Musings of a Manchester Drupal guy

Drupal, Open Source, Analytics, Social Media.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

From Vienna to Manchester - fostering the community spirit of Drupal

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Sebastian Siemssen is one of the maintainers of Jake Strawn's hugely popular Omega Theme. I met both of them at DrupalCon London and quickly realised these guys were forging ahead with some innovative responsive design approaches for Drupal.

Fast forward a few weeks and Sebastien is now at Livelink's offices working alongside our team advising on a major effort to streamline our theming process and implementation of responsive design.

For me this was a perfect opportunity to encourage a talented student who is valuable contributor to the Drupal project. Having flown him over from Vienna we've shown him a good time in Manchester. From Cloud 23 Bar to seeing Manchester United play Basle in the Champions League he's seen the best of Manchester.

Read more about Sebastians visit next week on The Livelink Blog.

 

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Friday, September 23, 2011

Drupal agency NodeOne takes stand against EPiServer demands to cease and desist

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With the enviable growth of Drupal into enterprise, education, government comes less desirable consequences. Swedish Drupal agency NodeOne have been served a cease and desist notification from EPiServer, a proprietary CMS, to un-publish their comparison between Drupal and other CMSs.

In September NodeOne published the article comparing Drupal against several proprietary products (EPiServer, SiteVision, Sitecore, Polopoly and Escenic) concluding that Drupal was best. The ran a banner advertising campaign to draw attention to the article, which naturally came up on EPiServers radar.

Having saught legal advice NodeOne have taken a stand and refused to remove the article.

Read more on NodeOnes site.

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Drupal agency NodeOne takes stand against EPiServer demands to cease and desist

Screen-shot-2011-09-23-at-08
With the enviable growth of Drupal into enterprise, education, government comes less desirable consequences. Swedish Drupal agency NodeOne have been served a cease and desist notification from EPiServer, a proprietary CMS, to un-publish their comparison between Drupal and other CMSs.

In September NodeOne published the article comparing Drupal against several proprietary products (EPiServer, SiteVision, Sitecore, Polopoly and Escenic) concluding that Drupal was best. The ran a banner advertising campaign to draw attention to the article, which naturally came up on EPiServers radar.

Having saught legal advice NodeOne have taken a stand and refused to remove the article.

Read more on NodeOnes site.

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Drupal agency NodeOne takes stand against EPiServer demands to cease and desist

Screen-shot-2011-09-23-at-08
With the enviable growth of Drupal into enterprise, education, government comes less desirable consequences. Swedish Drupal agency NodeOne have been served a cease and desist notification from EPiServer, a proprietary CMS, to un-publish their comparison between Drupal and other CMSs.

In September NodeOne published the article comparing Drupal against several proprietary products (EPiServer, SiteVision, Sitecore, Polopoly and Escenic) concluding that Drupal was best. The ran a banner advertising campaign to draw attention to the article, which naturally came up on EPiServers radar.

Having saught legal advice NodeOne have taken a stand and refused to remove the article.

Read more on NodeOnes site.

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Thursday, September 22, 2011

Google Plus - was it worth it? Cost $585m - Zuckerburg most popular user! See the stats ...

Google have released some interesting stats around Google+, their latest venture into social media. And this time they seem to have got it right. This week Google+ went into public beta so expect adoption to accelerate.

Whilst there was an initial surge of activity on the platform, things have expectedly cooled down. Indeed from what I can see most Drupalists are still hanging out back on Twitter. What Google+ desperately needs is highly active, engaged users.

Killer-facts-and-statistics-googleplus-1

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Thursday, September 15, 2011

Klout Google Chrome Extension

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If you take Twitter seriously, evaluating who you follow matters. Klout score is a good rule of thumb, but typically you have to visit the site to establish this.

Google Chrome users can enhance their experience of Twitter.com with a Klout Chrome Extension. It presents the Klout score against all users in your stream along with a link to their Klout profile.

Thanks to Matt Tucker for Tweeting about this tool.

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Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Drupal Modules examples for Developers - The example project

Since late 2009 Randy Fay has been heading up the Example Project on Drupal.org. The aim of the project is to provide module developers with highly documented best practice examples of how to approach common tasks in development.

You can hear Randy talking about the Examples Project on Drupal Voices.

Download here: http://drupal.org/project/examples

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Twitter Web Analytics available in weeks

Twitter_web_analytics
I was interested to discover that some weeks ago Twitter acquired BackType. It appears they have been working away to create a new reporting platform for marketing professionals.

"Twitter Web Analytics will be rolled out this week to a small pilot group of partners, and will be made available to all website owners within the next few weeks. We’re also committed to releasing a Twitter Web Analytics API for developers interested in incorporating Twitter data in their products."

