Phase2 Drupalcon 2010 Proposed Session Topics

Session voting for Drupalcon 2010 in San Francisco started today and I am very proud of the great entries that our team at Phase2 has prepared for the conference. In total our team proposed 13 sessions that cover 5 of the 6 categories and run the complete range from business topics to graphic design, architecture and code development. We would love your vote and chance to share what we have learned this past year.

Drupal in Government Part 1: Five government sites using Drupal effectively for open government initiatives

Why is Drupal important to the the Federal government? That is the main topic I will cover in a 3 part guest blog series on GovFresh. GovFresh works to inspire government-citizen collaboration and build a more engaged democracy. It features Gov 2.0, open gov news, guides, TV, tech, people and official U.S. government feeds, all in one place.

The first post Five government sites using Drupal effectively for open government initiatives provides some high profile examples of who is using Drupal effectively in government and why Drupal is a great fit for what these sites are trying to achieve.

My second post will focus on the unique aspects of providing web content management for government that are relevant for Drupal (i.e. what can Drupal learn from Government?) And my final post will provide ideas and predictions for the future of Drupal within the Federal government.

My Review of "Cracking Drupal" by Greg Knaddison

Cracking Drupal's goal is to help Drupal maintainers and module developers recognize, diagnose, and ultimately prevent security issues, from the perspective of code. It gives a good overview of how to think about security when building and/or analyzing custom, contributed or core modules. With included code examples and some real world cases, the book presents a good foundation to build from.

Enforcing DRY Concepts in Drupal

Don't Repeat Yourself, or DRY, is a software development principle aimed at speeding development efforts and reducing repetition in code bases. The great part about DRY is that in addition to getting work done quicker, it makes maintaining code much easier: if blocks of code that perform like actions across a site, or across multiple sites, is in fact the same code, making changes and adding features in one place results in those changes being quickly made in all places. Even better? Drupal makes enforcing DRY concepts incredibly easy in many different ways.

Quick homepage optimization

On Drupal sites, it is easy to implement page-front.tpl.php to layout your custom homepage, but forget that nodes are being rendered into $content if you use the default homepage. Here is a little trick to get a quick optimization on your homepage and avoid unnecessary nodes from being rendered.

Using hook_views_query_alter to change your views sort order

Sometimes you might need some extra help getting views to sort correctly. This is especially the case when sorting on a column that might include NULL values, or when your criteria for how results should sort is complex. Instead of implementing template logic to correct the result sorting, you can use hook_views_query_alter to modify the sort criteria in the query itself.

Drupal Smallcore: Where Do We Start?

There has been increasing amount of discussion and debate about Smallcore initiative in the Drupal community. Smallcore's purpose is to separate Drupal's CMS capabilities from the core framework APIs and enhance Drupal's characteristics as a universal web-development framework. The Smallcore movement mostly benefits the development of packaged Drupal distributions - a hot topic in the Drupal community, these days.

Phase2 Technology is the author and maintainer of two popular Drupal-based distributions: OpenPublish and Tattler (app). We also have worked on numerous high-profile Drupal-powered websites. In this blog post we try to digest the two perspectives and offer some of our ideas regarding Smallcore and Drupal's future, in general.

Go.USA.gov the Government URL Shortener using Drupal

"Does the world really need another URL shortener?" Asked TechCrunch in a snarky post by Erick Schonfeld on October 13, 2009 entitled Go.USA.Gov! Our Taxpayer Money Hard At Work Shortening URLs. He was referring to Go.USA.Gov the new URL shortener that lets government employees create short .gov URLs for their links. Go.USA.gov also tracks the number of clicks each shortened URL receives, so you can measure the impact of the spread of those links. We feel this is more like an example where the government rapidly and inexpensively deployed something innovative that will protect the reputation of government assets on the web.

Today We Release Tattler, What Is It? Why Is It Unique?

Today we are releasing our first publicly available open source version of Tattler on Drupal.org. Tattler is a way to monitor topics you are interested in and learn who is talking about them, where, when and how.

Tattler might be used by a researcher, journalist, blogger, technology analyst, or PR specialist or anyone looking for a better way to research on the web. In other words, Tattler is for those that don't just listen to, but help shape the public policy debate - either with coverage or research. So what is unique about Tattler?

Recording of Wednesday's Webinar on OpenPublish and Tattler now Available

If you missed Wednesday's webinar, you can still listen to the recording. The webinar is entitled Drupal Publishing & Social Media Solutions for Online Publishers and is chock-full of great information.