Partners

Our partners, resources and affiliations

2008-06-25T11:26:03-05:00

We are big proponents of the open source revolution that is sweeping the globe. This is about self-empowerment.

We design and build many of our websites using Drupal, which we've found to be an elegant, powerful and very flexible CMS. As beneficiaries of the hard work done there, we actively participate in the Drupal community.

Sponsor of DrupalCon Szeged 2008

Although we are not attending DrupalCon Szeged 2008, we support the Drupal community and the Drupal Association.

Platinum Sponsor of DrupalCon Boston 2008

We were proud and delighted to be Platinum Sponsors of DrupalCon Boston 2008.

Recent posts relating to Drupal:
Tips using Eclipse and Drupal, at Wednesday's Meet-Up at pingVision

Node Bodies, Teasers, and hook_nodeapi('presave')

"Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition" has arrived

Subversion, OS X and the elusive folder merge

pingVision presenters at DrupalCamp Colorado 2008

In Drupal 6, Blocks Need Extra Consideration

We are proud to have been a featured sponsor of BlogHer 2006. Our involvement with BlogHer began in 2005, when we provided the official chatroom for BlogHer Conference '05. In 2006, we developed a new community website for the BlogHer Network, using Drupal.

As we grow, we hope to contribute more to these development efforts.

Getting Historic Revisions of Drupal Modules for Comparison

2006-10-30T15:04:17-06:00

I was recently working on an older Drupal site that hadn't been updated in a while. It used lots of contributed modules and we were unsure whether these had any custom hacks in them. So, I needed a way to find what version of the module was in use, and then pulling down to relevant version of that module in a format suitable to use in a "diff" tool.

So, I did a couple fancy little things and wanted to share them for others to enjoy:

Finding the Id string

Many Drupal modules have an "Id" string in the top of the file. The CVS system replaces these with some information about the file when they are checked out of CVS. This gives you an automatically updated set of information about the file you are using. So, if we can find files named .module, grab the first 3 lines of those files, search for the string Id, and output the results into a file then we've tackled the question "What version of this module do I have?

find ./ -name '*.module' -exec head -n 3 {} \; | grep Id >> versionNumbers.txt

(Note that all of the pieces of text that are in these little boxes should be one one line.)

Which gives you output like:

// $Id: devel.module,v 1.108 2006/10/15 21:59:25 weitzman Exp $
// $Id: devel_node_access.module,v 1.7 2006/08/17 12:33:29 dww Exp $
// $Id: color.module,v 1.3 2006/10/29 15:13:01 unconed Exp $
// $Id: gsitemap.module, v4.8.11

Getting the corresponding code from CVS

The next step is to use that Id information to find the version from CVS. Fortunately, CVS provides the capability of checking out files based upon a date. First, we need to parse out the section of the Id string that contains the module name and the date. The fanciest way would be to use awk, but the problem with that is not all modules use the Id string. So, I used the OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheet program and the Text to Columns Macro. From there, two formulas got me the data I wanted:

=LEFT(C1;FIND(".";C1)-1)

and

=CONCATENATE("cvs -d :pserver:greggles@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib checkout -r DRUPAL-4-6 -D """;F1;""" contributions/modules/";B1)

The benefit of doing this in a spreadsheet is that it makes it easy to find modules (e.g. gsitemap) where the Id string has been implemented in a non-standard way so that I can search down the right details myself.

When the information is present, these functions get me the module name out of name.module and then provides a cvs checkout command to pull down the DRUPAL-4-6 branch from the date that was in the top of the module file.

So, I paste those into my shell pastebuffer, they pull down all the modules, and I can do my diff.

What's the Diff

Once you are there it's trivial to use your favorite comparison/diff tool to find the difference between the modules. And from there, you can follow the road back to Drupal sanity by removing custom modifications from the modules and implementing them as theme_ and hook_ functions.

Whew! That was difficult, but now it's easier for others to do (or for me to do again, I have a feeling I'll need it).

Drupal Project Module Updates

It's worth noting that most of this tom-foolery will no longer be necessary after some more improvements to the Drupal Project Module. If you are interested in supporting that work, take a look at this overview and fundraising page.

Final note: there are many ways to do these kinds of tricks, these just happen to be the way.

Drupal development code freeze: Drupal 5.0 expected November 2006

2006-09-01T09:35:20-05:00

It's September 1, and that means that the active development for the next release of Drupal is now moving into the bug-fixing phase. As Dries says:

Thanks to all the hard work we've done in the past three months, the next version of Drupal will have a lot of great improvements, including an installer, requirement checking for modules, a reorganization of the administration pages and file structure, a light-weight CCK, inclusion of jQuery and much more. We're also working on a new core theme (no guarantees it'll make it in time). With all that, I feel that, finally, the stars have aligned, and we're ready to call the next Drupal version, "Drupal 5.0.0". Thanks to all our contributors, Drupal 5.0.0 promises to be an amazing release!

We're very excited (once again) about the direction the worldwide developer community is taking Drupal. We can expect more scalability, some clearer organization of the administration area (which has grown immensely with so much more power in the past couple of years), and a change in file structure that, along with some other changes, will make Drupal even more scalable.

