The key is building a community - The White House blogs on success with Drupal

A few weeks ago I said that Barak Obhama beoming president for a second term was a win for Drupal (indeed open source in general). The White House started selected Drupal as a platform for their web presence almost immediately Obhama was elected.

A couple of days ago I stumbled across by Peter Welsch, Deputy Director of Online Platform for the Office of Digital Strategy at The White House. He talks about the improbable way open source software is built and how it can benefit organisations and the success they've achieved thanks to Drupal and it's community. It is an interesting read.

You say sure. When she returns the screwdriver a couple days later, your friend mentions that she made an improvement: now it works with both Phillips and flat head screws. Another friend hears this and asks if he can take a look, too. When he returns the screwdriver, it's been upgraded again: now it's a power screwdriver. Then a third friend gets excited and adds some extra speeds and a better battery.

Read the full story on Whitehouse.gov

Contributing back to Drupal

The White House recently created a Drupal.org user account and have created a poject FortyFour, a base theme currently in alpha. They also have a Git Repo containing open sourced Drupal modules. You can hear Tom Cochran talk about the "We the people" project which he presented at DrupalCon Denver.

It will be interesting to see what developments occur during the next presidential term and what positive impact this has on open source adoption beyond government.

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My role as Drupal Director at CTI Digital

Today marks an important new phase in my career, I start at CTI Digital as Drupal Director. I will be heading up Drupal operations, leading a team of developers and front end specialists. Having already appointed two significant new team members, I look forward to driving new wins in 2013 for CTI and Drupal.

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FREE Omingraffle stencils for Drupal 7 and Commerce

Omnigraffle is without doubt one of the best planning and visualisation tools available. I use if for wire framing software projects, including Drupal. It enables even novice users to rapidly produce impressive imagery to communicate complex concepts to clients and helps avoid mis-interpretation.

I recently discovered on Graffletopia, the community driven library of stencils for Omnigraffle, that there are some Drupal 7 specific stencils. These include Drupal 7 components, Drupal Commerce and Drupal Search.

Drupal 7 Omnigraffle Stencils

 

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From Vienna to Manchester - fostering the community spirit of Drupal

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

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

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

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 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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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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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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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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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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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.

• http://hicksdesign.co.uk/
• http://meltmedia.com/work/
• http://colly.com/
• http://51bits.com/
• http://sasquatchfestival.com

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

• http://fourkitchens.com
• http://drupalcampnh.org

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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Announcing Drupalcon Munich 2012

Today sees the announcement of the next European Drupalcon. For more details visit http://munich2012.drupal.org

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Drupal iOS SDK - Drupal as a backend for iPhone / iPad Apps

Drupal as a back end for iPhone apps just got a whole lot easier with the release of Work Habit incs new Drupal iOS SDK by Kyle Browning.

Download it now from github.

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Drupal desktop has never been easier - Introducing Dev Desktop by Acquia

WAMP and MAMP are no longer the best choices when approaching having a local installation of Drupal, Apache, MySQL.

Dev Desktop - From zero to Drupal in 2 minutes flat

The good people at Acquia have prepared a Drupal specific 'AMP' stack called Dev Desktop
which streamlines the installation process to a couple of minutes, after which you have all the servers and a Drupal site up and running. Stress free, non technical.

Download Dev Desktop

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Drupal is not just for Developers -Tim Millwoods .Net Magazine tutorial

The August edition of .Net Magazine features a detailed tutorial by UK Drupal developer Tim Millwood who works with Acquia. Guiding a novice user through the process of installing Drupal and building a job listing website, the tutorial clearly establishes how easy to use and extensible Drupal 7.x is to new comers. Detailing the benefits of features module in migrating configuration changes from development to live servers is a helpful inclusion.

Having recently had the pleasure of chatting with Brian Teeman co-founder of Joomla, it became clear that many 'outsiders' consider Drupal to require development skills in order to build sites. Of course, those familiar with the platform are clear in the knowledge that with over 7000 contributes modules Drupal is a platform where user can achieve powerful web presences with little or no development skills.

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Drupal? Which big brands use Drupal? Well actually ....

It's a question I am sure you've all been asked. As Drupal gains mainstream acceptance it happens less frequently but some clients do gain confidence when they hear the following organisations and brands are using Drupal

• Best Buy: http://www.bestbuymobile.com
• McDonalds: http://appsbeta.wireless.att.com/login
• AT&T: http://appsbeta.wireless.att.com/login
• Fuji: http://www.myfinepix.com
• The White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov
• Nokia: http://research.nokia.com
• Adobe: http://flex.org/showcase
• NS&I: http://www.nsandi.com
• Lucas Arts: http://www.swtor.com
• Robbie Williams: http://www.robbiewilliams.com
• Emmy Awards: http://www.Emmys.com
• Beyonce: http://www.beyonceonline.com
• Warner Bros Records: http://www.warnerbrosrecords.com
• The British Government: http://innovate.direct.gov.uk
• Rafael Nadal: http://www.rafaelnadal.com
• The Onion: http://www.theonion.com
• The New York Observer: http://www.observer.com
• Playboy Germany: http://www.playboy.de
• France 24: http://www.france24.com
• CNN: http://www.cnngo.com
• Amnesty International: http://amnesty.org
• Greenpeace: http://www.greenpeace.org.uk
• Oxfam: http://www.oxfam.org
• Stanford University: http://shc.stanford.edu
• MIT: http://media.mit.edu

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Detailed report about CMS Market Share 2010 including Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress

As a manager of a Drupal based digital agency I found this extensive PDF report about CMS Market Share for 2010 by Waterandstone.com well worth a read. Some telling insights about where certain platforms are succeeding and failing to perform.

Drupal has some ground to cover regarding its ability to convert users during the evaluation process. Wordpress continues to dominate market share across most metrics. 

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Drupal Networking Lunch, London

The last official Drupal event I managed to attend was DrupalCon Barcelona, thanks to the Icelandic volcano I missed San Fransisco.

My company recently joined the Drupal Association which has opened a range of opportunities to build better business relationships with Drupal houses.

Today I attended the Drupal Networking Luncheon which proved an invaluable opportunity to meet many forward thinking organisations and individuals in London.

Without Drupal Association Membership I would have been unaware of this event. The strength of Drupal is not code but it's community, I suggest you get involved and head along to http://association.drupal.org/ there are events worldwide no matter what your specialism is.

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