Amazee.com

On September 17, 2008 Amazee released a fully redesigned version of its social collaboration platform. We made this case study for all Drupal developers interested in how the site is being built and what the challenges have been so far.

What is Amazee

Amazee is a platform that channels any kind of activism and provides powerful tools to help project initiators organize, promote, and fund projects of any size with participants from anywhere around the world.

Whether the goal is to assemble a multinational football team or set up a massive number of broadband connections in remote towns in Africa, Amazee is easy to use for any kind of project.

Overview of Amazee features

Amazee provides you with effective tools to promote your project and collaborate with project buddies. You can for example decide upon the degree of openness and publicity of the project, assign different member rights and keep your visitors informed through an easy editable project magazine. The project team can exchange ideas in the discussion section and jointly edit text in the project's writeboard area. Members can upload pictures as well as other files and organize events and to dos in a calendar. Project funding is an important and unique part of Amazee, providing three built-in mechanisms for projects to raise money and ask for further support.

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LEADEL.NET is a video portal and social network, funded by the European Jewish Congress, which revolves around the elements that make social, technological, political and financial leaders tick and thereby encouraging Leadel's viewers to explore what makes them do what they do.

The site focuses on jewish identity and tries to explore the differences which make us as identity bearing human beings unique.
The path LEADEL have taken in inspiring the perseverance of that identity, is to create a website which will appeal to young people and will adhere to their standards of quality, user experience and ease of use.
This was a great chance to take the services module further then we (at linnovate) have ever done before.
We ended up writing 16 custom services and using drupal to organize the site's information and flash as a front end, this comination seems to be the best of both worlds.

The Talk Carousel

The talk carousel is the main visual component in the home page and is used to promote the videos inside.

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About Student Activities at Texas A&M University

The Department of Student Activities at Texas A&M University is responsible for overseeing the annual recognition process of the 850+ student organizations on the College Station, TX campus. The department also advises several large organizations directly and offers leadership and involvement opportunities to the entire student body. Many of the most popular traditions on campus are heavily supported by the department, including Fish Camp (an extended orientation program attended by over 5,000 freshmen a year) and The Big Event (a one-day service project in which 10,000 students complete over 1,000 community service tasks in the city and surrounding areas).

History of Student Organization Web Hosting

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After months of hard work, Acquia is now open for business! Starting today, everyone can connect their Drupal 6 site to the Acquia Network to take advantage of our services. Oh my!

The Acquia Network (previously code-named Spokes) is a hosted service that helps you with site management (update notifications, spam blocking, cron service, modification detection, etc) and provides real-time visibility into the health and usage of all your Drupal sites that are connected to the Acquia Network.

Second, the Acquia Network gives you access to Acquia's technical support team. Whether it is an installation question, a development question or a configuration question, our Drupal experts are ready to provide you with technical support. The kicker? Acquia Network subscriptions are available for every budget -- including a free community version. Give it a try!

Third, we are also releasing Acquia Drupal today. Acquia Drupal (previously code-named Carbon) is our Drupal distribution that bundles some of the best, most essential Drupal modules for building social publishing sites. Acquia Drupal is available for free, and all our bug fixes and improvements go straight to the module maintainers on drupal.org. Acquia Drupal defines the collection of modules that you can get technical support for.

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The Knight Drupal Initiative which funds new and existing Drupal projects. The next monthly review meeting takes place on Thursday, 2 October 2008 at 15:00 EDT (19:00 UTC). The meeting will be held in IRC #drupal-dojo on irc.freenode.net. (See http://drupal.org/irc for information about using IRC.) We will meet for an hour and a half to review current proposals, discuss the application process and introduce new proposals to the community.

Community members are encouraged to review and comment on the existing proposals before the meeting.

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A new top-level handbook will be added to Drupal.org this weekend, September 27-28, titled "Getting Involved." It will appear on the main Documentation landing page. We first posted about the new book back in August and have been working hard to get everything in to place to take it live.

For the creation of the new handbook, the "Developing for Drupal" and "About" handbooks will have some sections moved into the new book. The work will be happening this weekend, so those handbooks may be in a bit of disarray during the process. We are mostly moving existing pages or creating new ones so that no URLs will be harmed. Some pages may be rewritten to reduce duplication, but we are striving to not remove any pages.