There will be some nice new gloss in the next release of Drupal, with the addition of jQuery scripts [see Steven Wittens' post], more Ajax in various modules, some additional theme engine changes to empower designers even more (woohoo!) ... and possibly a new default Drupal theme, which will hopefully help draw more DIY folks into trying Drupal.

As soon as there's a stable release candidate, we'll start developing in Drupal 5.0 all new sites scheduled to launch after the official Drupal 5.0 release comes out.

Meanwhile, Drupal 4.7 is still pretty cool. (And, of course, we'll be doing upgrades.)

IBM's Internet Technology Group explains the Drupal basics

2006-08-30T10:17:38-05:00

IBM's Internet Technology Group has written a very nice series of articles on Drupal, the latest of which gives a fabulous introduction to the basics of Drupal.

This article gives you an overview of the Drupal content management system. We'll describe the common building blocks and discuss some common assumptions of the Drupal approach. It is helpful to understand core concepts and basic Drupal terminology as you go through this article and beyond.

The article starts off by explaining much of the Drupal jargon, and does so without falling back on other jargon, which is the first step for anyone wanting to understand the basic structures behind how Drupal works. For example, explaning nodes:

An important concept in Drupal is that all content is stored as a node. They are the basic building blocks for the system, and provide a foundation from which content stored in Drupal can be extended. Creating new node modules allows developers to define and store additional fields in the database that are specific to your site's needs. Nodes are classified according to a type. Each type of node can be manipulated and rendered differently based on its use case.

Or taxonomy:

The Drupal taxonomy system allows the classification of nodes, which enables the organization of node content on a displayed Web page. This categorization can also be used to modify Web site navigation.

Categories are defined by tags, or terms, and sets of terms can be grouped into a vocabulary. Drupal can automatically classify node content with terms, or node content can be manually classified using associated vocabularies. Drupal also allows free tagging, letting users define their own terms for node content.

Even the concept of program hooks is covered.

The authors also spend a fair amount on Drupal theming and template construction, going through various functions and node presentation hooks available to customize the look and feel of your Drupal content to however you like.

The PHPtemplate engine allows you to map templates to specific theme functions. Theme functions provide generic methods to build Web content that is used by modules providing core functions in Drupal, or by your own modules to extend Drupal.

One example is the theme_links function. Given an array of xHTML anchor elements (links), theme_links will return a string containing these links delimited by a given character. This is an example of a very simple building block....

function phptemplate_links($links, $delimiter = ' | ') { if (!is_array($links)) { return ''; } $content = '<div class="links">'; $content .= implode($delimiter, $links); $content .= '</div>'; return $content; }

Okay, so the writing tends to be a little on the geeky side, but this article admittedly is for the geek reader -- probably someone who is either interested in learning how to develop with or theme for Drupal -- but the post is clear enough that it could also be of interest to anyone interested in getting more than the most simplistic sense of how Drupal works.

I find myself hoping that authors Alister Lewis-Bowen, Stephen Evanchik and Louis Weitzman have the time to join the Drupal documentation team.

Hat tip to Bert Boerland and Gunnar Langemark.

Not live-blogging at BlogHer

2006-07-28T14:29:57-05:00

I sat in on the so you have this crazy idea session, where community sites were the topic. The room divided up into working groups -- legal issues, maintaining and sustaining and growing a community, starting a community, and technology to use. I sat in on the first two groups. Very interesting.

At the end, reps for each group presented their findings. The tech group listed Drupal as one of the top tools to use for a robust community site (along with Plone) -- which, I suppose, is an obvious result, especially as the BlogHer site is powered by Drupal, but it was nice to hear, especially since I wasn't there to evangelize it.

Right now I'm typing this while a very interesting discussion is happening. More not-live blogging later....

BlogHer site scaling as the Conference approaches

2006-07-19T13:48:42-05:00

The buzz on BlogHer is booming. I think we got the main BlogHer site moved to a scalable multi-server setup just in the nick of time. Kudos to our hosting partners on the BlogHer website project, Firebright, for their hard work! The new setup is humming!

Via BlogHer Contributing Editor Jeneane Sessum, I've learned that also speaking of (not at, unfortunately) BlogHer is Shelley Powers, who's back blogging on three blogs (so far). (Her old flagship, Burningbird.com, now seems to showcase some of her beautiful photography.) Shelley has noticed the incredible growing sponsor list on BlogHer's home page. The sidebar full of sponsor logos indeed has shot roots down deep 'below the fold' of the pages. (In fact, the sheer weight of the logo images was becoming a server load issue on the former hosting configuration -- a 'good problem to have,' to be sure, but still something that kept the server working harder than anticipated.)

When we got involved with BlogHer's site development, BlogHer's web presence was basically a Typepad blog used to disseminate info about the BlogHer Conference '05. The new site, powered by Drupal (with some customizations), has become an incredibly robust community. And not only that, but now it's the center of a new ad network that is poised to grow rapidly.

