CivicActions

Drupal is a very powerful publishing and blogging platform, combining its power with apture you can convert it into a POWER publishing/blogging platform.

Apture can:

• Add Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Maps, pictures, music, twitter and more from 50+ sources of multimedia content to your website in one click.
• Upload and Link your own content including images, PowerPoint, PDF, Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets on your web pages.
• Keep visitors on your site, instead of sending them away.

Here is an example how apture can solve most complex publishing workflows where you need pdfs, docs, videos, refs etc. all on one page!!:

Apture is already been adopted by many big publishers like:The New York Times , Washingtonpost.com, BBC news, Reuters etc.

To combine the power of apture and drupal - apture has released a new drupal module: http://drupal.org/project/apture  This module adds a button on node-edit form to add apture rich media content.

One drawback

You need to have an apture account to add apture rich multimedia content on your website but talking with apture's CEO Tristan Harris he mentioned soon they will a way to do this automatically.

You can test Apture with drupal at http://apture.sumitk.net/ . You need to register an account before adding new content or you can use username/password = demo/demo to login.

Example of apture enabled pages:

• Music
• Apture with drupal
• NY Times

DrupalCon Paris 2009 is two and a half months away and I'm excited. My wife Marcia is coming with me, we've got our tickets, rented our flat across from Jardin Du Luxembourg, and will be there for two weeks! Vote on youtube DrupalCon for this video, and help John Albin with free admission, at 195-eu, a sweet deal.

Caveat Emptor.  This is a Drupal 5.x case, but I think the warning also applies to 6.x.

This screencast dives deep into the Drush "dl" and "info" commands, which can be used to look-up, download and extract the recommended version (or specific versions) of modules, themes, install profiles and translations.

UPDATE: Due to recent changes to our website the code snippet (the valuable part of this blog post) got accidentally lost. If you read this already, please come back to see the sample code. Thanks!

Often you want to add CSS files, scripts, feed icons or even set Drupal's page title from the theme layer. The most obvious place to call Drupal's functions for these tasks is probably in a page preprocess function. However calling the following Drupal API functions from a theme or module's NAME_preprocess_page() function often doesn't work;

• drupal_add_css()
• drupal_add_js()
• drupal_add_feed()
• drupal_add_link()
• drupal_set_html_head()
• drupal_set_title()
• drupal_set_message() (or devel.module's dpm()).

I'm doing a lot with update handlers these days. This is where I put almost all of the configuration changes for a release. Putting configuration changes in update handlers has the huge advantage of (a) source controlling these changes, and (b) allowing you to qa them. I strongly recommend this practice.

Most configuration changes are very easy to make in code. Often all you need to do is call variable_set. Sometimes, you have to write some SQL to directly change a table value.

Earlier this year Jenn, Owen and I worked on a proposal for Greenpeace NZ. CivicActions didn't win the contract, but the website has just launched.

SignOn.org.nz – a Drupal site – was implemented by Catalyst IT, a FLOSS software shop in Wellington New Zealand which employs Josh "fiasco" Waihi, Drupal 7 PostgreSQL maintainer and NZ IT Rockstar 2009 winner and Brenda "shiny" Wallace, Drupal contributor.

Catalyst has done an excellent job and the campaign was featured in NZ's national Sunday newspaper a couple of weeks ago.

They've got many Kiwi celebrities on for the campaign, some which are known internationally too; Most notably Lucy Lawless (Xena Warrior Princess) and Keisha Castle Hughes (From Whale Rider and award-winning other films).

Email gateways to CMSs have lots of great uses. From automating content creation from various sources, to allowing people out in the field to easily post from non-web enabled devices, or to just lowering the bar for getting content onto your site, email can be make content creation that much easier.

After a long period of development the Drush team (myself, and the multi-talented rockstars Moshe Weitzman and Adrian Rossouw) have finally released Drush 2.0.

This is a milestone in many ways - the core of Drush has been completely rewritten (some parts of it twice over!) since the last stable release. This core can now (among other things) connect to multiple major Drupal versions, work reliably (we hope!) on a wide range of command line environments - but is also a powerful platform that allows commands to specify dependencies, to work at different levels of the Drupal bootstrap, call other commands (including on remote servers over secure SSH connections) and provide responses in both machine readable formats and nicely laid out human readable formats. There are also many improvements in the set of commands that come with Drush, both adding new functionality as well as making the existing functionality more intuitive to use.

Over the next few days, I will be uploading a series of short screencasts, covering how to get started, going through the various commands in some detail, and perhaps getting into some detail about how to write your own commands.

Here is the first in the series. Please add any questions in the comments, and I will try and address them (either in the next video, or in the issue queue).

Nearly four years ago (and 12 weeks - according to my Drupal.org account) I first came to know Drupal and the brilliant community that maintains it. Soon after, I attended my first DrupalCon "conference" in Amsterdam (October 2005) which I fondly recall though a somewhat smokey haze... At that time, DrupalCon participants didn't number more than 30 or so people in a dark room, hacking away at emerging Drupal 4.6 in all its glory!

Since those early days, the depth and breadth of the Drupal community has blossomed beyond my wildest notions. Now it's commonplace to expect at least 800 attendees to fly around the world to the bi-yearly DrupalCon conference - and even see 200 at a local meetup such as San Francisco DrupalCamp last weekend!

This September the Drupal community returns to Europe and descends on Paris! I personally haven't attended the last couple DrupalCon events in Brussels or Washington DC and I'm finding myself re-inspired to connect with the community.

In my appreciation of the magic we build together, I just proposed a fun session/panel called How to Eat 15 Drupal Sites in 90 Minutes. This panel will be a presentation of some of the best Drupal sites the entire community has ever produced - in one wickedly fast session using a speed-geeking presentation format.

I'm looking forward to seeing you in Paris - and I hope you'll take a minute to vote for the session and/or consider nominating your own site for the deck!

See (and vote for) the rest of the Drupal Sessions too!