man convicted of sex crimes. In contrast, the liberal government, which held power from 1935 until 1957, considered the greatest number of cases. In 1953, the liberals appointed a royal commission on capital punishment following Britain's lead, and both reports of these inquiries recommended the death penalty's retention. When the Minister of Justice appeared before the commission in 1954, he testified that the executive considered the prospect of commutation equitably, well in advance of the date set for the execution of persons sentenced to death. And you can read here his statement extolling the virtues of the capital case review process. Well, abolitionists who studied the records of executions which were produced as a result of this inquiry were unconvinced by claims of this nature. And my research provides stronger evidence to question the bases on which some men died for capital sex crimes while others served commuted sentences. For instance, if we compare the execution rate of sex killers with that of men convicted of robbery murder or burglary murder, we can see that both cohorts faced a greater likelihood of execution than did men convicted for other sorts of murder, and that's the other sorts is the light gray column. With one exceptional period, this one here, male sex murderers were more likely than any others to be executed, indicating that power holding men were prepared to condemn the actions of these offenders in the harshest of terms. Yet it would be wrong to assume that studying executions is the only place to find evidence of masculine moral condemnation. To demonstrate the value of examining commutations in concert with executions, I turn now to two capital sex cases in which the politics of race, gender, and class transsectored national politics in the course of death penalty decision making. In the case of William Maccathern, convicted of rape in 1927, a court of appeal, not the executive, made the final decision. Nevertheless, his death sentence, the first in 50 years for the crime of rape, set the standard process of capital case review into motion. When the so-called Fathers of Confederation decided in 1869 that rape and carnal knowledge, meaning the sexual abuse of a girl under the age of 10, would be mandatory death penalty offenses. They diverged from Britain, which modified that penalty in 1841. The reason for this, according to Prime Minister and Minister of Justice, Sir John A. Macdonald, was the alleged propensity of black men toward sexual violence. As he declared in 1868, Negroes were very prone to make felonious assaults on white women. However, no cases of this nature came before the cabinet and Macdonald himself, in his capacity as the head of cabinet, authorized commutations for every man sentenced to death for rape or carnal knowledge during his time of office. By 1877, concerns over the non-enforcement of the death penalty, as well as the power it potentially gave women and girls to testify against men, Parliament revised the law to make carnal knowledge a non-capital offense and to make the death penalty an optional death penalty offense for up to the judge's discretion for rape.  On the night of the 26th of October, 1926, he broke into the McCall's house while Mr. McCall was away in hospital. Maccathern ransacked the premises for money and sexually attacked and beat the elderly woman, who managed to escape and to alert a neighbor. When men from the local white community in the southwestern Ontario town heard the news, they converged on the McCall house to find Maccathern asleep in the basement. We have no record of the discussion that took place as they seized the man, but trial testimony revealed that some of the captors, including one of the victim's sons, contemplated stringing him up. Because cooler heads prevailed, Maccathern was put on trial before a justice of the Assize Court. And the night before the trial opened, a local lawyer agreed to take the case. No witnesses were called for the defense, which consisted of nothing more than a few questions in cross-examination to suggest that the assault might have been an attempted rape, which would have been a non-capital offense. From start to finish, including the nine minutes it took for the all-white, all-male jury to find him guilty, Maccathern's trial and sentence to death lasted two and a half hours. Much of that time was taken up by gratuitous statements by the judge, who commended the victim's white neighbors for showing restraint that allowed Canadians to distinguish themselves from lawless Americans who responded to such crimes by lynching suspects. Through this praise, however, he simultaneously demonized Maccathern, stating that law-abiding Canadians, that is, white people, had resisted the urge to, quote, burn a fiend at the stake. After the conviction, the trial transcript and the judge's report arrived in Ottawa, where officials in the Department of Justice produced case files for the cabinet's review. However, Maccathern's case material created a conundrum for the clerks in the remissions branch of the department who tried to anticipate questions from the cabinet as this memo indicates. Had any man been sentenced to death for rape since Confederation? If so, when? Had any been executed? No one knew the answers to these questions. So law clerks had to reach deep into their filing cabinets for the answers, since the judge had set the date for Maccathern's hanging two months after his conviction. Fortunately for Maccathern, his