Getting Drupal in Libaries

Less than two years after this post they now have 11 titles when searching their catalog for 'Drupal' in the Ottawa Public Library. It is great to see how big the demand is for this great CMS. I am quite excited to see Drupal adoption taking off in different verticals in our society. We're feeling a sudden surge of interest within government, but we have also noticed a big increase within libraries. There are communities of users sparking up and library specific modules being developed. The flexibility of Drupal, particularly with CCK/Views makes it a great resource for people who...

Donating to the Drupal Association

So it was after contributing a patch to the Donation module developed for the Drupal Association that I finally decided it was time for OpenConcept to step up to the bar and become an organizational member of this group. It isn't much more than a token gesture, however we are working to be more involved in contributing more than our time and experience to the Drupal project. We've donated some funds to Drupal events that we've attended and have organized others. The manner in which open source projects can organize and collaborate to pay for the inevitable infrastructure work is...

Private Wikis, WYSIWYG'S and What Really Is a Wiki Anyways?

The great news is hat wiki's are becoming mainstream these days and increasingly we are being approached by people particularly in government who want to adopt some type of collaborative and spontaneous editing environment that made wiki's famous. Unfortunately some of the elements of wiki's that have made them successful also makes them more difficult to adopt by non-technical and more bureaucratic organizations. Resources like Wikipedia have proven how valuable information can be freely organized by a community of users quickly and efficiently. Wikipedia is a great model and fortunately they are built on open source software so it is...

Simple Content Creating Issues in Drupal

We've had a couple clients recently have some trouble with some of the items that are hidden at the bottom of a Drupal node edit form. Depending on what modules you've got enabled and what content type you are editing there can be a lot of fields that you have to generate in order to create a node. So to help with usability Drupal 5 hides many of the fields by logical groups. Unfortunately, if you don't know what logical group you're looking for you can no longer quickly scan down the page to find the reference you're searching for...

Our Plans for Drupal Upgrades

We had some feedback from a client earlier this week who was worried about adopting Drupal now because she was told that there was going to be a new release out soon that would make the previous ones out of date. I figured that it was important to convey OpenConcept's approach to Drupal upgrades so that it is possible for organizations to budget for future expenses. Now Drupal is a great software project, but like all software projects it gets out of date rather quickly. Because there is an active developer community and the Internet is such a corrosive environment...

Political Trend Watching in Canada

There are some interesting tools out there to quantitatively measure what people are interested in. What people put into a search engine is a good indicator of how much relative interset there is in a particular term. In reading the Wall Street Journal article Can Google Trends Predict The Election? I thought it was worth looking again at the political scene up here in Canada. I had taken a look at this when it seemed like we would be heading into an election in the fall. We're still waiting for the Conservatives to fall, but thought that I'd toss up...

Panels2: Worth the Upgrade and Steep Learning Curve

If you've used the panels module than panels2 is a logical upgrade. It lets you create a content pages which are divided into multiple areas which can include many kinds of content (e.g., nodes, blocks, views...) Here's what's new in Panels2: It offers many new features, better interface and the ability to enter edit mode right from regular node view (the original Panels requires a half dozen clicks to access edit mode) You can create a flexible layout either to by percentage or pixels rather than being forced to work with a pre-determined layout template (i.e. 2 columns and 2...

A Summary of Drupal Camp Toronto 2008

Mike, Charlotte, and I spent the weekend in Toronto, attending the 2008 Drupal camp . It was a very enjoyable time and I'd like to thank the organizers for putting together a great event. I only arrived in Toronto midday Friday, so I missed both the morning sessions, but I was able to attend John Resig 's talk about jQuery . I had only briefly looked at jQuery before this talk, so John's talk was very informative, as well as impressive. I can safely say jQuery is a great tool for dynamic doing dynamic UI manipulation and definitely a handy...

Citizenship in the Age of Google

I don't write about podcasts I listen to unless they are particularly interesting, and One Nation Under Google certainly fills this need. Taped by CKUT and available through Rabble Podcast Network , Darren Barney's done an excellent job to challenge how we think about the politics and technology in our modern world. He reframes the definition of citizenship to be based on the practice of judgment, rather than a right of membership. This is particularly useful when we start discussing about global or wired citizens. He does touch a bit on some of the new technologies which have been used...

Building Drupal the Community in Eastern Canada

Earlier this week Ottawa had it's first ever Drupal meetup. I started talking up the idea after coming back from the Boston Drupalcon and found that there were a few folks I knew in my network who were interested. Turns out that there were more long standing Drupal users here in the community than I was aware of. There were over 25 people present at the discussion at the James St. Pub and people stayed for nearly 5 hours discussing different elements of Drupal. The biggest surprise for me came from the number of government agencies who were in attendance...