Shelley states:

I had originally thought of Blogher as a loosely organized non-profit formed from consensus. It wasn’t until I read the Bostom.com article and saw the list of sponsors that I realized that Blogher is actually a prime example of what it takes to be a succcessful Web 2.0 company.

Company co-founders, Jory Des Jardins, Elisa Camahort, and Lisa Stone have taken a grass roots effort and turned it into a professionally run media company, with it’s own ad network, and featured in Media Daily, as well as various other ad and media related publications.The three are now in great demand as speakers on the issue of women in weblogging, but it won’t be long before they’ll be in demand as speakers for their success as Web 2.0 company founders.

and adds, at the end:

Congratulations to Blogher, the company and good luck with the conference next week. I have a feeling it will be the ‘it’ conference of the year.

I have a feeling it won't be just the conference that will comprise the all-things-BlogHer-that-are-'it' category.

Related: Boston.com article on BlogHer

Drupal.Groups: Community logo

2006-06-07T18:31:19-05:00

Actually, this isn't really a logo per se -- more of a quickie "associated image" we did for the Community group in Drupal.Groups, using color and hue variations of the Druplicon.

This image is available under the GPL license.

BlogHer '06 Conference icon

2006-06-07T18:08:44-05:00

This is the taxonomy image we created for the BlogHer '06 Conference, doing a little conferencing riff on the BlogHer hermoticon.

BlogHer (beta)

2006-03-25T00:58:15-06:00

This is the 2006 BlogHer website. At the time of this screenshot (and this writing), the site is still in beta -- i.e., public but still undergoing further development and design work.

The BlogHer website itself serves as a clearinghouse of information for the 2006 BlogHer Conference itself, but it's also a vibrant online builder of community for women with its multiple daily front-page blogs about what women (and men, too) are writing about on blogs covering all kinds of topics.

The BlogHer Blogroll is the third main component -- categorized blogs whose listings are submitted by any and all who register on the site. We did some custom coding to get all those blogrolls to list the appropriate categories while paginating gracefully and linking directly to the linked sites while still tracking click-throughs. We also have forums set up, and a few other things planned.

We're proud to be sponsors of this year's BlogHer Conference.

More on the BlogHer site to come once it's launched and I write a little development case study. -Laura

BlogHer on the cover of the Austin Chronicle

2006-03-04T20:30:51-06:00

At the risk of seeming like every post of late here is about the BlogHer site, I just thought this was worth mentioning....

Never mind the cheesy sci-fi poster imagery for a moment (more on that below), it's some pretty good ink, getting on the cover of Texas capital's paper. The Austin Chronicle article opens with the topic that BlogHer founders Lisa, Elisa and Jory are addressing in sessions at SXSW:

SXSW Interactive is evolving. Alongside the exhibitions of better-faster-more emergent technologies, from BattleDecks and DOM scripting to Darknets, with a nod to all the dollars appertaining, panelists are keeping it real about what brings us online in the first place: ourselves.

But which selves do we place online? That's the question before the three co-founders of BlogHer. Last year, Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort, and Jory Des Jardins created BlogHer.org, a cluster site in which women (and some men) write about everything from technology to travel to religion and race, food, shopping, and current events in order to "create opportunities for women bloggers to pursue exposure, education, and community." All three intermittently describe themselves as "evangelists" for personal voices, for the transmission and sharing of ideas about women's lives, and for the craft of blogging itself.

Marrit Ingman's article gets into some of the ways blogging can affect one's personal and/or professional life -- as well as how women bloggers are treated differently from men bloggers.

Camahort and Des Jardins also theorize that the consequences for getting personal might be different for women and men if they reveal details of their romantic and family lives in a business setting. When a blogger like Technorati darling Robert Scoble mentions his spouse or child, his credibility is unaffected, they suggest, and possibly even enhanced.

"Women who write about family are 'mommybloggers,' while men who write about family are 'personal bloggers,' incorporating personal elements into their blogs," Des Jardins says. "It's so easy to call someone a 'mommyblogger,' to say that they write 'just' about family."

"As though so much of our great literature and art isn't about family relationships," Camahort points out. "When Arthur Miller wrote All My Sons, nobody said, 'Oh, he's just a 'daddy playwright.' Nobody calls him a 'male playwright.' I think that's why women are rightfully apprehensive."

Interesting stuff worth a look.

It's just too bad the whole thing is branded with the cheesy drawing of a half-naked vixen, with a title that evokes the plethora of science fiction flicks featuring evil ambitious women who enslave men while striving to rise above their station and dominate the universe. I know it's all in fun, and captures some of the cut-loose and let-loose spirit, but the imagery carries a rather unfortunate overtone of using sex appeal to subjugate men.

But hey, it's Austin, city of cheese. We can laugh, since it's all done with a wink. Who knows? I think I'm probably older than most bloghers, and might be one of only a handful of people who remember those movies from Saturday afternoon television (sans Mystery Science Theatre commentary). In this modern day, I think more people have seen the posters than the pulpy adventures themselves, and I don't think anyone would seriously believe that BlogHer is a throwback to bad 1950s B movies -- though I'm sure some folks would love the idea.