By popular demand I added tagging to Drupal Digest. This allows you to create your own rss feeds from all Drupal Planet content about drupalcon or views for instance. To implement this feature I enabled the core taxonomy module and Feed Element Mapper to save the feeds' tags as Drupal terms.

Along with the simple voting mechanism this is an easy and useful way to personalize the Planet's aggregated content. These are really low-profile changes that can easily be implemented for the Drupal Planet so I hope they get picked up as part of the drupal.org redesign.

We're pleased to announce that O'Reilly's first Drupal book, Using Drupal, is now finished. It's being sent to the printer and should be available at your favorite book stores soon. In fact, you can pre-order from Amazon.com right now.

But you want a sample chapter, you say? Well you've come to the right place! The sample chapter is entitled "Event Mangement" and covers some of the most sticky aspects of handling time-based information in Drupal. The chapter talks about how to use the Date, Calendar, CCK, Views, and Flag modules to create a simple events site in which users can sign up to attend an event. The download includes the table of contents for the entire book, so you can see what you'll get when the entire book is ready.

read more

read more

In part two of this series, you got into CCK and views. This time around, you will be theming the views and adding a little spit and polish to pretty it up.

Views has a neat feature that allows you to create a simple template file to coerce the ugly default output of views into something more presentable. If you created the CCK fields and Views just like I did in part two you can copy and paste the following code into the appropriate files.

read more

Remember that interview that Joss Whedon had over at the Wired blog where he said he hadn't been interviewed by Crocheting Monthly yet about Dr. Horrible's sing-a-long blog? Yes, of course you remember that! Well my very favourite Drupal-run crochet magazine, CrochetMe, "hypothetically" has a question for you... "If you could ask Joss Whedon one crafty question, what would it be?" Make sure you drop your question in the hat before 5PM PST Thursday November 13th! You may want to read the back story about Kim's amazing adventure to secure this interview.

The Permeke Library in Antwerp is the location of tonights Drupal User group meeting.

Hans Coppens from Groen!WEB will talk about the multi-site solution that was implemented for the websites of the local usergroups of Groen! (the green political party).
The general usecase that's used for these websites will be shown, and Hans will explain how you can implement a similar approach for your organization.
For all your technical questions, Jan, Roel, Jo and Nick will be available.

The presentation is in Dutch; questions can be in Dutch, French or English.
Make sure to register at Drupal.be (there are only a few more seats available).

I've recently been thinking a lot about the freemium business model. For those unfamiliar with the freemium business model, it was first articulated by venture capitalist Fred Wilson in 2006:

"Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc., then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base."

I've been thinking about the freemium business model because, inspired by Drupal and Open Source, both my companies, Acquia and Mollom, use a freemium business model. (Technically, Acquia uses an Open Source business model which is different from the freemium business model, but there is plenty of overlap and similarities -- pointing out the differences could be a blog post and discussion on its own.)

read more

“Variables in JavaScript are fundamentally the same as object properties”
From “JavaScript – The Definitive Guide, 5th edition”

A meme from James Tauber, Greg Newman, Justin Lilly, Brian Rosner and Eric Florenzano.

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
• No cheating :)

A few weeks ago (on Sat 18th Oct 2008), we (a.k.a. the Sydney Drupal Users' Group) held the first ever DrupalCamp Australia. Sorry for the late blog post — but hey, better late than never. This was Sydney's second full-day Drupal event, and as with the first one (back in May), it was held at the University of Sydney (many thanks to Jim Woulfe from the Faculty of Pharmacy, for providing the venue). This was Sydney's biggest Drupal event to date: we had an incredible turnout of 50 people (that's right — we were booked out), and for part of the day we had two presentation tracks running in adjacent rooms.

DrupalCamp Australia in lovely Sydney.

read more

As you can see, we think that what the DC government is doing by opening up its data and asking people to mash it up is a great idea. We hope that more cities follow the lead. To put put our support behind this initiative we decided to enter another website in the contest - one that focuses on the lighter side of things. Welcome to Stumble Safely, a website that will help you find the best bars and a safe path to stumble home on.

read more

"Scratch your own itch" is one of the mottos of the open-source movement. And this evening, I had one monstrous itch.

If you saw this blog more than a week ago, you'll remember that I only recently cleaned it up from a horrible mess and upgraded it to Drupal 6 at the same time. Since then, I've found numerous small ways to improve it. For the most part I use widely available addons (archive, tagadelic, adsense, agregado), but I freely hack away at them when I need more functionality.

For example, you may notice that when you are on an older post from October 2007, the calendar block to the right will show October 2007 instead of November 2008 - it doesn't do that out of the box. The tag cloud shows tags from both vocabularies, both the freely tagged "keywords" and the strictly hierarchical "news category", which required some extra code as well.

read more

I’m looking for a flash (or AJAX) banner rotator for a project I’m working on.  Something like this.  Does anyone know of anything like that that is either free or open source?

