I have to admit that I've got it pretty good in the website spam department. The Mollom project, started by some of the same folks who started Drupal, uses content analysis to keep spam users from registering accounts on my site, leaving blog & forum comments, and using my site's contact form to spam me via email as well.

The only problem that I've really seen is the rise of spammers who will post blog comments containing text from the blog post itself, almost entirely unchanged, along with one or more links to their sites. Content-based analysis is of no use here, since the majority of the comment is actual text that I would want on my site -- after all, I blogged it!

Until now, I've been following all blog comments to my site via built-in RSS feeds, noticing spam comments some time after they were posted, and going back and deleting them. Drupal allows for comment moderation, but I want comments to go out there right away.

read more

In preparation for the Bringing it All Back Home: CMS Communities panel at SXSW, which I'll be speaking at on Saturday, I posed the following question on Twitter and in #drupal:

Which Simpsons character best represents the #Drupal community and why?

And the winner, in terms of number of responses, was...

Lisa Simpson

• Thinks she has all the answers to save the world but is so pathetically naive she never will. Yet you love her anyway. - TheRealCrell
• Underestimated, Intelligent, resourceful. With a wonderful singing voice. - bear_feet
• She is open minded and usually diplomatic :) - JCL324
• Logical, but not so popular. - DaftNinja

And here were the others. Feel free to comment too with your own. :)

read more

Wolfgang Ziegler (aka "fago") talks about the Rules module, and how it can be used by non-programmers to set up a series of events that are executed after certain conditional triggers happen. Fago claims that this is a more robust solution that Drupal's core trigger module functionality.

The Rules module in Drupal 6 is an evolution from the Workflow-NG module in Drupal 5, but renamed to reflect that it can do much more than just workflow.

There was also a Summer of Code project by klausi that integrated into the Rules package as the Rules Forms module.

Fago also talks about the future of Rules and how he plans on improving the APIs so that it's more extensible to add in loops and new features, and to have Features module integration with rules so that it's possible to and re-use rules.

You still have a week before you can personalize your conference schedule, but the time to sign up for one of the DrupalCon pre-conference events is now. This year, we have added all-day trainings to the already robust DrupalCon offerings.

The Drupal module Nodewords is a module that many people have come to love-to-hate - its SEO features are second to none, but a few buggy releases have left a sour taste with many developer.

read more

Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), one of the leading international development contractors, has deployed Open Atrium to help its GIS team in Islamabad communicate with its office in Peshawar and headquarters back in Bethesda on a capacity building project. In addition to improving team communications, they decided to use Open Atrium to boost the project's transparency for USAID and to get a sustainability win by using open source software that can stay behind with the local team in Pakistan long after the mapping project is completed.

Below is a short Q&A I had with Andrew Ross from DAI's GIS office about his work and how Open Atrium is helping.

Can you tell us about your project and your team in Pakistan?

read more

As the web evolves, we evolve with it. The introduction smart-phones to the general public, in a mass, together with lower costs of cellular internet connectivity and availability of wireless networks, all lead to an increasing demand to supply mobile application, to go with a website or service. iPhone started the storm, and Android is catching up rapidly. Other mobile devices are not staying behind.

Few years back we were amazed by our possibility to be mobile, while staying accessible and reachable. Now, the net goes with us, anywhere we go, we are not only mobile, we are in constant connection to information, friends and services. All this information is usually saved on a server somewhere. On this server each one has an identity, assets that are associated with this identity, friends, pictures, preferences etc. Sounds familiar? Right - all of the above are native in Drupal.

read more

Drupal's "premier conference" is quickly approaching. This Drupal conference is known as DrupalCon and will be held in San Francisco from April 19-21, 2010. As with previous years, the unofficial theme of the conference is to "learn about all things Drupal". If the conference sessions aren't enough, the schedule is also packed with plenty of development, documentation, and training events that are being held the days prior to and following the conference.

Presently over 1500 people have signed up to attend the conference. The price of attending a DrupalCon has always been reasonably priced which is one of the reasons this conference always sees a high turnout rate. If you plan on attending the conference, I would urge you to buy your tickets to DrupalCon now. Procrastinators like me have been known to wait too long to register for this conference only to find out that the maximum number of available tickets for the conference has already been reached.

read more

Just a note to all kindly Drupalists and your followers. I'll be appearing at SxSw interactive to talk about Drupal in the Cloud, sporting an updated presentation which includes info on how we're using BZR to create a "cloud platform", where all that's going anyway, plus details about our forthcoming Mercury on-demand service.