Read more on the Twitter Blog (Powered by Drupal).

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Monday, September 12, 2011

What is Drupal? A brilliant short video by Drupal Area Drupal Association.

As Drupal's momentum escalates, more people begin to ask this question. The Brighton Area Drupal Association was awarded one of the first Drupal Association Community Cultivation Grants. This short film is how they spent the grant. I think you will agree, it was well spent.

Source: What is Drupal? - Brighton Area Drupal Association

 

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Thursday, September 08, 2011

Stroring Drupal Entities in MongoDB

Just stumbled across the idea of storing Drupal 7.x Entities outside of MySQL to achieve significant performance improvements. There is a mention of this technique on Drupal Voices 135: Jeremy Andrews on Performance & Scalability Tools

http://cyrve.com/mongodb

http://drupalwatchdog.com/1/1/performance-scalability-drupal-7

http://engineeredweb.com/blog/10/3/pluggable-entity-operations-drupal-7

 

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Twitter Lists - an alternative to following people - tip

The trouble with following more than 300 people who tweet reasonably often is you start missing really important posts. Twitter lists offer a way to watch groups of people without actually following.

By only following people you really need to keep a daily watch on, adding everyone else in lists (and unfollowing them), you are less likely to miss vital tweets.

Equally a list could contain a select few people and serve the same purpose.

Always remember that people cannot direct message you unless you are following them.

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So what did the Acquians ever do for us? Drupal-Acquia and Gartners Magic Quadrant

Yesterday Acquia announced that "Drupal-Acquia together have been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the Visionaries quadrant of both the 2011 Magic Quadrant for Externally Facing Social Software and the Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace.". This raises Drupal's visibility and acceptance particularly amongst the top 10,000 global businesses.

This recognition has not happened without substantial effort on Acquia's part. Bryan House of Acquia spends considerable time ensuring that analyst firms such as Gartner, Forrester Research and CMS Watch are fully aware of Drupal. Large corporations turn to analysts firms for opinion and risk analysis when considering adopting platforms on large projects.

You can learn more about Bryan's work to break barriers down for Drupal into large enterprises on the Drupal Voices Podcast 193: "Bryan House on Marketing"

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Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Manchester Drupal Lunch Up - Who's in?

So it seems I am not alone in finding evenings, paricularly Fridays impossible to handle for the North West Drupal user group. Mark Hope of accessadvertising.co.uk has the same issues.

What if I were to propose a shorter lunch break style casual Drupal meet up in central Manchester? Would anyone be interested? We could elect a cafe and just socialise, talk Drupal and share knowledge, advice.

Anyone who thinks the idea has legs please reach me via @pdjohnson on Twitter. If I get enough interest I will think something up.

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Monday, September 05, 2011

Visualisation - What does your Twitter account really say about you?

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I care about what impression I emit online, especially Twitter. Tagxedo.com enables you to create visualisations from Twitter accounts. The image above is one such example, based on a tag cloud concept, highlighting commonly used terms. Try it on your account, are you happy with the impression it gives of you? Next time you Tweet, pause, consider what impression it will leave people of you. 

 

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Friday, September 02, 2011

Responsive web design and Drupal

What is a responsive design?

As one of the leading innovators in responsive design Ethan Marcotte explains it is composed of three distinct parts.

 

  1. A flexible grid.
  2. Flexible images. Or more specifically, images that work in a flexible context (whether fluid themselves, or perhaps controlled via overflow).
  3. Media queries. The final layer of a responsive design, media queries optimize the design for different viewing contexts, and spot-fix bugs that occur at different resolution ranges.

 

OK, so what is responsive design?

The best way to quickly appreciate what is responsive web design is to visit a few really good examples. Start with a large browser window and slowly resize right down. Notice how the follwoing sites reposition, remove or repurpose the layout to cope with the smaller view port.

To fully understand why we have arrived at adaptive and responsive approaches I strongly recommend listening to Lullabot's podcast "Who is Jeffrey Zeldman?". It provides some historical perspective about web standards, how we thought 960 grid was the perfect solution and subsequently that it emerged it was not.

Do responsive with Drupal

Jake Strawn and Sebastian Siemssen have delivered Omega 3, a responsive mobile first theming system for Drupal. This enables Drupal themers to create web sites which actively change based upon the screen size of the device used in order to provide an optimised interface and images at appropriate size for the available bandwidth.

Examples of responsive sites on Drupal include

DrupalCon London session

Jake Strawn presented at DrupalCon London "Adaptive, Responsive, Mobile First and Drupal Theming for the Future with HTML5, CSS3 and Omega" which gives a good executive overview of the challenges responsive web and mobile devices represents. You can watch it here.

Find extensive documentation and support for Omega for Drupal.

 

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