Drupalgive

Ten years ago today Adrian Rossouw committed the first code for the Aegir project. ComputerMinds have been involved in Aegir for many of those years, particularly one of our senior developers: Steven Jones. We asked him some questions about it to mark the occasion.

When did you get involved in the Aegir project?

I went to a session at Drupalcon Washington DC in March 2009 and Adrian was presenting this mad thing: Drupal managing other Drupal sites. At ComputerMinds we were looking for something to help manage our Drupal hosting and help update sites and generally make things...

It's a well known fact that a large proportion of sites turn off the node preview button. It just doesn't work well. Your unsaved changes don't show and the admin theme is used in place of your site theme - not helpful.

Workflows like that provided by Workbench Moderation give previews that work nicely, but that involves a lot of complexity with revisions and workflow. It really changes the way you (and your nodes, for that matter) work. For the sites out there that don't have something like Workbench Moderation in place, this usually means that there is no accurate...

Several of our recent projects have involved setting up languages that feel like 'child' languages of other languages, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's for marketing, so that content can be overridden for markets using a specific currency, other times it's to target a specific audience. Our classic examples are 'Euro English' and 'British English' - in either case, these are special cases of regular English. A more traditional example would be Canadian French - where most content would be the same as French, but some pages would want different spellings or customisations. We came across Amazee Labs' work on language fallback which inspired us to work on the Language Hierarchy project.

I recently read the trending article The Web We Have to Save, by blogger Hossein Derakhshan ('Hoder'), who had been imprisoned in Iran for six years. In the article, he talks about how the internet had changed over that time. Quality can be drowned out; what is important is diluted in amongst the trivial.

Personally, I believe any expression of culture will reflect the society it flows from. The internet is a global society, so incorporates so many different aspects of humanity - different, good, and bad.
What does the internet say about our global society? I believe that we should all take responsibility to some extent -- especially those of us in the business of websites and content on the internet! Can we contribute to a more responsible internet? Are we equipped to do so?