On July 15th & 16th, the University of Pennsylvania will be holding a Higher Education Web Symposium, "the first and only web design conference for IT Professionals working in Higher Education." The conference focuses on a lot of issues that web developers and designers deal with on an everyday basis, such as usability and good css design, and features such notable speakers as CSS guru Eric Meyer and usability expert Jared Spool.

The conference will also feature two Drupal related sessions. First, fellow Philly Drupal evangelist, and head of the Philly Drupal Group, Nathan Gasser will be presenting as part of the panel Adopting Content Management Systems. Later that day Jody and I will have the privilege of evangelizing Drupal to the conference participants in our session HOWTO: A Drupal Demonstration.

If you're interested in the conference, you should register now, as space is filling up fast on what promises to be a great two-day conference!

Jody just created a small patch for FeedAPI that added a filter to Views for "Filter by Parent Term," which allowed me to create a new way to sort through the massive amount of videos that have been coming in via the various Drupal themed video feeds that I've been able to find. Before, FeedAPI only had an option to "Filter by Parent Feed", which only accepted the feed's node id and which made it pretty unusable as an exposed filter. But now that it is working, I present to you, the Wall O' Drupal Video Feeds. This is mostly just a proof-of-concept as I try to work through different ways to organize helpful and informative Drupal videos (espescially instructional videos), but I hope it's useful on its own as well!

Update: The "wall o' feeds" is now known as the Drupal Video Planet

ZivTech is extremely excited to announce our participation in the Google Summer of Code 2008. Jody and I, along with Aaron Winborn and Roger Filomeno, are mentoring the project Views as Web Widget, which will be worked on by Utah State University student John Snow. At the end of this project you should be able to turn your Drupal Views output into java, opensocial, and facebook widgets, and your site should be able to serve them out as XML feeds. I believe that this project truly has the potential to push Drupal to another level, as it can allow people to publish from their Drupal site to any number of other sites with ease. As Aaron noted in his post Drupal will Explode your Site into a Million Pieces, and Why You Want That:

Views as a Web Widget has the potential to revolutionize the Internet, now that I think about it. Taking a hint from Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion in The Future is Web Services, Not Web Sites, we are entering a time where creating an API for embedding content within another site is becoming a standard way of sharing information.

The leading players on the web all see the train coming. They are wisely creating APIs and turning themselves into plug-and-play services, not just big destinations. YouTube is just the latest to do so today. Amazon has S3. Google has OpenSocial and an extensive library of APIs. As does Microsoft. Facebook is allowing its applications to live outside the site. Twitter is an API first and (eventually) a business model second. Finally, the booming widget economy shows the promise of small content that can go anywhere.

Anyway, I'll be sure to write more about the project as the summer progresses, but for now I just wanted to end by saying congrats to John Snow, and THANK YOU to google for funding this initiative, and to all the hard working Drupalistas (most of all Webchick) who have helped Drupal to accept 21 awesome students, whose projects promise to bring an amazing amount of new features and functions to Drupal

This has been added to the Drupal 5 PHP Snippet section of the Drupal Handbook

I needed to make a little freetagging form to allow users to tag content as they view it - here's how I did it:

Set up a freetagging vocabulary using taxonomy.module and assign it to your content type as usual. Note the vid (vocabulary id) of your freetagging vocabulary (you can find it in the URL when editing the vocabulary). In a custom module, create a new form like so:

There are lots of great Drupal productivity / development modules (e.g. drush, devel, coder) which due to their nature as modules need to be installed on each site you work on. If you work on a dizzying number of different Drupal sites, productivity improvements which are not site-specific are the most useful.
NB: this post is geared toward Mac users.