I am looking forward to seeing all sorts of great folks in/around the conference. If you're going to be in Austin this coming weekend, drop me a comment and let's coordinate! You can mark the session on your planner right here.

For those unable to attend, there will be some video and other media, and my slides will be posted online as always. See you in the Lone Star state!

During my last session on Drupalcamp in Barcelona I got the impression that there was a need for an updated guide on how to easily setup your own Apache Solr instance.
If you want to see why you or your company would have the need for an improved search experience you can still see my presentation on slideshare : http://www.slideshare.net/nickvh/drupal-apachesolrRead more

Lullabot is looking for an experienced project manager. Responsibilities include: managing scope, deliverables, schedules, and team resources for Lullabot client and internal projects. Daily tasks would include leading daily 15 minute check-in calls for each project, tending the ticket queue and managing task lists, communicating (email/phone) with clients, and basically keeping projects on track and moving forward. Lullabot is a distributed company without a central office, so like all Lullabot jobs, this is a telecommuting position and may involve travel.

Additional responsibilities include helping to write and assemble new project proposals and statements of work, though we tend to focus on bigger projects and don't take on too many projects at once. You'd be responsible for estimating and staffing projects, meeting with clients, pursuing and growing development partnerships, and coordinating the delivery of various projects.

If this sounds like a lot, it is. But Lullabot is a very collaborative company so you won't be working in isolation. You'll be working with a team of highly experienced Drupal consultants and developers with excellent communication skills and a passion for their work.

Ideal candidates should:

read more

....with the release of m.stubru.be the mobile site of the nr.1 public broadcast radio station "Studio Brussel".

Studio Brussel, the nr. 1 radio station of the Belgian public broadcaster VRT has released last week it's mobile website using Siruna technology.

read more

At DrupalCon Paris, Doug Green of CivicActions shared some insights doing big Multilingual sites. He talks about some of the pain points faced with doing the site, and working with the i18n module.

Other references mentioned:

• Locale module in Drupal 6
• Properly the t() function
• i18nSync module included within i18n
• Amnesty Report Site
• Amnesty International site

read more

One requirement of the Archdiocese of St. Louis' website is that group administrators are able to publish and unpublish the content inside their groups, and they should also be able to schedule posts for automated publishing and unpublishing at a later time.

To do this, I used the following modules:

• OG User Roles
• Scheduler
• Publish Content
• [EDIT: I'm now using the Override Node Options module rather than Publish Content - it gives more fine-grained control over visibility of node form options.]

After enabling these modules, I spent a while in the Permissions page, and also created a new user role, "administer nodes." Ironically, I didn't assign the 'administer nodes' permission to this role, because doing so causes a huge mess ('administer nodes' gives waaay too much power to anyone except the site admin—it's best to leave that beast unchecked in most cases).

read more

Recently, I have been working with quite a few Drupal sites, and one of my favorite tools to use has become drush. For those of you who are not aware of it, drush is a command line utility (drush = DRUpal SHell) that makes management of a Drupal site much more bearable. Drush is a great tool to use and is quite simple to install on your system when you have admin rights to the box. However, what about those of us on shared hosting system?

read more

Over the last year, Mediacurrent has been intensively collaborating with Ad Giants, an innovative marketing company based in Dallas, Texas. Ad Giants boasts an impressive list of clients and strategic partners like T. Boone Pickens, the legendary oil and business man, who has been featured on national television ads advocating an energy plan overhaul.

read more

The March Washington, DC Drupal meetup will be tonight (3/8) at 7:00 pm at Stetson's. After missing last month's meetup due to the snowmaggedons, it will be great to catch up with everyone.

As usual there will be a round of lightning talk where anyone can take the floor and talk - for five minutes or less - on a Drupal related topic. So far two people have volunteered:

• Jeff will talk about the Boxes module, which produces exportable and Spaces-friendly blocks

• StevenC has volunteered to talk about a website he built for a local construction firm that included a data migration from a legacy MS SQL database and some complex back-end programming.

  read more

I'm working on a new framework for dropdown menus and I'm running out of ideas. So far I got:

1. Animation on showing as well as hiding the menu (superfish only supports on-show)
2. Automatic configurable multi-column dropdowns. When number of items in a submenu exceeds set number a submenu is 2 columns, or 3 columns. (will look like http://www.whitehouse.gov)
3. Added support for custom easing, including the additional easing from the jQuery easing plugin and some homebrew easing*.
4. Animated properties are configurable (widh/height/opacity)

So what cool menu feature would you like to have on your next Drupal site? drop your idea in the comments!

*my new and favorite dropdown easing:

read more