What is it?

The driving idea behind the handbook is to not only tell people how to contribute to Drupal, but also to explain why, and encourage folks to explore contributing as a great way to actually learn and make their own Drupal lives better. The new handbook will cover everything from how to get an account on Drupal.org to how to use CVS.

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Davis Applied Technology College

The Davis Applied Technology College (DATC), located in Kaysville, Utah, offers open-entry/open-exit, competency based programs on a year-round schedule. Our programs are broken up into the following schools: Business & Information, Construction & Apprenticeship, Health Professions, Manufacturing, Service Professions, and Transportation. For 30 years the DATC has been offering opportunities to individuals with difficult schedules or tight finances to further their education. Which is why our motto is "we change lives."

Web Team

With a medium-sized College we definitely had a lot of people willing to give feedback regarding the new web site. With that in mind we decided to put together a team of about 10 faculty and staff members that met regularly to discuss the progress and plan for the site. This team made the preparations for the site a lot smoother because we were able to look at it from all angles. It helped us feel more comfortable about the decisions that we were making along the way. In the end it definitely made the outcome more welcome.

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MothersClick.com and the entire ParentsClick Network is very proud to announce that we've been acquired by Lifetime Entertainment. This marks a major milestone for a digital company whose online technology stack is largely built on Drupal.

The transaction is further proof that Drupal is competing with the likes of Ruby on Rails as a framework for high-tech startups. Lifetime's strategic acquisition of ParentsClick Network shows its belief that Drupal can power some of the largest online social community sites. Lifetime's VP of technology Nathan Potter states, "With the acquisition of ParentsClick, we continue to grow our core competency in Drupal development. With one of the largest and fastest growing Drupal-based communities anywhere, we will continue to show the world what Drupal is capable of."

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Bill Fitzgerald, of FunnyMonkey, has written Drupal for Education and E-learning, due out from Packt Publishing in late October. Targeted for Drupal 6, this book covers how to set up community sites to support interactive teaching and learning. This book gives an overview of the functionality of Drupal core, and then gives precise instructions on using CCK, Views 2, Organic Groups, and a range of other contributed modules to extend the functionality of your site.

This book is written with the needs of educational users in mind, but the information in this book can be useful for site administrators, or for people looking to build a community/social networking site in Drupal.

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Lullabot is pleased to announce the largest independent Drupal event ever. Do It With Drupal is a 3-day seminar focused on the configuration, architecture, and processes behind building successful Drupal websites and communities.

The event is geared at attendees with a wide range of Drupal experience. For new developers and decision-makers, DIWD will offer a great introduction to Drupal and the Drupal community. For more experienced Drupalers, DIWD will offer a great chance to pick up tips and tricks straight from the experts and a chance to connect and socialize with other Drupal professionals.

The Do It With Drupal Seminar will feature the following highlights:

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Some of you may have noticed we recently gave the Bryght hosting system a facelift and added some functionality under the hood. Bryght Drupal hosting combines a custom install profile with a tuned hosting environment, incorporating best practices used on Drupal.org, to make a fully functional, out-of-the-box VPS.

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After a week of delay due to DrupalCON related travel, it is time for our monthly open review meeting. We will meet for the next round of proposal reviews on Thursday, September 11th at 14:00 Eastern (US) (18:00 UTC).

The meeting will be held in IRC #drupal-dojo on irc.freenode.net. (See http://drupal.org/irc for information about using IRC.) We will meet for 1:30 with the following agenda:

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At the end of 2007, Aten Design Group worked with The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation to deploy iCitizenForum.com, a Drupal website about Citizenship. The following case study documents some of the factors that led to choosing Drupal, and outlines the technical approach for the project.

Background

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation operates the world's largest living history museum in Williamsburg, Virginia. The foundation preserves and interprets a 301-acre Historic Area; operates museums, outreach programs, and the John D. Rockefeller Library; and carries out important research and archaeology pertaining to the origins of America. In accordance with its mission, "That the Future May Learn from the Past", the foundation is concerned not only with recreating the 18th-century experience, but with facilitating education about the idea of America–both in its beginnings, and in its relevance for the future.

iCitizenForum.com, a website that promotes discussion around the topic of Citizenship, is a fitting extension of this core mission.