extraordinary sentence attracted a more experienced lawyer to the case and he filed an appeal in the Ontario Court of Appeal. So in legal terms, the defense had won Trump card. The death sentence could be appealed because it was not a mandatory penalty for rape as had been determined in the 1870s and as it was for murder. The court accepted the argument that the sentence was out of keeping with prevailing practice. Accordingly, it reduced Maccathern's sentence from death to imprisonment for 20 years plus 20 lashes, which was a common penalty in the 1920s in Canada. But the basis for this moderation drew on racist reasoning. Maccathern's Anglo-Celtic defense lawyer referred to his client as a negro of low mentality who was addicted to alcohol. The chief justice went further in this regard and in his judgment, he described Maccathern as by nature crude and ethically defective and a man whose underlying criminalistic tendencies and brutality had emerged in aggravated form. As the outcome of this case indicates, patriarchal white nationalism could sit comfortably alongside penal amelioration. If we fast forward 32 years, we come to another anomalous case in which a capital sex crime became entangled in the politics of the death penalty and national politics, although in ways distinct from Maccathern's sentencing. And this is the case that I foreshadowed in the opening when I referred to the capital conviction that rivals the trial of Louis Riel in Canadian memory of the death penalty. This crime, the rape murder of a 12-year-old girl, Lynn Harper, occurred in 1959 just outside an air force base in Southwestern Ontario. The police arrested and charged a boy of 14, Stephen Truscott, because he was the last person known to see Lynn while she was still alive. By this period, a person so young would normally have been tried in the juvenile court, but the seriousness of the offense prompted the local magistrate to assign the case to an adult court. After his two-week trial for murder in the fall of 1959, Truscott was convicted, although the jury and the judge both recommended clemency. Well, no Canadian seriously anticipated that the government would allow a boy of 14 to be hanged for murder for two reasons. First, journalists dug into the records and reported that no youth in Canada had even been sentenced to hang since 1875. Nevertheless, the case dramatized that in Canada there was no legal provision to prevent the execution of a juvenile. In England in contrast, the execution of offenders under the age of 18 had been ruled out in 1933, but Canada still left that decision up to the cabinet. The other reason why the public anticipated the commutation of the death sentence was the government's controversial move away from capital punishment enforcement, which began in the late 1950s. Two years before Truscott's trial, John Diefenbaker, the first conservative prime minister in 22 years, came to office with a background as a criminal lawyer and a specialist in criminal defense. He had also defended several capital offenders, one of whom had been executed and whom he believed to be innocent. The day after Truscott was sentenced to death on the 1st of October, 1959, the prime minister as head of cabinet announced the government's intention to commute the sentence once the court of appeal had considered his case. As Diefenbaker explained, his cabinet had adopted a policy of granting clemency if juries had recommended mercy. However, he also decided to wait until the court of appeal had made its judgment before he acted. For some Canadians, Diefenbaker's stated attention to alter the mandatory sentence of death via the executive rather than amending the criminal code was undemocratic. For others, including English observers, as we can see here, his decision to suspend the exercise of the royal prerogative waiting for the courts to act failed to make proper use of executive power. In the interim, Diefenbaker's government faced mounting disapproval as this editorial in the Manchester Guardian indicates. For four months, Truscott faced execution, spending his 15th birthday on death row before the court dismissed the appeal, prompting the executive to act the very next day, to make good on its promise, and to commute the sentence to life. But controversy continued. As allegations soon emerged that a serious miscarriage of justice had occurred in the crowns and the judges' handling of the case.  No further developments occurred, however, and the principle of finality held for six years since the Supreme Court of Canada had denied leave to appeal in 1960. But the course of the case changed in 1966, thanks to a journalist who cataloged a host of procedural irregularities and prejudices that had colored Truscott's trial. In 1966, the publication of Isabel de Brugde's innocuously titled book, The Trial of Stephen Truscott, did not lead to his release from prison, but it did become a catalyst that turned a sufficient number of MPs in favor of abolishing the death penalty. Parliament's first step was to amend the criminal code in 1967 by imposing a five-year moratorium on the death penalty.  