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Erin and I will be at the 2014 NTEN NTC next week in Washington, D.C. We're going to helping with Drupal Day on Wednesday. I will also be doing a breakout session about diversity, accountability, and empowerment in nonprofits and the nonprofit tech community.

If you've ever been here before, you may notice that the site looks totally different. We started DevCollaborative in January 2013. The three of us were already working together, and had been in various forms for some years, but we decided to team up under a common name to make it easier to think and talk about ourselves as a team as we worked to develop more unified processes, better collaboration techniques, etc.

Ah yes... WYSIWYG editors (or as I prefer to more accurately call them, "rich text editors"). As you can see, I'm not their biggest fan. There are lots of reasons why they're troublesome, but I'll save that for another post. I wanted to quickly share a problem we came up against yesterday with a site we're about to launch, and its solution.

Building a membership site in Drupal isn't so hard, really. The challenge is to have memberships that include recurring fees. That is, a membership that automatically renews, and the member pays automatically. There are several reasons why this is hard. Some reasons include the payment processor - not all payment processors support recurring fees. But mostly, it's the tools we have available that are limiting in their options. But it is possible, though difficult, and fraught with peril.

When I first heard the news that there was a Drupal fork, I was pretty surprised and doubtful. Then I heard who started the fork (Nate Haug and Jen Lampton, really respected Drupalers), and I got a lot more interested, really fast. I've been playing with Backdrop now for a couple of weeks, and have even contributed some pull requests. It's helped me understand better the rationale behind the fork, and helped me think about what might happen moving forward.