Drupal is an excellent framework to build a community member site, but it isn’t that easy. It involves a lot of steps, knowledge, theming, tweaks and configurating to make things work well and look good. Which modules should I use to achieve certain functionality? How do I put it all together? Drupal is a very flexible and extensive CMS but it also makes it difficult to oversee the enormous amount of options you have to handle any challenge.
Even with the ebook, you will need advanced Drupal skills and experience. Especially if you run into problems, want something a bit different or need to customize the template. Don’t expect to build your own Facebook or Hyves with it in a weekend, but nevertheless this showcase is a great resource and really shows how powerful Drupal is.
We are looking for people – Drupal enthusiasts – who want to learn and experiment with Drupal and develop, build and maintain community website using Drupal.
We started Diveheads.com in late 2007 together with copywriter Blok Oh. The goal is to provide a better diving community, experiment with Drupal communities and look into ways to monetize the site in the future. The site is built on Drupal 5, multilingual and supports features like geomapping with Google Maps.
Due to lack of time, we don’t have the resources to give this project the attention it deserves and are looking for other people. In the open-source spirit, we want to ‘open’ up this project. We at Merge would still sponsor the project by providing free hosting (development site) and support (advice, tips, think along), but have no further commercial interest.
We think the main task at hand would be to migrate the site from Drupal 5 to 6. In case you are interested, leave a comment or email us.
If you want to give us a better impression of your Drupal skills, mark yourself on the Drupal learning curve :).
A while ago, I wrote a post about the semantic web and microformats (Dutch). Now, I jus finished reading a very interesting post about RDFa and Drupal. While it may sound very technical, RDFa is another way to do semantic markup. It requires special namespaces which are put inline the XHTML. Machines (search engines) are able will be able to read this structured data and this is where the magic happens.
Just watch this video and look how data – in this case from a Drupal CMS and database – can be read by other engines and displayed in various different formats.
I’m absolutely no expert on the subject, but I’d say RDFa is going to win in the long run (supported by the W3c) while Microformats are already used by some websites and use the internet vCard standard.
It will take some time before we’ll see results with semantic markup in Google but it’s great to see Drupal is already thinking ahead (CCK in core huray!).
One of the things Dries talked about in his opening keynote at Drupalcon DC, was the great and much needed redesign of Drupal.org. You can check out a live demonstration site at staging.dosprint.org, login with demo/demo.
The redesign (envisioned by Mark Boulton) not only looks good, but also embodies some nifty features like your own personalized dashboard. Complete with customizable (iGoogly-like) tabs and drag-and-drop gadgets.
Now I got curious how this functionality was implemented in Drupal 6. What modules were used? Or did they create their own custom one?
After some searching, it appeared this is done with a custom drupal.org specific module in combination with the new theme codenamed ‘bluecheese’. However, these ‘modules’ are also available as projects on Drupal.org. Don’t expect any releases yet, but in the issue queue you’ll find an announcement for plans to release the dashboard module as a generic module once the redesign is finished. Great! I think there will be quite some demand for such functionality. Especially in community based websites.
Contribute
The new design will probably go live in the next couple of months (or when it’s ready). If you – like us – use d.o on an almost daily basis and want to contribute to the redesign don’t forget to ChipIn!
Update: As it seems, there is also another module called homebox which offers quite similar functionality with drag-n-drop. You can see it in action on the Drupalcon Paris (2009) website.
In case you didn’t know, DrupalCon DC starts this Wednesday! The biggest Drupal conference yet will be held 4 – 7 March in snowy Washington DC. You can read more about the event in Dries’ post. The previous Drupalcon was in Szeged (hungary) and the first one which we attended. It made a great impression and we certainly will attend the next one in Paris, but we’ll have to follow DC through other means.
Howto follow DrupalCon on Twitter Thanks to the wonders of modern communication – and especially Twitter – it is now possible to follow big events through many, many people who are microblogging about the event and the sessions they attend. With the popularity of Twitter rising, you can get great live feeds.
If you already are a twitter user, you can follow the official twitter.com/drupalcon. Find tweets about drupalcon by using the #drupalcon hashtag. (If you don’t know what a hashtag is, read my post about Twitter first)
You can search for #drupalcon tagged tweets using the search page, which will show you realtime results. However there are two small problems with this page:
you have to refresh the page to see new tweets (though you will be notified there are new tweets through an ajax call)
you can’t follow multiple hashtags on one page. #Drupalcon might be the official one, but undoubtly there will be people who use #dcdc or #drupalcondc.
There is a simple solution: creative developers who use the Twitter API to create an app like Twitterfall. This app will show you popular hashtags but also allows to enter your own custom ones. And it will automatically show new tweets in realtime!
It’s the next best thing to attending ;)
If you know about betters apps which do the trick, please share. Oh, and if you’re interested in the next Drupalcon in Europe (Paris, september 2009) follow @dcparis2009.
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Drupal is an excellent framework to build a community member site, but it isn’t that easy. It involves a lot of steps, knowledge, theming, tweaks and configurating to make things work well and look good. Which modules should I use to achieve certain functionality? How do I put it all together? Drupal is a very flexible and extensive CMS but it also makes it difficult to oversee the enormous amount of options you have to handle any challenge.
In case you didn’t know, 
