CivicActions

Who Are the World's Most Influential?

Take a moment and Vote for Peter Gabriel to get a spot on this year's Time 100. In the article, he's credited with launching 'the Hub, a so-called YouTube for human rights' which was built with Drupal by a number of the folks right here at CivicActions!

Stephen Musgrave from Capellic was kind enough to video my talk at Drupal Camp a few weeks ago. I attempted (and succeeded!) to install the full Media Mover suite in under an hour, along with an introduction to the theory behind Media Mover. Check it out!

Just got back from Drupal Camp NYC 4, where I did a session on settings up advanced video functionality on Drupal in an hour. In the span of the session I installed Drupal, installed a handful of modules, and got a site that lets users upload video to their site, transcodes it and deposits the file on Amazon's S3 site. While nothing new in terms of functionality for Media Mover, it is always a bit unnerving when you do something live.

The CivicActions team is in high spirits today with the launch of our newest project, MeNotMeth.org.

MeNotMeth.org. is part of an $11-million California state campaign of billboards, bus wraps, cable TV ads and the website aimed at discouraging gay men from using methamphetamine. A statewide survey recently found that crystal meth use was 11 times more common among gay men than in the California population overall.

Better World Advertising provided the brilliant design and wireframes which CivicActions developed and themed in Drupal.

From the start the project we were under a tight deadline, due to a looming marketing campaign which included the website URL. Despite the pressure BWA and CA always remained friendly and flexible, contributing the the successful launch!

The site functionality includes user-submitted video functionality (including transcoding lots of different file types), basic registration, content moderation, Spanish-language internationalization, a self-assessment module, and more.

Community Contributed Modules

In addition to all the contributed modules, one notable module was specifically developed for this project:

mm_flvtool2 found at (http://drupal.org/project/mm_flvtool2) gathers meta data from a flash file and attaches it to the node. This is how we are able to display the length of the videos on the Your Stories page of the site.

Of course, this is part of a bigger package of using XSPF Playlist and FLV Media Player which provides the flash player for videos and the TV commercial - both in English and Spanish.

All uploaded video is stored on Amazon's S3, while displayed through Drupal, using the Arthur's contributed Media Mover module.

Media Mover, XSPF Playlist, FLV Media Player received new commits and patches because of this project. For instance, flvmediaplayer allows an administrator to set the "style" of the player (e.g. foreground color, background color, allow full screen and more.