Announcing Spark: authoring improvements for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8

At DrupalCon Denver, I announced the need for a strong focus on Drupal's authoring experience in my State of Drupal presentation. During my core conversation later in the week, I announced the creation of a Drupal 7 distribution named "Spark" (formerly code-named "Phoenix"). The goal of Spark is to act as an incubator for Drupal 8 authoring experience improvements that can be tested in the field.

I hope for Spark to provide a "safe space" to prototype cutting-edge interface design and to build excellent content tools that are comparable with the experience of proprietary alternatives. While not a final list, some initial thinking around the features we want to experiment with is:

• Inline editing and drag-and-drop content layout tools ("true" WYSIWYG)
• Enhanced content creation: auto-save, save as draft and more
• Useful dashboards for content creators
• Mobile content authoring and administration support

The vision behind the Spark distribution is to be "the Pressflow of Drupal authoring experience". Pressflow provided a "spoon" of Drupal 6 with various performance enhancements that made their way into Drupal 7 core while it was in development. The same improvements were made available to Drupal 6 users so they could easily be tested in the field. With Spark, we want to test authoring experience improvements in Drupal 7 on real sites with real users and real content. We also want to target the best improvements for inclusion into Drupal 8 core.

I'm excited to announce that Acquia will fund the Spark distribution. Core developers Gábor Hojtsy and Wim Leers will work on Spark full-time starting in late May. They will work along side Angie Byron (webhchick), Alex Bronstein(effulgentsia), myself and other members at Acquia. While we have some promising candidates so far, Acquia is still seeking applicants to join the Spark team (with a strong preference to candidates located in or willing to move to the Boston area):

• Drupal UX Interaction Designer, who can conceptualize and prototype cutting-edge interface design.
• Senior Front-End Engineer, who eats, sleeps, and breaths JavaScript and jQuery (Drupal experience optional).

The Spark team will collaborate with the Drupal usability and the core development teams.

Spark update: WYSIWYG editing for Drupal

After a lot of discussion and testing, we decided to adopt the Aloha Editor as the WYSIWYG editor for Spark, and possibly for Drupal 8 core. Check out Wim's blog for the details. In short, it is the best HTML5 based WYSIWYG editor; fast, well-written and future-proof.

Here is a screenshot of our latest designs of how we envision integrating the Aloha Editor in Spark on a mobile device:

By tapping into a rich text field such as Body, a toolbar comes up with two tabs with editor buttons below: Format (containing buttons such as Bold, Italic, Left/Right Align, and Lists) and Insert (for Links, Images, and the like).

I also wanted to give a big thank you to Haymo Meran, creator of Aloha Editor and Director of Product Experience at Gentics Software GmbH, both for hosting a Drupal/Aloha collaboration sprint at his company's offices in Vienna last month, and also for changing the license of Aloha Editor to GPLv2+ (from AGPLv3) so that it could be used with Drupal!

It's an incredible gift to the Drupal project and the Open Source community at large. Thanks!

Spark update: ready for alpha testing

The Spark distribution is a Drupal 7 distribution which aims to prototype cutting-edge authoring experience improvements that we hope to propose for inclusion in Drupal 8 core. Since we announced Spark back in May, we've shown videos of prototypes of inline editing, responsive layout building and mobile administration. The rest of the Spark team (Angela Byron, Kevin O'Leary, Wim Leers, Gábor Hojtsy, Jesse Beach, Preston So and Dharmesh Mistry) has also been working hard to make these designs a reality.

There has been a lot of great progress over the past months, and with the release of Spark 7.x-1.0-alpha4, Spark is now ready for some community testing! Each module/theme that Spark builds upon is a separate, standalone contributed project that can be integrated into existing sites. This alpha release includes:

• Inline Editing, courtesy of Edit module. You can click into a node, switch the “View / Edit" toggle in the toolbar, and then click directly into any field to edit its contents, instead of having to be redirected to the backend.
• True WYSIWYG, courtesy of Aloha Editor. Edit your rich text with your theme's direct styling through the inline editor. It even works with images + captions, links directly to content in the site, and has basic support for tokenized strings.
• Responsive Layout Builder, courtesy of the Layout and Gridbuildermodules. You can configure layouts for separate breakpoints (e.g. Mobile, Tablet, Desktop) and even define your own grids for them to snap to. These technologies layer on top of Panels,though it's been architected so it could be integrated with other layout solutions as well.
• New admin theme, brought to you by Ember. This brings some nice light styling on Drupal core's Seven admin theme as well integrating theAdmin module to better support mobile devices. A more fleshed out mobile toolbar and administrative experience is slated for implementation soon.

If you'd like to try the distribution out without downloading and installing it, check our demo site at http://demo.sparkdrupal.com. (Note that since this site is open to anyone, it might look a bit funny at any given time. If things are really broken, please check back later.)

There is still much to do, but hopefully this release will provide a good understanding of the direction Spark is taking, and what we hope to propose for inclusion in Drupal 8 core. We greatly welcome feedback, bug reports and patches in the Spark issue queue.

At DrupalCon Munich next week, we'd love to talk more about how we can move some of these things into Drupal 8 core. We've setup various Spark sessions and BoFs at DrupalCon Munich to plan and brainstorm about this.

Node.js integration to Drupal

Node.js integration
===================

This module adds Node.js integration to Drupal.

Setup
=====

1. Install Node.js.

 Installing Node.js and NPM on Ubuntu/Debian

How to Install Node.js

2. Install required Node.js modules with the Node Package Manager (NPM).

Make sure you are in the nodejs module directory - NPM needs the package.json
file that comes with the nodejs module to install the right modules.

cd path/to/your/nodejs/module/directory
npm install
npm uninstall express
npm install express@2.5.9

3. Create a 'nodejs.config.js' file in your nodejs module directory.

Read the 'nodejs.config.js.example' file. A basic configuration can be as simple as:

/**
* This configuration file was built using the 'Node.js server configuration builder'.
* For a more fully commented example see the file nodejs.config.js.example in the root of this module
*/
backendSettings = {
"scheme":"http",
"host":"192.168.1.61",
"port":8080,
"key":"/path/to/key/file",
"cert":"/path/to/cert/file",
"resource":"/socket.io",
"publishUrl":"publish",
"serviceKey":"",
"backend":{
"port":80,
"host":"localhost",
"messagePath":"/drupal7/nodejs/message/"},
"clientsCanWriteToChannels":false,
"clientsCanWriteToClients":false,
"extensions":"",
"debug":true,
"transports":["websocket",
"flashsocket",
"htmlfile",
"xhr-polling",
"jsonp-polling"],
"jsMinification":true,
"jsEtag":true,
"logLevel":1};

Set debug to false when you are happy with your setup.

4. Run the node server with the command: node server.js

As long as you have 'debug: true' in your configuration file, you'll see lots of helpful messages.