Apps in Drupal and on the Web: The Why and The How

One of the main reasons Drupal is so popular, among hundreds of other open-source content management systems, is due to its developers' constant thirst for innovation and the ability to push the limits of the possible. From its roots as a flexible, hooks-based CMS to modules like Views and CCK, to CTools exportables and Features, Drupal community has been challenging the status-quo, re-thinking the old ways of doing things and constantly delivering more usable, flexible, superior solutions.

Today we are pleased to introduce a new paradigm in content-management systems: an App. Apps are very popular and well-established in the mobile world, but have not been present on the web or in any content-management systems, quite as much. We think it's time for that to change.

November DC Drupal Meetup Tonight: Two Minute Site Tours

The November Washington, DC Drupal meetup is tonight - November 8 - at 7:00 pm, and it will be a great opportunity to see some of the different kinds of sites that can be built with Drupal. Tonight's meetup will be showcasing several different kinds of Drupal websites in '2-minute site tours'.

Using DocumentCloud to Expose Public Documents in OpenPublish

DocumentCloud, a Knight News Challenge winning project, provides an innovative technical approach for sharing public documents that we are now incorporating portions of into OpenPublish. In our latest release OpenPublish 2.3 (released yesterday), we have integrated the document viewer technology developed and open sourced by the New York Times and used by the DocumentCloud team to present documents.

Ever wonder if a site is using OpenPublish?

We do. Well we used to. We've created an extension for Google Chrome to help dispel the mystery.

Wikheu - Managing Drupal Multisite Releases with SVN

Drupal Multisite is a powerful and mature tool for creating platform deployments of Drupal-based web-systems. However creating a release structure that allows atomic deployments of individual sites within a multisite is a somewhat less explored problem. Presented blog post describes one such approach that uses Subversion version control and a set of bash scripts for Linux to automate the process.

Drupal 6 Theming for Module Developers - Suggesting TPLs From a Module

The ability to write self-contained modules (thank you, Hooks API!) and a very flexible theming layer are two important aspects behind the power and extensibility of Drupal. The following blog post describes how to leverage this power and write "proper" modules - modules that externalize all rendering logic into TPLs, suggest default implementation but allow themers to override default TPLs if needed. Several use-cases are discussed.

World Bank Open API 2.0 Launched

World Bank has been collecting massive amounts of data, for the past 50+ years, and now possesses one of the richest repository of information about economic development in the world. Phase2 Technology had the pleasure of helping World Bank architect and engineer a new major release of its Open API 2.0

As we steadily approach the next era online where open data and the semantic web gives us more than we ever dreamed, the launch of each new major web-services API is significant. When a rich and unique data repository like the World Bank's opens its data for free, a world of possibilities opens up.