1. Bending Open Atrium to
your will!
Jeff Miccolis, Development Seed

2. Bending Open Atrium to
your will!
Twitter: @miccolis, @developmentseed

3. Open Atrium Co-maintainer
Twitter: @open_atrium

4. Give you want you need to
write your own feature.
My goal.

5. There is a lot to know!
My worry.

6. Expose you to the hard
problems
My approach.

7. Pretend you‟re all *nix
users
My approach.

8. ...that you know Drupal
My approach.

9. ...and that you‟ve used
features and context before
My approach.

10. 1. Quick overview of OA
2. Configuration
3. Groups & access control
4. Building a new feature
5. Pitfalls & resources.
Agenda.

11. Quick overview
Part 1.

12. What Open Atrium does
already.

14. quick demo.

15. French
Hebrew
Hungarian
Portuguese / Portugal
Swedish
Spanish Russian
30+ languages
Catalan Arabic
Danish Brazilian Portuguese
Italian Japanese
German

16. Time tracking!
A “real” wiki!
Maps!
Gantt Charts!
Solr powered search!
Alfresco powered DM!
News Aggregation!
The kinds of features you can add.

17. News Aggregation!
The feature we‟ll add today.

18. RSS+ATOM
Feeds per-group
Three categories
Atrium Reader
http://code.developmentseed.org/atrium_reade
r

19. quick demo.

20. People organized into
groups.
How Open Atrium expects to be used.

22. Is your feature useful to
people organized into
groups?
Question.

23. Yes, we‟re twitter junkies.
Answer.

24. Configuration
Part 2.

25. What modules will we use?
Getting technical.

26. Where does module X
store its configuration?
Features module compatiblity.

27. I warned you about this
What is the features module?

28. Your configuration needs to
be automatic.
Why exportables?

29. You cannot trust a
sequential id!
Exportables are crucial.

30. The `term_data.tid`
problem
You cannot use taxonomy for architecture.

31. Alex: sets up Open Atrium
Alex: makes a “Important” tag
Alex: builds a View with a term filter
Alex: bundles it into a feature
Tom: sets up Open Atrium
Tom: posts a blog with a tag, “drupal”
Tom: downloads Alex‟s feature
Tom: has issues...

32. “Alex! Your feature hides
anything I tag as
IMPORTANT! WTF!?!”
A term‟s creation order determines its
sequential id. You‟ve got not control.

33. No.
Is there a good work around?

34. Exportables will guide what
modules you use and how
you build.
The short.

35. Any thing that uses the
core `variables` system is
supported (via strongarm)
The good.

36. Context module does that
What about block visibility?

37. I warned you about this too
What is the context module?

38. What needs to be
customized per group?
Spaces module compatiblity.

39. Our aggregator doesn‟t
need anything of this.
Spaces has a great readme.txt

40. Context and Strongarm are
covered.
Spaces controllers.

41. Groups & Access Control
Part 3.

42. OG powers OA‟s groups
Open Atrium uses Organic Groups.

43. OG controls access
Open Atrium uses Organic Groups to control
who can see what.

44. This is where people get
confused.
Organic Groups implements Drupal‟s
node_access hooks.

45. node_access is not
permissions
The node access system let‟s you control who
can view and edit an individual node.

46. db_rewrite_sql()
The node access system is inforced at the SQL
level.

47. Don‟t worry
Views does this for you and it wrote the book
on exportable configuration.

48. Build it already!
Part 4.

49. Aggregation feeds (contrib)
Feeds node (core)
Feed items data (contrib)
Displays views (contrib)
Block visibility context (contrib)

50. No surprises
You knew this already.

51. Exportable and modular
What they have in common.

52. 1. Tighten scope
2. Build in order
3. Use features
Three steps to a successful feature.

53. Limited functionality that is
useful to people in groups
Tighten scope

54. Start with the content
types, then fields, then
displays.
Build in order.

55. At every stoping point
export your changes into
code and commit
Use features.

56. atrium_reader.info,
atrium_reader.module,
access plugins
Hightlights

57. Pitfalls & Resources
Part 5.

58. You‟ll get burned
Surely I can work around this „exportables‟
requirement.

59. It‟s not obvious the first
time you see it.
I didn‟t quite get the node access stuff.

60. Don‟t forget about View
access plugin in Spaces
Why does the menu icon show up when the
feature isn‟t enabled?

61. Localization always comes
back to bite
30+ languages, eh?

62. Yea, you should be using
l() anyhow
I didn‟t use l() and my links don‟t work.

63. community.openatrium.co
m
#open_atrium
Resources

64. Thanks.