Drupal Planet

I am incredibly honored to have been selected to speak at the upcoming DrupalCon Denver on the topic of International NGOs Leveraging Drupal for Social Change. 

As part of the amazing support in the Drupal Community, all presenters have been requested to attend (or watch recordings of) webinars on how to give good presentations, led by Emma Jane Hogbin of Design to Theme.

Below is a summary of the two hour-long videos, which I initially intended as personal notes, but later realized others might find useful as well.

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Affinity Bridge's Katherine Bailey and Tom Nightingale gave an awesome introduction to the Search API module at the recent Vancouver Drupal User Group's meeting.

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We are excited to present a wide range of session proposals for the upcoming DrupalCon Denver. If you take a look at the proposals our team members you will see that there is a little something for everyone, from very technical sessions, to sessions on using Drupal for Mobile applications, nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations using Drupal, and how to use Agile not only to run your projects but also to run your organization.

These sessions are born out of our experience and expertise on these topics, as well as our passion to share what we know with the community.

Take a few minutes to look over the proposals and cast your vote. We hope to see you at DrupalCon Denver, and empower you and your organization with one of these excellent sessions.

• Occupy Drupal
• International NGOs Leveraging Drupal For Social Change
• Zen and The Art of Estimating
• How To Architect For Drupal
• Using Agile Software Development Methodologies To manage Your Organization
• Do It With Scrum
• Create Your Community: Social Archiving And Participatory Culture
• Drupal Base Your Next Mobile App
• A Very Large International NGO Case Study (the NGO will be announced soon!)

A new command in Drush 5 is the runserver command (alias "rs"), which is a built in web server for development (if you have used Django or Rails you will be familiar with this concept). All you need is the php-cgi binary and you can bring up a server (and logged in web-browser, if you like!) for a specified site in seconds - no need to have Apache configured for the site, or even running. Click full-screen and HD for easier reading, or view on YouTube.

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A new command in Drush 5 is the core-quick-drupal command (alias "qd") - the purpose of this command is to get you running in Drupal with zero setup. All you need is php-cgi and the PDO sqlite driver - you don't need MySQL or Apache running at all. Running the command will download and install Drupal (or your choice of distribution) as well as any contrib projects you like, start the built in php webserver and open your default browser with you already logged in as user 1. Fun stuff.

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This screencast covers the Drush "help" command (a command important enough to warrant it's own screencast!) and some handy tricks to use it well, as well as the "topic" command. If you are new to Drush or an experienced user looking to more easily discover (or rediscover!) commands or options, this is a great place to start. Click full-screen and HD for easier reading, or view on YouTube.

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Background

I have been reading through the various blog posts and issues discussing the need for a community consensus around a plan for Drupal as both a platform/kernel/framework and product(s), and how we get from here to there. Despite indication from some that this is may be an edgy or controversial topic, it feels to me like there is already pretty good consensus around big parts of the discussion.

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A community specifically for Drupal developers and users at universities is in the formative stages, see: Forming a Drupal in Higher Edu Consortium; (groups.drupal.org).

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Recently, I blogged about Drupal's plans to integrate HTML5 into its next release. However, version 8 of Drupal is at least a year away. What's a Drupal dev to do, if they want to start using HTML5 right now? There are a variety of tools and techniques. Let's look at them.

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Six Drush developers met earlier this week for the first ever Drush sprint. I didn't keep notes of everything we worked on (I would have missed things anyway!), but I thought I would share what I remember. Among the great discussions:

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