Spring Cleaning Your Drupal Site

Many people celebrate spring by doing an intensive cleaning of their house, getting rid of stuff that isn't needed any more, putting away the winter clothes/jackets and cleaning in those places that you don't get to on a daily basis. It occurred to me that most CMS admins should take on a practice like this at least every year when I started looking at broken links. Checking for Bad Links Now the dead links are inevitable in any website that's up for any length of time. I was looking for a way to provide a list of broken links when...

Migrating WordPress Plugins to Drupal Modules - Earth Hour

It was Friday afternoon and went over to search for terms on Twitter that I like to keep an eye on when I ran into a post from @haggaret . It was a call to convert an Earth Hour WordPress Plugin over to Drupal. Now I'm very aware of environmental issues, but there are 8765 ( or so ) other hours in the year to worry about, so what's the big deal about this one. I'm still not sure, but in solidarity I decided to check it out and see when it was, unfortunately it was 8 days later on...

Accessible Interface Design

It's been another big week for accessibility issues & Drupal (and we're just barely at Wednesday). Got another patch committed to Drupal 7 (thanks Angie), but found another couple of bugs to add to the Accessibility Improvement's list . I taped a video of a friend of mine with Cerebral Palsy (Al Shain) trying to create an account and log into Drupal. That was certainly educational, and I've tossed it all up on Youtube with annotations for usability issues . Presentation Summary I just came back from a great talk by Mark McKay , who is the Tech Lead of...

Accessibility Discussions at DrupalCon

I've been trying to lead the charge on accessibility issues with Drupal 7 leading up to DrupalCon DC. As Dries outlined in his keynote, we've got until Sept 1, 2009 before the feature freeze takes place, so time's precious. Also, as Angie Byron noted, there are some accessibility issues that have been identified but not resolved for years. So, now that WCAG 2.0 is out and there seems to be a renewed interest in accessibility I was quite happy to see the interest in participants at the conference. Between the two Bird of a Feather (geeky breakout group) workshops that...

Union & Government Birds of a Feather

One of the things is common in technology conferences these days is side gatherings that are informally called to discuss certain issues. They are generally referred to as Birds of a Feather Gathering. Today I participated in two sessions (discussing nonprofits & CiviCRM) and initiated two (focusing on governments & unions). All were quite interesting and a good opportunity to talk with people passionate about a sector they are involved in. In both sessions there were nearly 15 people involved. Considering the multiple presentations and discussion sessions that were available at that time I was very happy to see this...

Building Community and Finding Consensus for Accessibility Enhancements

I think there are a number of ways that Drupal 7 could be much more accessible out of the box than it is right now. I've spent a bit of time working on a few items to improve and document some accessibility enhancements . Spent some time going through WCAG 2.0 documentation & comparing it with Drupal Core . And have been making patches and proposing best practices enhancements for a number of projects. I'm definitely much more of a PHP/MySQL developer, but the complexity of finding a neat solution that works for SEO, across all major browsers, and also...

Response to PWGSC's No Charge Licensed Software RFI

Well, it's been interesting to see how the government is choosing to investigate alternative software licenses. In a very broad definition that includes (thanks Wikipedia for this summary) it isn't clear that this definition is going to provide them very useful responses: Abandonware Adware Beerware Careware Crippleware Demoware Donationware Freely redistributable software Free software Freeware Nagware Open source Postcardware Registerware Shareware I wanted to thank the many respondents who took the time to fill in our survey. Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works Corporation Benjamin Horst, SolidOffice Rolf Paloheimo, Creative Communities Research Inc Peter Vander Klippe Alfred Settle, Freelance IT Consultant...

Canadian Government Uses Plenty of Open Source Software

Getting a survey of what software is used across all of the departments within the Government of Canada would be an extremely exhaustive process. I'm quite sure that there are many employees of the federal government who already are spending considerable time counting their proprietary licenses. So, how is it possible to get a quick overview of how open source is being used, since there are no contractual responsibilities to report it? With websites a lot of basic information is generally offered up from the server, and with a well established site like Netcraft we can do a quick audit...

Canadian Government Web Security Problems

One of the reasons given about why the government should worry about open source software is security. I'm rather tired of this argument, so after hearing it one too many times, I decided to take some action. The concern is that if a piece of software is open for everyone, including hackers, it will be more vulnerable . This has been shot down any number of times, with some of the best known arguments stemming from the idea that many eyeballs will give you better confidence in the security of your software. Others security experts that have argued that good...

We're Now Acquia Silver Partners - Commercially Supported Drupal

This past week we completed the final steps to become a Acquia Silver Partner . This is something we've had a number of discussions about within the shop and are happy with the opportunities that this partnership provides for us and our larger clients. OpenConcept is already the premier Drupal shop supporting the Canadian government, federal unions and national non-profit organizations. Our longstanding work with multi-lingual content management systems has placed us in a great space to work with bilingual organizations. The work we've done on accessibility leads us to help support more and more entities which will be required...