Drupal

Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), one of the leading international development contractors, has deployed Open Atrium to help its GIS team in Islamabad communicate with its office in Peshawar and headquarters back in Bethesda on a capacity building project. In addition to improving team communications, they decided to use Open Atrium to boost the project's transparency for USAID and to get a sustainability win by using open source software that can stay behind with the local team in Pakistan long after the mapping project is completed.

Below is a short Q&A I had with Andrew Ross from DAI's GIS office about his work and how Open Atrium is helping.

Can you tell us about your project and your team in Pakistan?

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As the web evolves, we evolve with it. The introduction smart-phones to the general public, in a mass, together with lower costs of cellular internet connectivity and availability of wireless networks, all lead to an increasing demand to supply mobile application, to go with a website or service. iPhone started the storm, and Android is catching up rapidly. Other mobile devices are not staying behind.

Few years back we were amazed by our possibility to be mobile, while staying accessible and reachable. Now, the net goes with us, anywhere we go, we are not only mobile, we are in constant connection to information, friends and services. All this information is usually saved on a server somewhere. On this server each one has an identity, assets that are associated with this identity, friends, pictures, preferences etc. Sounds familiar? Right - all of the above are native in Drupal.

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Drupal's "premier conference" is quickly approaching. This Drupal conference is known as DrupalCon and will be held in San Francisco from April 19-21, 2010. As with previous years, the unofficial theme of the conference is to "learn about all things Drupal". If the conference sessions aren't enough, the schedule is also packed with plenty of development, documentation, and training events that are being held the days prior to and following the conference.

Presently over 1500 people have signed up to attend the conference. The price of attending a DrupalCon has always been reasonably priced which is one of the reasons this conference always sees a high turnout rate. If you plan on attending the conference, I would urge you to buy your tickets to DrupalCon now. Procrastinators like me have been known to wait too long to register for this conference only to find out that the maximum number of available tickets for the conference has already been reached.

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Just a note to all kindly Drupalists and your followers. I'll be appearing at SxSw interactive to talk about Drupal in the Cloud, sporting an updated presentation which includes info on how we're using BZR to create a "cloud platform", where all that's going anyway, plus details about our forthcoming Mercury on-demand service.

I am looking forward to seeing all sorts of great folks in/around the conference. If you're going to be in Austin this coming weekend, drop me a comment and let's coordinate! You can mark the session on your planner right here.

For those unable to attend, there will be some video and other media, and my slides will be posted online as always. See you in the Lone Star state!

During my last session on Drupalcamp in Barcelona I got the impression that there was a need for an updated guide on how to easily setup your own Apache Solr instance.
If you want to see why you or your company would have the need for an improved search experience you can still see my presentation on slideshare : http://www.slideshare.net/nickvh/drupal-apachesolrRead more

Lullabot is looking for an experienced project manager. Responsibilities include: managing scope, deliverables, schedules, and team resources for Lullabot client and internal projects. Daily tasks would include leading daily 15 minute check-in calls for each project, tending the ticket queue and managing task lists, communicating (email/phone) with clients, and basically keeping projects on track and moving forward. Lullabot is a distributed company without a central office, so like all Lullabot jobs, this is a telecommuting position and may involve travel.

Additional responsibilities include helping to write and assemble new project proposals and statements of work, though we tend to focus on bigger projects and don't take on too many projects at once. You'd be responsible for estimating and staffing projects, meeting with clients, pursuing and growing development partnerships, and coordinating the delivery of various projects.

If this sounds like a lot, it is. But Lullabot is a very collaborative company so you won't be working in isolation. You'll be working with a team of highly experienced Drupal consultants and developers with excellent communication skills and a passion for their work.

Ideal candidates should:

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....with the release of m.stubru.be the mobile site of the nr.1 public broadcast radio station "Studio Brussel".

Studio Brussel, the nr. 1 radio station of the Belgian public broadcaster VRT has released last week it's mobile website using Siruna technology.

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At DrupalCon Paris, Doug Green of CivicActions shared some insights doing big Multilingual sites. He talks about some of the pain points faced with doing the site, and working with the i18n module.

Other references mentioned:

• Locale module in Drupal 6
• Properly the t() function
• i18nSync module included within i18n
• Amnesty Report Site
• Amnesty International site

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One requirement of the Archdiocese of St. Louis' website is that group administrators are able to publish and unpublish the content inside their groups, and they should also be able to schedule posts for automated publishing and unpublishing at a later time.

To do this, I used the following modules:

• OG User Roles
• Scheduler
• Publish Content
• [EDIT: I'm now using the Override Node Options module rather than Publish Content - it gives more fine-grained control over visibility of node form options.]

