Registration is now open for a seminar that Drupal development and education firm Lullabot is presenting this December in New Orleans.

The event, Do It With Drupal, looks to be quite good; their list of speakers includes Lullabot staff plus some authors and maintainers of popular Drupal modules such as Organic Groups, CCK and Ubercart!

Check out the seminar's website at http://www.doitwithdrupal.com/ for more information on the event and look out for more info there regarding seminar topics and schedule(s)

I'm bloody stoked about a module I just discovered on drupal.org - its called Movino and may just be one of the most powerful and cutting edge tools you can implement on your Drupal powered website.

As I understand it Movino consists of a program that you can load onto your smartphone/video-enabled mobile, plus a module for your Drupal site.  Once its all installed and configured you'll be able to stream live to your site or have your site record the stream for on-demand playback.

Imagine what you can do with this.  Video-blogging, indie concert broadcasting and well, a million other things.

I was quite interested to come across a very simple use of drupal today - a British firm called Record of the Day setup a very plain website survey (at http://www.whatpricedidyouchoose.com ) buyers of Radiohead's much discussed (new) album 'In Rainbows.'

The site is built in Drupal and uses the basic Minelli theme. Its developer was rushed to get something up live for Record of the Day and in effect created a great example of how Drupal can be used simply to powerful effect.

I just came across a great little chunk of php to bung into your template.php that will load icons next to actual file attachments in posts on a Drupal 5.x site, thanks to Agaric Design. He's got a basic icon set with MS Word, PDF and a couple more icons you can use - I also recommend looking @ famfamfam to see if anything else strikes your fancy/works better with your theme.

Something that can get confusing for site users is when you have created 'sections' of your site comprising of blocks, Views, Panels etc - often cases in Drupal 5, the menu system won't follow a Panel, for example as belonging to a menu item (it instead wants to refer to nodes only - which means that even if you use something like the Menu Trails module, you may run into problems).

One main quirk I've had with using Drupal (and other Open Source CMSs for that matter), is that when I need to do some heavy maintenance and take a site down, the default 'site offline' message looks pretty mickey mouse and though I'm proud of using Drupal, I'd rather have my own logo, if one at all, when people see that my site is down - I mean, it looks as if they've reached some page they shouldn't have and something's seriously messed up.

Well, you don't have to waste much time pondering these things like I have - there are two approaches in Drupal 5 that let you beautify the site offline message, and I recommend you read this post:

http://drupal.org/node/58562

About 2/3 of the way down the page you'll see mention of a simple template.tpl.php include which will redirect people to a custom/static page or URL but still allow you to access site login/admin pages. :)

Its funny how often people remark; "I don't know about Drupal - all the sites people make with it, well, look like Drupal!"  Such observations are usually the result of a developer not taking that extra step to override some default blurbs and titles that Drupal comes with out of the box.

Now, overriding Drupal's strings has been quite the pain until recently because you'd have to wrap your head around php and then come up with some snippet including a hook and so on..  Well, thanks to Khalid @ 2bits today I got twigged onto a new module which makes overrides a dream.  This great module is simply titled 'String Overrides' and comes ready to transform your Drupal 5 and 6 experience.  Yay!

Here's a demo video from Rob Loach:

I've spent a little time this week hunting down a well priced Drupal-friendly hosting environment for a client of mine.  Actually, for years I've been extolling the virtues of shared/virtual hosts like Dreamhost who have been bumping up disk space and bandwidth allowances before gmail wet its bed for the first time - but then I signed up @ Rackspace and have fallen in love with how muc quicker Drupal runs when its file structure is on the same machine as its database - especially when that machine solely exists to power your own sites.

A few days back the second Release Candidate of Drupal 6 was posted for download on Drupal.org .  I'll be blogging a bit over the next couple of weeks about some neat things that Drupal 6 features as opposed to previous releases of the CMS, but for now wanted to note that site theming is getting easier as versions of Drupal advance; which is an exciting development for anyone interested in making sites that are aesthetically unique and provide enjoyable user interfaces.

To get cracking in discovering how Drupal 6 can offer more power in site theming, be sure to watch Moshe Weitzman's screencast introducing the Theme Developer module; a new part of devel which lets you know what theme functions are being called on your site, as you look at it!  Sort of like a Web Developer toolbar or Firebug extension for Drupal :)

Website developers reading this will all agree - it can be quite a pain when a client is moving from some archaic static html site (or CMS) over to a dynamic site - especially when there is a lot of content to move over.

Well, to make things easier I suggest putting all the old content into a spreadsheet and then dumping it into the new Drupal site you've made for them... "What a second," you say, "how can I dump a bunch of content easily into my Drupal site?"  Well, all you need is the node import module folks; its a great tool that plays nicely with the CCK; so you can prepare a CSV file with all the content you want and then import each row as a node!  When you import the data the module asks which fields map to which column in the CSV so don't worry; if you're focused when doing imports, the whole process should be pretty clean and straight-forward!