One of the great things I've learned about the Drupal community is, well, the community. They have these 'camps' all over the world, and more and more of them are videoing their sessions and putting them up all over the place on t'internet. It used to all be on archive.org where I watched all the lovely drupalcon sessions, but now they're on loads of places, including the latest DrupalCamp Austin ones on Vimeo. Here's some of the ones I watched this last weekend.
As a Drupal Consultant I regularly explain what Drupal is to business people, and with five million searches per month for "What is Drupal?" according to the Google Keyword Tool, one of Drupal's growing pains as it gains mass adoption is communicating what exactly it is to a new, often non-technical audience.
Ten years ago I was an Enterprise CMS Consultant for a Java software house in London. I worked with many blue-chip clients and innovative startups including Volkswagen, B&Q, and The Foreign & Commonwealth Office to name a few. I had a team of twenty developers and designers working with me to produce some of the most advanced Internet technology at that time.
Drupal 7 is nearly here! There's lots of modules included over and above what was in version 6, however for me there are some essential Drupal 7 modules I can't do without on any site I build for clients so I thought I would share them.
Although Drupal 7 is still in beta I'm sure there's many people like me who like to play with cutting-edge technology, but heed this WARNING: Lots of things will still be broken, so be prepared!
Books for Keeps is the UK's leading, independent children's book magazine. It was launched in 1980 and ever since has been reviewing hundreds of new children's books each year and publishing articles on every aspect of writing for children. There are over 12,500 children's book reviews and more than 2,000 articles including interviews with the top children's authors and illustrators.
Thirty years ago I encountered computers for the first time. They were already involved in my life in some way or another, but not sitting there in front of me with a keyboard and a cursor waiting for my command. I learned how to program in a language called BASIC. I learned how to get the computer to display “Hello World!” and have it repeat all over the screen. I worked out that if I added another blank space between the two speech marks it the text would zig-zag over the screen.
Heck, I was nearly ten years old and lived in the middle of the East Anglian countryside surrounded by fields of corn which I spent most of my life playing in as there was little else to do - until my parents bought me a BBC 'B' computer, then it was mostly spent in my room for hours as I watched Mandlebrot fractals being generated in glorious eight colours at a pace which I could easily have painted quicker. Not entirely sure I need to tell you all this, however as I write I hear that Benoît B Mandelbrot, the man who made geometry an art, has sadly passed away, so I'll take that as a sign and keep it in. The point is that to me, the power and ability to change something around and make it do something different was everything, and the possibilities were endless - especially when it comes to Mandlebrot graphics...
Recently I was lucky enough to be sent a copy of a new Drupal book to review: "Drupal 6: Social Networking" by Michael Peacock, a UK-based web developer and author. Having built social networks for ten years, the last five of those using Drupal, and knowing how hard it can be to know which of the many available approaches to use, I was very interested to see what the book had in store for the prospective reader.
I was pleasantly surprised as whilst the book is quite small compared to some other computer books at 280 pages, Michael managed to cover a wide spectrum of topics in a way which I believe is easy for anyone with the will to sit and try things out to master. Throughout the book he builds the "DinoSpace!", a social network for keepers of pet dinosaurs - always a good thing to do as you can build with each chapter and of course adapt to your particular needs.
Below is an overview of the chapters, followed by my conclusion then some sample content from the book to whet your appetite:
Thanks to a recommendation from our friendly local mobile app design experts Ribot, it's been a busy couple of months here at Purkiss HQ re-launching celebrity gossip site HolyMoly.com using our favourite web app platform Drupal.
Our brief for this first phase of development was to move the site over to the Drupal platform, paying special attention to the speed of the site and making sure that all existing URLs are correctly carried over to the new site.
We created a number of custom modules to deal with business-specific issues, including automatically cropping the image depending on the filename, and moving over existing user details along with their encrypted passwords.
“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.” - Dr. Seuss
Living in Brighton I get to see and meet a vast array of different characters - it's a place where anything goes and that's one of the reasons why I love it so much. When it comes to creating or building a business though, people seem to forget their individuality and talk in too broad terms.
For example, lately I've had far too many people describing themselves to me as simply a "designer", which is not really a rarity in Brighton. When I ask them what type of design they do, the vast majority say "web" or "web and print". This still does not help. What I need to know so that it sticks in my mind is what makes you different than the rest of the designers, because you are! Dr. Seuss was a very wise man. He also said:
“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.”
We went over many topics at the Drupal 101 Workshop on Thursday April 9th 2009, I will be posting some notes here. For a more complete SEO-friendly setup for your site, download the SEO Checklist module http://drupal.org/project/seo_checklist and follow the instructions
Module requirements
NOTE: If you have downloaded the Acquia Drupal distribution from http://acquia.com/downloads then these are already included, otherwise:
Thirty years ago I encountered computers for the first time. They were already involved in my life in some way or another, but not sitting there in front of me with a keyboard and a cursor waiting for my command. I learned how to program in a language called BASIC. I learned how to get the computer to display “Hello World!” and have it repeat all over the screen. I worked out that if I added another blank space between the two speech marks it the text would zig-zag over the screen. 
