Deeson Online: Blog

We went to Playful 2011 recently. It’s a conference where people talk about — you guessed it — the value of being playful in, mostly digital, experiences. This talk by Chris O'Shea is fairly representative of this year’s emergent theme.

At Deeson we’ve been thinking about play a bit too.

Graeme, our Senior Designer, spent a bit of timing playing with CSS (on his day off!) last week to see if he could recreate the Druplicon in CSS.*

He could have gone for a more formal ‘learning’ experience, I suppose — a book or a webinar perhaps. But I think he’d have had less fun.

Effective websites are fun

Stephen Anderson, a design consultant and User eXperience expert, has written about seductive interactions. He spends his life talking about the little things that can make a difference between success and failure in an interaction or an interface.

He often calls this delight, but it makes just as much sense to talk about being playful.

Some interfaces feel like they ‘care’ about you more than others — the designers have thought about you and when you do something the interface responds immediately. The site trusts you enough to play it.

Not only are we more likely to use sites and interfaces which are enjoyable, we’re more likely to use them effectively. Our brains are rubbish at remembering sequences of instructions (sorry, developers, I’m talking about ‘normal’ people here) but they are very very good at remembering how to get little rewards.

Seducing the Drupal Community

There’s a difference between these two ‘playful’ flavours. Graeme, with his pure CSS Druplicon is messing about and seeing if he can break stuff. And then fix it again.

The Drupal community is very good at this. There are probably thousands of developers experimenting with breaking and fixing stuff as we speak.

I’m tempted to say that the Drupal Community is less good at the Subtle Art of Seduction. I’m not necessarily talking about sites built in Drupal — our recent The Making Spot release for Future Publishing plays with a whole bunch of APIs and has a playful, social experience running right through it (if you’re into crafting).

But more within the community itself.

Gamification and Drupal

The most famous example of a playful community of developers is, of course, Stack Overflow. One way of looking at Stack Overflow is to talk about the site design as adding a bunch of point-scoring functionality to the site. A motivation engine, as some people would call it.

But I think it works better to understand the site mechanics as revealing the rewards and the values that are always present in any thriving online community. Stack Overflow notices you when you do cool stuff. Stack Overflow cares.

Paying close attention to your users is seductive.

Investing in structured metadata

If you watch sports — baseball, cricket or Starcraft, whatever, you’ll know that, if you arrive late to a game, you can immediately find out what’s going on. Scorecards are highly-structured metadata.

The same is true on pages in the Stack Overflow community.

Drupal loves playing with data. And Drupal developers have a powerful understanding of the absolute necessity of having good code formatting practices:

Sometimes it feels like a needless pain. Sometimes it feels like wasted effort. Sometimes all those extra spaces and parens feel somehow wasted. But they’re not. Code is an intermediate language — one designed for both humans and machines. Making the code machine-friendly is only half of the equation. Paying attention to the other half isn’t a waste. It’s a long-term investment in continued quality.

I’d argue being playful is a long-term investment in continuted quality.

Drupal and Burnout

A lot’s been written about Burnout in the Drupal community. It even got its own session at Drupalcon. Randy Fay quotes this description from HelpGuide in his series of posts on What can the Drupal Community do about Burnout?:

Most of us have days when we feel bored, overloaded, or unappreciated; when the dozen balls we keep in the air aren’t noticed, let alone rewarded; when dragging ourselves out of bed requires the determination of Hercules. If you feel like this most of the time, however, you may be flirting with burnout.

Perhaps the Drupal Community should spend a bit of time playing with how it keeps score? Stack Overflow's a good model. As are Mozilla's Badges and their Open Badges Project. But, as well as all the suggestions on effective management and dealing with burnout on an individual level, perhaps we could make the Community have more of a playground feel?

* If you’re interested, Graeme was inspired by these other examples of famous logos rendered in pure CSS.

Tarsus has more than 100 international, multi-lingual sites in its portfolio in the exhibitions, publications and online media arena, including sites for the Dubai Airshow and major packaging, labelling and print exhibitions. We have also recently launched a new corporate site for the organisation.

We provide Tarsus with a full set of outsourced web services, from technology strategy to design and development.  They utilise our consultancy, training, infrastructure specification and project management support services together with full build technical skills according to their internal requirements.
Tim Deeson, Director of Deeson ONLINE, states, "Tarsus benefit from the flexibility of outsourced services from the Deeson Group - they can use our consultancy services for certain projects - giving them lower overheads and higher quality in their own internal builds -  or they can choose full service builds if their own teams are at capacity. They are one of a number of enterprises that we have successful outsourcing arrangements with”.
 

Drupal’s core search technology is a good fit for small to medium sites, or where the search requirements aren’t particularly sophisticated. The benefits of core search are zero setup and no additional server requirements; the node content is indexed in the database.

However, for busy sites, sites with a lot of content, or if features such as faceting are required, then Drupal can be combined with Apache Solr, a specialised search platform.

Apache Solr provides scalability and performance benefits over core database search, as well as providing some features that are difficult to deliver (or difficult to deliver with acceptable performance) using core search.

What is Apache Solr?