One of the core services that Acquia offers is support for people building sites with Drupal. "The S-Files" are stories about the day-to-day life of our support team. Each one contains a nugget of Drupal knowledge that helped a customer succeed with Drupal. Enjoy!

"Hello, I installed a new theme on my site but I didn't like it. So I deleted it. Now I can't log into my site and it really looks broken."

read more

Acquia documentation agent Jam* and I will be heading to Denmark this weekend where we'll be geeking out with Scandanavian Drupallers at the first ever DrupalCamp Copenhagen. You will recognize us by our Acquia shirts and our inability to speak Danish. Our mission is to help you upgrade your Drupal 4 or 5 sites to Drupal 6.

read more

There has been a lot of hand waving about the semantic web, RDF, and Drupal. This is good, and it is important for there to be excitement about the possibilities that this opens to us. Now the first concrete plans are being laid and the first patches are being written and evaluated. If you’ve ever wondered about this semantic web business, or if you thought microformats were a good idea, or if you’ve been secretly (or publicly) coding your own RDF tools for Drupal you’ll want to be a part of this conversation.

A lot of hard issues will have to be solved. XHTML document designers (ie web application builders and Drupal developers) are not accustomed to working with XML namespaces. The inclusion of RDFa is wholly dependent on the theme layer so it is important to build tools that handle this without further burdening Drupal themers. The basic data storage mechanisms in Drupal are all based on relational databases, not RDF, thus it will fall on tool builders and module authors to ascribe semantic meaning to data and to actively use the new tools to generate RDFa markup.

read more

You can show that Drupal is the platform of choice for governments by voting in the next 12 hours in the Apps for Democracy contest. There’s no login required and voting only takes three seconds, so vote!



This competition is an experiment by the Washington, DC government to see what developers can do with open data streams of city data. If they like the results, they’ll open up more data and make it freely available next year. This is also a great opportunity to show governments that open source software – and Drupal – rock. Our submission is the only one that’s 100% open source.

read more

OutsideinDC is a guide to biking in Washington, DC where you can find detailed bike routes for commuting or fun, monitor bike theft in real time, and use Craigslist to shop for equipment. It’s a community space, so if you have a tip or want to sound off on biking in DC, just add #dcbike to a twitter message and it will show up on the front page of this site.

read more

For those of you who haven't been keeping up with the Do It With Drupal blog, we've been posting profiles on some of the speakers who will be appearing at the event. Recent posts include short profiles of Earl Miles (author of Views) and Karen Stevenson (co-maintainer of CCK).

Whether or not you're planning on coming to the event next month, it's important to recognize the achievements of the people contributing such wonderful work to the Drupal project.

read more

My position with Acquia will find me helping out with a lot of migrations and upgrades. I'm going to embark on a multiple-part blog to discuss some of the common techniques that I use when moving clients to Drupal.

Migrating to Drupal can seem intimidating if you already maintain a database-driven website. However, populating a Drupal site with your current content might be easier than you think. Whether you are migrating from a popular CMS or a fully custom application, you can easily use Drupal modules to mimic your current data structures and migrate your data using a simple custom PHP script. I should note that while there are several different methods to accomplish this task, this happens to be my favorite.

read more

It's time again for Portland Drupal developers to gather at OpenSourcery and count the ways Drupal makes their lives better (and to get help on what still stumps them).

The gatherings have been growing and becoming more informative every month, and we expect November's Meetup to continue that trend. We have another great session in the offing - Steve Edwards' presentation on using Übercart to build e-commerce sites - so we anticipate lively discussion on a range of issues.

It's now clear that Portland has an extremely active Drupal community, which means perhaps it's time to consider two gatherings per month: one that focuses on sophisticated users who need in-depth, technically rich discussion, and another that's geared toward beginners. We'll broach that subject at the Meetup.

As always, join us Wednesday evening from 6pm-8pm, followed by a beer at the Green Dragon. We're located at 711 SE Ankeny, one block south of East Burnside.

Telcos set up as easily as WordPress and Drupal sites using software and hardware from projects like OpenBTS! Now this would be the end of "telco business as usual". Go open go!

QUOTE [From Using Constraint to Design for Innovation at Many Possibilities] (via Ethan Zuckerman)

2. Make a telco as simple to set up as a wordpress blog. Wireless meshes, least-cost-routing, etc. Let’s make as much of that complexity disappear into default behaviours that can be tweaked as the owner/entrepreneur becomes more comfortable with the product.

3. Be as open as possible. This is more of a philosophical than a practical constraint. We believe we can attract maximum participation by making software and hardware as open as possible. We believe that Open Hardware strategies devices like the Mesh Potato can change the way people think about hardware.

END QUOTE