Participant Productions

My first client after joining Lullabot was Participant Productions, famous for their Syriana and their Good Night, and Good Luck block buster movies. This film company “exists to tell compelling, entertaining stories that also create awareness of the real issues that shape our lives” as they explain on their about page.

In order to help achieve this goal, Participant Productions has created Participate.net to facilitate collaboration and awareness around these political issues, allowing people to create accounts and voice their opinions on various issues, along with being able to participate in various campaigns to promote change in our society.

My role on this project was to lead the effort for upgrading their website from Drupal 4.6 to 4.7. Now, this was no simple task at all, since we were trying to make this upgrade to an unstable version of 4.7, since 4.7 wasn’t even out yet! It was still only about 90% finished, and buggy indeed. Now the real challenge during this upgrade was updating all of the custom modules (there were a number of them), along with ensuring that all other downloaded modules were working too. As a result, I fixed quite a few bugs in Drupal core after uncovering them from upgrading custom modules and I became the new lead maintainer of the TinyMCE module, since I fixed a number of bugs in that module and added quite a few new features.

But I learned my lesson, upgrading from 4.6 to 4.7 can certainly be quite a hassle! So much changed after the forms API went in—I’m not sure if I’d volunteer to do that conversion again :-)