As the year draws to a close, it can feel busier than ever: trying to wrap things up (literally and metaphorically!) can take a lot of time and it’s difficult to carve out time for reflection.
One of Fibonacci’s core values is sustainability, which means we’re committed to the long-term: building products that are sustainable, cultivating a work culture that is sustainable for our team, and investing in a sustainable open source community. And the only way we know how to do that is by building in time for reflection.
So before we head off to find JOY (another company value) at holiday parties, we want to reflect on the past year’s work.
DrupalCon 2021
In our goals to invent in open source communities, this year our fearless leader Irina contributed time to the DrupalCon Program Committee. She also led a BOF session on Musings on Open Source and Drupal (follow along with some great resources). For us, the theme of this DrupalCon was going back to the foundations of open source principles.
WebCamp 2021 - we did it!!
In more community event-related news, this year was the 12th Stanford WebCamp! Hosting a camp is an accomplishment in the best of years, but with two virtual camps now under our belts, we’re celebrating! Check out some of our favorite sessions from this year.
Assignment Calculator
Speaking of open source, this project was a great win for us in terms of using open source technology to improve lives of students and educators. We were working with the team from Stanford Learning Lab who work with all learners to identify their strengths and provide them with tools to be effective. They wanted to adapt and expand an Assignment Calculator created by the University of Minnesota Libraries to provide even more students with their strategies and techniques.
Lucky for us, those developers also believe in Open Source principles :) We were able to consult with them, and then create a Stanford version on Drupal that will allow the Stanford Learning Lab to share their expertise with students. We also created a non-affiliated version that will allow educators to create custom assignments. Oh, and all our code is available on GitHub.
We’ve already heard from a couple of other schools who want to adapt it for their students.
Empowering students to tackle tough assignments is such a positive outcome… and all accomplished with the power of Open Source!
Cloud IDE is CMS for coders
Our journey in building the best web tools for research and academia is taking new turn - Irina presented at the DevOps summit at DrupalCamp Colorado. How did she get here? She found that CloudIDE is doing for coders what Content Management Systems did for content managers. Now she can invest time that she used to spend on setting local IDE for D9 (OS versions, PHP versions, db versions, composer, other tools) into testing new features for modules that we need for site building. Same tool was presented at Stanford IT Unconference in December.
Drupal 7 End of Life
If you work in Drupal, you knew this was coming. We’re working with many clients who need to get off of their Drupal 7 sites. A lot of these site owners are stressed: they don’t know what the options are, let alone how to decide, and they mostly just want their site to work… oh, and not cost too much!
We’re able to use our expertise to empower them with the facts about different CMS, what the roadmap looks like, and what solutions are available.
Backdrop CMS - our first site, our first contrib
Speaking of getting off of Drupal 7, we’ve officially dipped our toe into Backdrop CMS… Ok, maybe we went ahead and dove right in the deep end! After lots of deep dives and experimentation, we’ve officially migrated a Drupal 7 site to Backdrop (with more on the way!). And, to keep our open source communities strong, when we saw something we needed, we went ahead and made a contrib to the project: flexible three column layouts for all!
UC Santa Cruz Science
Don’t you go thinking we forgot about Wordpress! It’s still one of the best CMS options out there for a lot of applications. This year, we worked with https://science.ucsc.edu/ to maintain their site. We created shortcodes that allowed them to pull in content from elsewhere with unique, custom queries… sound familiar? As we always say, there’s lots of different ways to feed a cat… And your CMS is flexible enough to feed many, as long as you’ve got the right development team!
Drupal, Backdrop, Wordpress, oh my! What will 2022 bring?