After enabling these modules, I spent a while in the Permissions page, and also created a new user role, "administer nodes." Ironically, I didn't assign the 'administer nodes' permission to this role, because doing so causes a huge mess ('administer nodes' gives waaay too much power to anyone except the site admin—it's best to leave that beast unchecked in most cases).

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Recently, I have been working with quite a few Drupal sites, and one of my favorite tools to use has become drush. For those of you who are not aware of it, drush is a command line utility (drush = DRUpal SHell) that makes management of a Drupal site much more bearable. Drush is a great tool to use and is quite simple to install on your system when you have admin rights to the box. However, what about those of us on shared hosting system?

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Over the last year, Mediacurrent has been intensively collaborating with Ad Giants, an innovative marketing company based in Dallas, Texas. Ad Giants boasts an impressive list of clients and strategic partners like T. Boone Pickens, the legendary oil and business man, who has been featured on national television ads advocating an energy plan overhaul.

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The March Washington, DC Drupal meetup will be tonight (3/8) at 7:00 pm at Stetson's. After missing last month's meetup due to the snowmaggedons, it will be great to catch up with everyone.

As usual there will be a round of lightning talk where anyone can take the floor and talk - for five minutes or less - on a Drupal related topic. So far two people have volunteered:

• Jeff will talk about the Boxes module, which produces exportable and Spaces-friendly blocks

• StevenC has volunteered to talk about a website he built for a local construction firm that included a data migration from a legacy MS SQL database and some complex back-end programming.

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I'm working on a new framework for dropdown menus and I'm running out of ideas. So far I got:

1. Animation on showing as well as hiding the menu (superfish only supports on-show)
2. Automatic configurable multi-column dropdowns. When number of items in a submenu exceeds set number a submenu is 2 columns, or 3 columns. (will look like http://www.whitehouse.gov)
3. Added support for custom easing, including the additional easing from the jQuery easing plugin and some homebrew easing*.
4. Animated properties are configurable (widh/height/opacity)

So what cool menu feature would you like to have on your next Drupal site? drop your idea in the comments!

*my new and favorite dropdown easing:

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Following some issues to integrate drush and making civicrm upgrade process accessible from script, I started looking at drush on how we can take advantage of it for civicrm, and was surprised with the ease I was able to reuse drush code to add few utilities for civicrm. Some of the utilities currently implemented are:

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Given a list of videos tagged with a specific vocabulary, I wanted to show a view of these videos on the page of another node type (a "channel") that is also tagged with the same vocabulary. The idea is to create video channels that implicitly relate to videos by sharing taxonomy terms, instead of explicitly relating the videos to their channel (using node references for example). The videos should show on the channel's node page.

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The bane of multistep node forms are validation errors. But Drupal 7 has a cure. Not nice but a cure.

Slap #access = FALSE on form elements you dont want to see in the current step and then set up the Next button with #limit_validation_errors set to the elements you are about to see. The Prev button should get an empty #limit_validation_errors. Should field validation errors bother you, you can nuke those in hook_field_attach_validate.

<?php
define('MYMODULE_STORY_NODE_FORM_LAST_STEP', 2);

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This video shows how to use the Multiple Image Upload, Views and Views Bulk Operations modules to create a "multiple image upload and tag" tool. The View used in this video is attached as a text file which can be imported into your site using the Views import tool.

Bulk Uploading/Tagging images in Drupal - Imagex + VBO from Greg Knaddison on Vimeo.

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Well, 2010 is here, and so is March, and my blog has been pretty quiet for a while because of an insane amount of contract work that has left me with minimal time for anything outside of paid work. Drupal freelance has been VERY good to me over the last 4 months since leaving my full time employment. It was no doubt a very scary situation to be in again, but everything worked out for the best. Even the FT job that I ended up not getting that I was completely sure I wanted ended up falling apart for a reason.

Freelance Consulting/Contract work is a touchy business, and not for everyone, but for me, it really is a great way to be. What mainly attracts me to it is the ability to work from home, set my own hours, and oddly enough, make a lot more money than most full time opportunities. My days of commuting to ANY office are in the past, and while I will/am still considering FT positions that allow 100% telecommute, there's no reason for me to ever want to get out of my jammies and deal with office drama again.

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MacHeist is up to their same tricks and have just released a new bundle. Inside that bundle is a product called MacJournal that has tempted me.

So, I have downloaded a 15 day trial and started to play with it.

I'm no fan of Flash. Even the name annoys me :-) But I feel that recreating its capabilities using the trio HTML/CSS/JavaScript (isn't there an acronym for these 3 interrelated technologies?) is often non-trivial.

A case in point: I recently added to Sheetnode the feature of editing the spreadsheet fullscreen. While every Flash component has a fullscreen option, I couldn't even find a jQuery component that implements this functionality.

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