Computer World Canada Article on SCO Group’s Copyright Case

ComputerWorld Canada published an article on 13 Aug 2007 that featured a quick quote that I gave them. GNU/Linux experts look for lessons from SCO suit . GNU/Linux adoption has certainly taken off in the desktop world since the release of Vista. As is often the case, some of the most interesting notes are in the comments that people leave. Our very own Russell McOrmond left the following. As you read Mr. Sookman's comments about FLOSS licensing, remember that his ideas actually apply more to non-FLOSS licensing than FLOSS licensing. As a lobbiest for CRIA and other businesses promoting the...

Content Management System (CMS) Report on Alternatives to Back-End

The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), a long-time client, recently approached OpenConcept about content management systems (CMS) and the potential transition from what they are using now. CUPE’s website is currently running on a highly customized version of the Back-End (BE) CMS. BE’s existing, extended functionality is based on several modifications made by CUPE staff and contracted developers over the past few years. However, BE as an open-source CMS is no longer being developed – meaning that no additional features or updates are being provided by the open-source community, and external technical support is limited. As a result, OpenConcept...

States & Provinces in North America

So I needed a list of provinces/states for a CCK select list I was creating, so figured I might as well document it for others as well, considering how popular my list of countries seems to be. I've attached a text list that makes these easy to import with their abbreviations as the keys. I was surprised at how many little Islands the USA has now absorbed. Wanted to see if I could find a list of USA states in Spanish, but couldn't find such a list. I decided instead to include a list of the states of Mexico so...

Release Announcement - Drupal Connect Module

We're super excited to announce the release of Steve's new Drupal module - Connect . Connect glues together two CCK node-types so that they are related to each other. Big deal you you say, but it is! Not just because it's our brain-child, but because it marries two pressing needs of our clients - effective take action tools and flexible event registration systems. But we developed this initially for an advocacy tool we were developing or a client, The Council of Canadians , so let's start there. All of the exiting Take Action tools I know have either grown very...

Finally, An API to Help Bind Citizens to their Representatives

OpenConcept is looking for Beta testers to help them evaluate our new political web service, Make The Change . We need application developers to take a look at the API we've outlined here, and suggest ways that it could be implemented for your projects. We've provided an example for PHP, but there are lots of great folks out there who use Perl, Python and other neat development languages. We are rolling out tools for Drupal, but Joomla & Plone have big communities of users who could benefit from this technology too. Like the folks at datalibre.ca we believe that governments...

Dealing with Oodles of Comment Spam with MySQL

I keep track of a lot of sites, and at one point I needed to disable the CAPTCHA on one of them and forgot to re-enable it. Needless to say the spam bots had a field day. I don't check the site very often as I don't have much time to add new content, but when I was there last I realized that there were over 1000 comments waiting for approval. Way too many to scan through 20 at a time to see if there might be some actual people responding. I wanted to review as much as I could,...

Alternatives to Mathematical & Image Captcha's Needed by the Open Source Community

Like everyone else out there I'm sick of spam but like the idea of bringing user feedback to blog notes like this. I thought I'd list some alternatives to those wiggly letters that are so often inconsistently applied and are often difficult to read. CAPTCHA stands for C ompletely A utomated P ublic T uring test to tell C omputers and H umans A part. Solving captchas should be fun, or at least less monotonous. I'd like to see these implemented in open source applications like Drupal and perhaps we'll get the time to do this ourselves at some time...

Better Approaches to Managing Translation with Technology

I got a call from a translation company the other day because they were looking to contract someone for some PHP development work. We got started talking about some of the work that they were doing, but also some of the opportunities to use content management tools to automate the process, and reduce the costs for high quality professional translations.We began looking at something like this a few years ago when we were setting up a newsletter tool for a branch of Environment Canada. They were interested in streamlining the process so that they could produce their own publications more...

Screen scraping MPs info from government's websites

Well, for any number of applications, one might find oneself in need of the contact information for our federal politicians. There are any number of ways you can do this, including going onto a government web page like this , and manually copying and pasting the information. "dude, manual data input is sooooo last decade!" Or of course, you could screen scrape this data into a basic csv. DISCLAIMER: while normally my scrapings are done in the likeness of ninjas robbing a museum, this time around I resorted to some pretty hacky antics. This means that there is no one...

Disadvantages to Using Two CMS Installs to Deliver a Bilingual Site

I've noticed a few sites now are trying to produce a bilingual site by taking a basic install of a blog like WordPress and setting up a unique instance for every language that they want to use. There may be times where this is a reasonable solution, but for most organizations I think the long term costs will be much higher than the short term savings. By using Drupal for managing your content the maintenance and work-flow of a multilingual site will be considerably easier for most users. Setting up two versions of a Content Management System (CMS) in different...