Today my post about codes of conduct was published! Read "Beyond Being Excellent: Care and Feeding of a Code of Conduct" on the Palantir.net blog.

Along with the marvelous Kelsey Bentham, I gave a talk that was tentatively titled "Make Project Success without A Babel Fish". I dropped the babel fish joke at the last minute because I wasn't sure how many people would get it. (Hint: It's from Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy.)

It uses concepts and language from the Agile project management methodology to describe common communication mistakes that can sink projects, give some clues about how they arise, and make some suggestions about how to avoid them. Also includes humorous examples of how things can go wrong, hopefully to help you catch it early when your project starts going off the rails. Or just to laugh at.

It's also the same talk we gave at Twin Cities Drupal Camp in August, but the Fox Valley folks were nice enough to make this great recording of us and put it on YouTube:

Today my pull request to the Responsive Multi-Level Menu Github repo was merged. Exciting! It doesn't look like much (besides removing extra whitespace) but here's why the tiny new option I added was powerful.

Responsive Multi-Level Menu (RMLM) is a great little library that allows you to navigate through nested hierarchical menu trees without flyouts or page refreshes. It's great for mobile, and it's great for sidebars. However, it wasn't great for Drupal.

The reason for this lies in Drupal's default menu-making behavior and its divergence from the RMLM paradigm of menus.

Imagine that you have a structure like this:

• Parent Item One
  • Child Item One-A
  • Child Item One-B
  • Grandchild Item One-A-i
  • Grandchild Item One-A-ii
• Parent Item Two
  • Child Item Two-A

RMLM assumes that this means the pages (nodes/entities/what-have-you) that exist are like so:

• Parent Item One
  • Child Item One-A*
  • Child Item One-B
  • Grandchild Item One-A-i*
  • Grandchild Item One-A-ii*
• Parent Item Two
  • Child Item Two-A*

Where "*" indicates an actual page that you can navigate to. The rest are just some kind of bucket or placeholder. They can't be navigable links, because if you click on the item, it has to take you to the child items list, not to a page. To do both would be impossible.

Unfortunately, this is not how Drupal and most other popular CMSs work. They tend to create something like this:

• Parent Item One*
  • Child Item One-A*
  • Child Item One-B*
  • Grandchild Item One-A-i*
  • Grandchild Item One-A-ii*
• Parent Item Two*
  • Child Item Two-A*

where every single menu parent item also represents a page (node/entity/whathaveyou) unto itself.

That means that if you were to use the RMLM library with Drupal's menu structure, you'd end up with

• Parent Item One†
  • Child Item One-A
  • Child Item One-B†
  • Grandchild Item One-A-i
  • Grandchild Item One-A-ii
• Parent Item Two†
  • Child Item Two-A†

where "†" represents a page that exists, but cannot be navigated to with the RMLM-enhanced menu.

My pull request fixes that.

Instead of assuming that parent items will never represent content unto themselves, the setting I added permits the inclusion of a link to the parent item's content at the top of the list of child items.

The first thing you would see upon perusing the menu structure above with RMLM would be:

• Parent Item One >
• Parent Item Two >

with ">" indicating the existence of child items.

Clicking (or tapping) "Parent Item One >" with the stock RMLM configuration would show you

• < Back
• Child Item One-A >
• Child Item One-B

But with my new setting enabled, instead we'd get:

• Parent Item One
• < Back
• Child Item One-A >
• Child Item One-B

where the new "Parent Item One" link at the top would take us to, say, example.com/parent-item-one-page instead of just showing the menu for the parent items again.

With this modification, using Responsive Multi-Level Menu on Drupal-generated menus becomes as easy as theme_preprocessing your menu items to have the classes the RMLM library expects, and turning on the new setting I provided.