CivicActions

Drupal for Education and E-learning is a must-have for any teacher, school or education institution considering a new school website, or technology-centric project in the classroom. Whether the reader has heard of Drupal or not, the book provides valuable insights, empowering ideas and simple instructions to help get any teacher or school on their way to having a powerful, useful and valuable learning resource.

In this episode

Working on Drupal core means that any change you contribute - even the most trivial tweak - is likely to go through multiple levels of review before being applied. Most contributors to core can expect delays of weeks, months, in some cases even years before a patch is accepted--if indeed it ever is accepted.

And even if a new feature you contribute to core goes in, you won't get to actually use it for months or years--the typical lag time until a new major version is ready for production use.

So it's no wonder many Drupal developers choose to work instead on contributed modules.

In contrib, if you're developing your own module, you've got a pretty free hand to do whatever you want. You can get a lot of functionality out there relatively quickly. And you won't have anyone breathing down your neck while you code. Want a new feature? Easy: code it up, press that metaphorical "commit" button, and you're set.

So end of story? Put in the occasional minor patch to core, but otherwise stick to the easy world of contrib?

Not quite. Because it turns out that the ease of contrib can also be its greatest pitfall.

Drupal Project founder Dries Buytaert's recent blog post on Contributing Back to Drupal came on the heals of much discussion of the same topic while I was the Lullabot DIWD Seminar. It is not a new conversation, at CivicActions we have been having it for as long as I can remember.

The Community Stipend Program

Recognizing that it was hard for our company as a company to "give back" beyond our sponsorship of DrupalCons and DrupalCamps we have made efforts to empower all of our team members to give back. A big part of this is our Community Work Stipend Program which we started in 2006. Team members who achieve a threshold of client work each month earn an additional stipend to do "community work". This can take the form of maintaining modules, working on patches for contrib or core, organizing or presenting at Drupal events like camps, cons or user groups, or writing documentation.

When upgrading your CiviCRM site from 1.x to 2.x you might have to upgrade some custom modules. If you're upgrading to CiviCRM 2.1 or higher, this also requires that you're running Drupal 6. Upgrading your custom Drupal 5 modules for Drupal 6 is pretty easy: you simply download the coder module which will point out almost all required changes to your module with direct links to the documentation page about converting 5.x modules to 6.x.

Upgrading your custom CiviCRM modules to be compatible with 2.x however won't be as easy since a bunch of functions have been replaced or removed. The idea is to motivate developers to use the internal API's directly and not use these helper functions anymore. There is a developer discussion about the API Migration from 1.x to 2.x and while it offers some indication as to what functions were replaced, it doesn't provide a valid alternative for all removed functions.

In this fifth and final article in our series on creating an SEO strategy we will tackle the topic of community. Websites are not like the "field of dreams" -- if you build it, they won't necessarily come. Certainly if you do everything right up to this point: write good content, use appropriate markup and install the right Drupal modules, the search engines will index your site. However, when you start receiving quality inbound links is when your organic search results will increase exponentially.

As you can see, we are quite a diverse bunch here at CivicActions, with sessions proposed for everyone from non-profits looking at using Drupal, though content managers, themers and module developers.

We hope you will take a browse and vote for the ones you are interested in!

• Advanced Theming Techniques (Trevor and Bevan)
• Google Maps Mashups In <10 minutes (Bevan)
• Media Mover: File Processing and Storage for Drupal (Arthur)
• New node and taxonomy APIs in Drupal 7 (Nat)
• Drush - command line Drupal productivity (Owen)
• Quality Assurance and the Drupal Development Process (Fen and Nat)
• Intro to SimpleTest (Nat on panel)
• Paper Prototyping To Fix Usability Bugs (Bevan)
• Usability testing at the University of Baltimore (Nat)
• RarePlanet.org as a Project Management / Knowledge Management Tool (Doug & RARE staff)
• SEO & Drupal: Search Engine Optimization Tips, Tricks and Best Practices (Gregory)

In this episode: Drupal software update, drupal.org redesign almost complete, rating drupalcon submissions, and Drupal jobs stay steady.

In Drupal Multimedia Aaron Winborn covers media handling in Drupal and provides information on how to embed and manipulate images, audio and video. Packt Publishing provides a dedicated page which lists the complete table of contents and where you can download all example code used in the book as well as a sample chapter.

The first chapter provides an in-depth introduction to Drupal, covering nodes, regions, blocks, themes and modules in general and cck and views specifically. The advanced theming section contains information about custom regions, hooking into template.php and creating template files. Each topic comes with clean example code, plenty of comprehensive screenshots of the different configuration forms and of what the end result looks like and notes with extra clarifications, tips and tricks. The author does a great job in describing the basic Drupal concepts, making this chapter really useful for new Drupal users.

In Part 3 of Creating An SEO Strategy we discussed ways of writing better HTML markup in your content. In this part of the series, we will discuss some Drupal specific modules and tips, as well as other resources for learning more about SEO.