They were not singled out. Two years after the moratorium, Truscott was released from prison and placed on parole, while the campaign to overturn his conviction continued. Finally, in the face of new evidence, the Ontario Court of Appeal quashed his conviction in 2007. And a year after that, the Government of Ontario acknowledged Truscott's case as a miscarriage of justice and awarded him $6.5 million in compensation. Today in Canada, the name Stephen Truscott has become synonymous with wrongful conviction. As this slide shows, successful appeals in capital cases were a rarity. In Canada, access to appeals was meager until the 1960s, and most capital-y convicted offenders had no access to lawyers skilled enough to argue before the judicial elite. However, I have found a handful of cases in which leading members of the bar sacrificed their time and lent their expertise to represent convicted sex murderers in courts of appeal on points of law. And this is just something to note that until 1961, it was not, offenders did not have the right to appeal on matters of fact before the Supreme Court until 1961. So by far the most common legal matter raised in successful appeals was the improper use of coercion or inducements made by the police in order to extract confessions. And through their interventions, seven men, including Maccathern, were spared execution after courts of appeal, either set aside verdicts and ordered new trials in which defendants were acquitted or convicted on lesser charges or quashed convictions. But as this chart shows with the gray and yellow, these were exceptions. For the vast majority of Canada's convicted sex criminals and killers, the changing roster of men who served in the federal cabinet were the decision makers who determined their fate. And as I've shown, the inclination toward clemency did not increase over time until the period we can see in the 1960s where we're moving to effectively a de facto abolition period. Well, you might by this point be wondering whether by focusing as I have done on the history of the death penalty and its administration that I disregard the suffering and horrible deaths of the victims in these cases, but nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, I hesitated to take on this book project because I knew that I would have to be confronting gut-wrenching testimony and images. As I sat in the archives in Ottawa, flipping through papers and photographs in these 83 capital files, it was difficult not to be struck by a sense of horror and disgust at the suffering inflicted on victims. But I was also struck by the lofty claims of judges, ministers of justice, remissions branch officers and the members of the Royal Commission who extolled the virtues of Canadian criminal justice in death penalty cases. Their claims and their actions and their dilemmas have inspired my critical perspective on the death penalty's administration. And the contents of these files confirms that in many of these cases, especially the 27 dealing with child victims, near lynchings occurred, including several cases with white suspects, not just McCathen. Judges and juries frequently accepted questionable confessions and regarded police evidence uncritically. And the police under intense pressure to produce a suspect were clearly prone to tunnel vision with Truscott's case, just one example. Psychiatric expertise was beyond the means of most defendants and the legal definition of insanity created a narrow window for the presentation of evidence concerning mental abnormalities. And most of all, men on trial for their lives had no choice but to accept the defense the court appointed. These were the ingredients most commonly found in the cocktail of convictions and executions, but their potency depended significantly on the period in which their cases came before cabinet. Although Truscott is the only one of these men officially recognized as wrongfully convicted, my research shows that the majority of men sentenced to death faced execution on questionable evidence and the thinnest of defenses. When the criminal justice system works so poorly for defendants, it also fails victims because it undermines the credibility of convictions. As one legal commentator stated in relation to the murder of Lynn Harper, law enforcement dishonored this girl, her family and her community, none of whom benefited from the arrest, prosecution and conviction of an innocent young man while the real perpetrator of this horrible crime escaped justice. It's natural for us to be certain that we're living in times where more sophisticated forms of forensic analysis, state-funded legal aid and the provision of appeal on matters of fact as well as law rule out the possibility of errors in our own time. And in Canada, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides further assurance of fairness in criminal justice in comparison with the period before that when the death penalty was still in force. Perhaps too, we might imagine that juries are more fair-minded and better representative of the broad community, especially now that women serve alongside men. Yet we also know that funding for legal aid is shrinking, that women know less than men harbor racist beliefs and that science has yet to provide definitive answers concerning the culpability of persons affected by alcohol, drugs, trauma or mental illness. So for this reason, I consider this book about the past a cautionary tale for our own era as well as for the future. And just on a final personal note, as I was preparing this talk, it occurred to me that it's the first time I've done a presentation where I won't have the opportunity to talk to my father about this. I recognize him as a man with a year nine education who developed expertise in art, botany, architecture, music, biology and history. And so I dedicate this talk to his memory. Thank you.