develOOp another fine develOOpment

Ixis worked with Manchester based agency Worship Digital to produce a great multi-media based community site for the legendary Haçienda club brand in Manchester (UK).

The project included the usual News section for promoting upcoming activities and history of the nightclub, and alongside this an events area which allowed pinning an event on the world map using a custom Drupal CCK field.

MAPLight.org is a Drupal site I’ve been working with for quite awhile. Their upgrade to Drupal 6 and redesign launched last week. We worked with Chapter Three for design and theming; and MAPLight’s excellent team for the idea, research, and quite detail-oriented QA. It is already getting some mentions in the media.

Both money and legislative data sources have modules to pull the same source data into your database. OpenSecrets Open Data for donations to U.S. Congress; Legislature for votes and more from GovTrack.us. MAPLight’s research is available in an API.

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When using PHP functions such as array_map and preg_replace_callback, you are forced to pass in a single-parameter callback function, making it impossible to send additional context information to the callback. But it ain't necessarily so.

Function objects, aka Functors, are here to help.

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I have an interesting problem, on a data migration project I'm currently working on. I'm importing a large amount of legacy data into Drupal, using the awesome Migrate module (and friends). Migrate is a great tool for the job, but one of its limitations is that it requires the legacy database tables to have non-composite integer primary keys. Unfortunately, most of the tables I'm working with have primary keys that are either composite (i.e. the key is a combination of two or more columns), or non-integer (i.e. strings), or both.

Table with composite primary key.

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Jay just posted a blog post, called Building enterprise social communities with Drupal, sharing a white paper that we have written at Acquia. In this white paper, we answer questions like: what kind of social features Drupal supplies, why Drupal is the best choice for building a social site, what Drupal modules are useful when building a social site, and some examples of successful enterprise Drupal communities.

The reason we wrote this white paper is simple: many of the enterprise organizations that we talk to ask us these questions over and over again. Building social business sites is a very hot topic in the enterprise. The work environment in these organizations is evolving, and increasingly more, people want to connect, create, share and find people and information relevant to their work. Needless to say, not all social business sites are equal -- some are team collaboration sites, some are community sites, and others might be networking sites. They can exist behind the firewall for internal teams, or they can be external facing sites to engage with partners and customers.

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Drupal has come a long way since Acquia Marina leapt onto the scene in 2008 with an unprecedented number of theme settings. Many themes followed suit, and we were thrilled at the extra power and flexibility that these theme settings gave to Drupal users. These theme settings had come out of lots of time spent in the forums and on IRC, finding out what site builders were constantly running up against and wished they had an easy way to change. We constantly got feedback about how great they were in the Acquia themes, and how much our customers enjoyed them in our premium Drupal themes.

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I was asked to speak at this year's Career Day at our local high school, and thought it would be an awesome opportunity to skew the vision of young minds towards the possibilities that a work life in web design / development can offer. I did a similar talk a couple years ago at the last career day, and realized that in order to keep these guys from drifting off I had to make a concerted effort to break the third wall.

So, I put together this presentation that basically converts the room into a web development firm and introduces the multiple roles you can take on, all the while building out a spec for a popular web site clone (MySpace was the choice each time). I was really impressed with the kids' willingness to participate, and heard it went over pretty well.

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Plan your DrupalCon adventure by picking the sessions you want to attend!

Because DrupalCon is such a large event, and the time flies by so fast, I always recommend you put together a list of the sessions you really want to go to and keep it handy. You can start doing this now by going to the session schedule and adding sessions to your personal schedule. By signing up you'll be able to see what sessions are on what day and at what time, and come to the unfortunate realization that you can't be in three places at once.

A lot of the times designers forget to make sure their websites print out clean and readable. Users sometimes want to archive your website as a hardcopy so they can reference it later. This means they print it out by doing the most simple way they can think of which is going to File > Print instead of clicking some random print button on the page.

Note: Some important things people print off the web are coupons and purchase orders which is normally reminded on the web page.

On the piece of paper they end up printing, they will be viewing the navigation menu system, a random blank white page, a bunch of ads, form elements such as input boxes and useless images. The content they really want is just a section of this cluttered page of ink. The solution I am giving is to clean these pages up, make it readable for even my grandma, and save paper.

First step is to add a print.css file to all your printed pages, to do this is to add the code to your theme_name.info file.

Chris Heuer founded the Social Media Club and came to DrupalCon Paris to talk about "Social + Media: What's Needed Next." Heuer talks about the social media trends that he sees as well as how Drupal plays a part in them. He also shares some of his insights into some of the darker sides of social media, and how to best use the available tools with the highest intentions of social change.

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Chris Heuer founded the Social Media Club and came to DrupalCon Paris to talk about "Social + Media: What's Needed Next." Heuer talks about the social media trends that he sees as well as how Drupal plays a part in them. He also shares some of his insights into some of the darker sides of social media, and how to best use the available tools with the highest intentions of social change.

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Join Ryan Price and Mike Anello as they talk to Trevor James (twitter.com/jamesweblabs), one of the co-authors of Drupal 6 Performance Tips from Packt Publishing. Unfortunately, Trevor's co-author, TJ Holowyachuk, was unable to take part in the interview.

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The voting is over and the Drupal Con San Fran sessions have been posted. I'm proud to say there will be a number of sessions featureing folks from Zivtech and the Philly area:

Alex - Zivtech:
http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/contractor-shop-how-make-leap

Alex - Zivtech:
http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/panel-many-flavors-drupal-t...

Alex - Zivtech:
http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/state-drupal-web-applicatio...

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There have already been a couple of glowing reviews of this book recently. But they fail to mention what is so great about it.

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Got a website with ten or more content types, and you want a neat way to promote mixed content to the front page/side bar? Here is one solution.

The Twitter dataset is an insanely valuable source of useful social networking information. That explains the huge number of Twitter-related sites that spring up, each one performing one specific analysis of Twitter data. The one I was looking at today is TwitterSheep which just creates a tagadelic-type cloud of keywords, from a user's followers' bios. Pretty neat idea, but it was frustrating that the Web application didn't let me actually see who of my followers are in which category - and make a list out of them, and email them, etc.

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Ah, the spring. So many things happen in the spring. Snow melts. Flowers bloom. The Easter Bunny sells cheap chocolate. People set their clocks ahead in an attempt to confuse their pets. It is also the start of conference season in the northern hemisphere, which means flying about the country talking about Drupal. This year is especially busy, with 10 presentations in 4 cities so far. (Possibly more to come.)

Here's where you'll be able to stalk Crell in the coming weeks:

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The results are in, and it looks like Palantir will be all over DrupalCon San Francisco, which kicks off in just under five weeks.  Nine of us will be on hand to spread the Drupal love (and some great swag) everywhere from the stage to the Birds of a Feather (BoF) room to the hallway. Here's the low-down on the Palantir track: