Drupal

Slides from our presentation at the Higher Education Web Symposium

Alex UA — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:39:00 -0500

Yesterday, Jody and I had the privilege of presenting at the first Higher Education Web Symposium, held at the University of Pennsylvania. Below you can find the slides from the first part of the session, which was part of our intro to Drupal and a showcase of some of the educational institutions that run Drupal sites. For the second part Jody did a live demonstration of some of the basics of setting up and running a Drupal site, which we were not able to record.

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Throughout Jody's presentation the conference participants jumped in with questions, which covered a big spectrum of topics. One of the really interesting things to me, though I guess it really shouldn't be surprising, was how many of the questions were the same ones raised during the two recent usability tests. Not only did those tests help prepare me for addressing these issues when they arose, but it gave me one more motivational push to give a hand at the usability sprint at DrupalCon Szeged!

One last thing I'd like to note, for anybody who was at the session or who wants some more arguments in favor of using Drupal in a University setting, I highly recommend reading the following post, watching the video within it, and reading the comments: Dries Buytaert: Many universities use Drupal

Drupal Rocks UNICEF's Junior 8 Summit

Alex UA — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:30:32 -0500

This short video from "UNICEF Television" features the workspace that we built (along with a few of UNICEF's internal developers, who are part of the Division of Communication's Youth Team) for UNICEF's annual Junior 8 Summit.

We created a bunch of custom modules for the site--including a MediaWiki integration module, a custom video player to work with mDialog (who are hosting all of the videos for the conference), and a highly customized photo gallery-- as well as a bunch of custom functionalities to make the workspace as intuitive and easy to use as possible. Unfortunately, as with many of the sites we've built for UNICEF, access is limited to employees and participants in the program, though you can check out a version of the video player on the main Junior 8 site.

Seeing these youth from all over the world using the tools we spent so much time creating really does make me feel great about the work we did, and it's yet another insistence of Drupal's ability to connect people from all over the world and enable them to work together in a meaningful way.

TED Talks: Yochai Benkler on Open-Source Economics

Alex UA — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:29:09 -0500

I just stumbled upon a great TED talk by Professor Yochai Benkler, on the transformative power of open-source and networks on societies and economies. His view of the future of economics bodes well for Drupal and the people & shops (like this one) that build sites using it.

I'm not sure how I've never heard of Benkler, but I just ordered his book (which is open source, of course)!

We're going to DrupalCon Szeged 2008, are you?

Alex UA — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:30:32 -0500

This week Jody and I registered to attend DrupalCon Szeged 2008. It's been a few years since I've been to Europe, and I've never been to Hungary, so I'm looking forward to an interesting and exciting trip. The last DrupalCon was a great experience for us-- Jody and I agreed to partner while we were there, I got to see a lot of friends and colleagues I hadn't seen in a long time, and I got to meet a ton of amazing people. If you're in the Drupal business but you're on the fence and wondering whether it's worth the expense (Luckily, we bought our plane tickets right before the big price increases!), trust me, it is!

I also am taking the opportunity to take a little vacation with the wife to see a bit more of the country. Everyone who I know who has visited Hungary raves about it, so I can't wait to see what the fuss is all about!

See you in Szeged!

Fun with Theme Switching

Jody — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:40:20 -0500

UPDATE: CODE REWORKED THANKS TO CHX

<?php
/**
 * Implementation of hook_menu (D5 code)
 */
function SOMEMODULE_menu($may_cache) {
  if (!$may_cache) {
    if ($theme = $_GET['theme']) {
      $themes = list_themes();
      if (isset($themes[$theme])) {
        $GLOBALS['custom_theme'] = $theme;
      }
    }
  }
}
?>

With this you can amuse yourself by browsing to /node/1?theme=marvin

I was thinking this could actually be useful- for example you could make an all xml theme and have Flash get data from path/to/page?theme=xml_theme

Drupal Node Access Explained

Jody — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:03:10 -0500

Drupal's API contains a pretty good description of how node access works (developers should also analyze the node_access function itself). There are many contributed node access control modules for Drupal and you really should understand the basics of node access before installing and configuring one. The API should suffice for developers but for the benefit of our many community members who build sites without reading code, here is a translation and some basic rules of thumb:

Drupal Association

Alex UA — Thu, 22 May 2008 16:16:24 -0500

Higher Education Web Symposium at the University of Pennsylvania - July 15-16

Alex UA — Mon, 12 May 2008 08:43:05 -0500

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!

Wall O' Drupal Video Feeds

Alex UA — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:52:19 -0500

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

Google Summer of Code 2008 - Views as Web Widget

Alex UA — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 14:22:36 -0500

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