Drupal in Government Part 2: Drupal: The New Gov 2.0 Site Builder?

I have been writing a series of guest blog posts at GovFresh on Drupal in open government. GovFresh works to inspire government-citizen collaboration and build a more engaged democracy through Gov 2.0 best practices, open gov news, guides, TV, tech, people and official U.S. government feeds, all in one place.

This month, I discuss how Drupal is close to being the perfect Gov 2.0 solution for savvy agencies – and soon perhaps a default solution for open government web initiatives in my post today entitled Drupal: The New Gov 2.0 Site Builder?

Last month I wrote about how Drupal supports five of the most effective open government sites in Five Government Sites Using Drupal Effectively for Open Government Initiatives.

Let me know what you think of these posts and what else you would like to see written about on this topic.

Views 2 Table Aliases and Extra Criteria

Here are two tricks that you can use when you need to provide data for use in views.

If you need to provide data to views that rely on tables already present in a view you can use the table parameter to ensure views builds your joins the way you desire. This can be handy when using organic groups and you want data from two different nodes to be available in your result.

NodeBolt Module

New module released to make you think twice before deleting certain nodes.

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.

What Does the Open Government Directive Look Like?

On the first anniversary of the President's inauguration, I wanted to share some thoughts about the historic Open Government Initiative and discuss the implementation details of last month's Open Government Directive. Since we are developers, we wanted to do more than talk and write about what open government is, we are interested in how it actually looks and works to a user on the web. So we prepared some mock-ups for this purpose and shared it around town. This mock-up demonstrates both our concept for the user interface and content of a great /open site, but also prototypes what a simple approach to open government data and communications could be through a templated installation of Drupal we would like to build if some agency wants one?

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.

Login issues and $cookie_domain

If you find yourself unable to log into a pre-existing Drupal site after a migration and despite making sure everything has been transferred, you may want to check settings.php.

NoVA Drupal December Meetup: "The Greatest Under-the-Radar Modules"

This week's topic is "The Greatest Under-the-Radar Modules". Just come ready to share and discuss your favorite, coolest modules that aren't standard issue for most drupal sites

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.