Apache Solr is a search platform focused on delivering enterprise class, high performance search functionality. The software was originally created as an internal CNET project and then donated to the Apache Foundation in 2006. The Apache Solr Drupal integration module makes it relatively easy to replace Drupal core search with this external search platform.

Apache Solr runs as a separate service from the web server and the database, so requires some extra resources. Normally this means a dedicated server rather than cheaper shared hosting. The fact that it is separate means that it can scale independently of the other two services, from being run on its own dedicated server through to its own cluster.

Use Apache Solr to help sell content with Drupal and UberCart

Drupal’s e-commerce module, UberCart, has two great features that make selling content online easy. Firstly, you can sell file downloads; for example, you can sell PDFs with training content. We recently launched Soccer Coaching Club for Green Star Media, providing users with the ability to find and purchase the right piece of content from thousands of potential choices.

UberCart also allows you to change a user’s role for a certain period. For example, users can buy a subscription to allow access to premium videos or articles for a month via UberCart and be automatically reverted to a ‘free’ role after this period.

UberCart’s content purchasing functionality, combined with Apache Solr’s powerful content filtering, represents an exciting and entirely open source solution.

Search facets with Apache Solr and Drupal

Facets are attributes of content that allow filtering alongside the user’s search query. A well known example is Amazon: a search for ‘John Grisham’ brings up results from the Book, Film & TV and MP3 Downloads categories. By selecting ‘Book’, you eliminate the results related to DVDs and audio books that are in the other categories. You can also filter for certain delivery options or customer ratings.

The Apache Solr module provides Drupal facet data to Apache Solr. For example the content type (eg News, Blog post or Research paper), the publication data and, most usefully, all of the taxonomy terms (tags) associated with that piece of content. This means users can use a keyword search in conjunction with the site’s taxonomy to further narrow their search, providing a very usable and powerful tool.

Performance improvements with Apache Solr

High traffic sites running search queries against the database can start to degrade the site’s overall performance if the database becomes the bottleneck. This is also true for lower traffic sites with lots of content. Complex search queries can be slow to run.

Requirements for features such as faceted search (see below) are becoming increasingly common. This can be delivered in conjunction with Drupal core search using the Faceted Search module but the inherent scalability and performance implications are well documented by the module’s maintainers.

Other useful Apache Solr features

Apache Solr also supports indexing and searching multiple sites (imagine internal intranet site and external corporate site), indexing attachments (eg PDFs, Excel documents) and recommended content blocks driven by a node’s taxonomy. The module page and the Acquia Search overview both have a good overview of the Apache Solr features that Drupal supports.

How does Apache Solr fit with Acquia Search?

Acquia Search is a cloud-based ‘Platform as a Service’ (PaaS) delivery of Apache Solr. The difference is in where Apache Solr is hosted; it’s essentially the same software backed by an SLA. The main benefits are ease of set up and scalability. No local installation or management of Apache Solr is required. You just enter a license key into your Drupal site. Also because it is hosted by Acquia (on their Amazon EC2 infrastructure), you don’t have to worry about scaling or managing the load of your Apache Solr usage.

In many cases, the fact that Acquia Search simplifies the hosting stack, potentially reduces hosting costs and Just Works™ means that it’s the default choice over a local Apache Solr install. Projects requiring bespoke Solr configuration, or an unwillingness to rely on a 3rd party solution, should consider their own local Apache Solr install. For example, a project we worked on recently required a custom Solr synonyms configuration file to ‘educate’ the search on a niche subject’s search terms. This isn’t possible with Acquia Search currently.

The difference between Apache Solr and Apache Lucene

For most people, there isn’t one. Lucene is the internal indexing and search library that Apache Solr uses to deliver its search functionality, Solr can be considered the ‘service’ wrapper around the Lucene engine. They were originally separate projects but have merged. Outside of the technical community, generally people use the terms Solr and Lucene interchangeably. If you are using Solr, you are implicitly using Lucene, and vice versa.

With DrupalCon Chicago drawing to a close, attention is turning to London for the European leg of Drupal's two annual conferences, which will be held at the Fairfield Halls from 23rd to 25th August 2011.

The DrupalCon London website and brand have been under wraps while work has been going on, but were officially launched in Chicago yesterday by Jeff Veit. Twitter has seen a lot of activity and generally people seem pretty excited. The conference team is made up of volunteers from all over the world and I am honoured to be creative director. As a Drupal specialist, The Deeson Group is really looking forward to DrupalCon London and recommends that anyone who is interested in working with or specifying the CMS attends. Discounted tickets for early-birds should go on sale soon.

If you have no idea what I am talking about, Drupal is a wonderful piece of software that enables rapid development of websites, which can then be maintained largely through your web browser. Drupal is open source and free, yet as powerful as most of the top-range and extremely expensive commercial content management systems. We use Drupal every day.

Please check out the DrupalCon London website and join the mailing list if you want to stay informed. There is also a DrupalCon London Facebook page and Twitter profile providing plenty of opportunities to keep up to date. DrupalCon London is still looking for volunteers, so if you are interested in helping out, there is a volunteer form here.