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Now that everyone is (hopefully) recovered from Drupalcon Szeged, I wanted to create one more front page post with a roadmap for the portion of the redesign project involving Mark Boulton Design. Mark and Leisa provided insight into their approach to the redesign in their keynote and really built up excitement and enthusiasm for the project. I highly recommend it to anyone even a teensy bit interested in the redesign process. Over the next three months (September 2008 – December 2008), the d.o redesign team will be tackling:

• User research
• Revised information architecture
• Content audit and editing
• Wireframes
• Usability testing
• Brand style guide
• Finalized design .psd

To be sure, they have a lot of work ahead of them. No worries – they’re totally on it! However, it also should not be underestimated how much work is ahead of us, the community. Again, I’m not worried, but it’s important that everyone is clear that the scope of the work we’ve contracted MBD to do is only the beginning.

The community will be the driving force in the redesign of Drupal.org and the Redesign Group will be the central hub for all interested. Be a part of it.

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digg_url = 'http://digg.com/software/Drupal_is_a_2008_Open_Source_CMS_Award_Finalist';

Last year Drupal won 2007 Best Overall Open Source CMS. That was before we released Drupal 6.

This year, Drupal 6 was nominated for best CMS in two categories. Please help us by voting for Drupal in both of them:

• Best Overall Open Source CMS
• Best PHP Open Source CMS

"Following six weeks of intense voting, Packt can now exclusively reveal the Content Management Systems that have made the final of the four different categories. With the final voting stage opening on September 1, the competition is likely to be strong with new CMS's joining some of the more established names in each category to compete for a share of the $20,000 prize money."

"As usual, judging comes from a panel of experienced and respected figures from the Content Management and Open Source industry. They will be selecting their top three based on a number of factors including performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security.

The final judge is made up of votes from customers and visitors to www.PacktPub.com. You have the chance to support your favourite CMS by submitting a vote when the final five are announced."

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Drupal Essential Training

with: Tom Geller (Publishers bio)

...is now live in the Online Training Library at Lynda.com! Contact me privately via email or comment here if you have a well-known site and would like to publish a review of the full series, and I'll do my best to get you a DVD or free site pass. (It's normally $25/month for access to all their videos, which I think is a really good deal.)

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Another amazing Drupalcon has come to an end. Thank you to everyone that made the journey to the beautiful town of Szeged, Hungary. We truly turned this city into DrupalTown! Drupal folks covered every part of the town making it difficult to get away from them but who would want to! The amount of talks, connections, and learning that happened at this conference was amazing. This community is truly awesome!

But we're not stopping! Drupalcon North America has been decided and will happen in the March/April timeframe in the United States. We are not announcing the location or exact dates until the final contracts are signed, but watch for them on the Drupal.org front page! Start saving now!

By the way, did you attend Drupalcon Szeged? Couldn't make it?
Tell us about it in the Drupalcon Szeged 2008 Survey.

Although Drupalcon Szeged may be over and Drupalcon North America isn't for another seven months, that doesn't mean you have to wait to meet your fellow Drupallers. The following camps are occurring around the world in the next several weeks. Find more listed over at groups.drupal.org/events:
Sept. 6th-7th Victoria Canada DrupalCamp and Beerfest!

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The much-anticipated second edition of Pro Drupal Development has shipped! Newly updated and revised for Drupal 6, it includes more than 200 pages of additional content covering the Actions API for automating complex operations, the Batch API tools for managing long or complex processes, and other new tools. As with the first edition, it covers important foundational issues like building modules, working with FormAPI and the node system, using Drupal's search tools, and more. Purchases of the book made through its web site also benefit the Drupal Association.

When Pro Drupal Development was first released in 2007, it was a runaway success, hitting the Amazon.com top 100 in just a few days. As critical tools like Views, CCK, and Drupal are shipping for Drupal 6, the book's release should help give another important boost to the Drupal development community.

DrupalSN.com (Drupal Social Network) is a Social Network website about Drupal and built with Drupal. It is engineered from the ground up by thomjjames with a tiny bit of help from BioALIEN in getting this write up polished and published on the Drupal front page.

What is it?

DrupalSN is essentially a Drupal showcase both in terms of the site itself and also as a place where Drupal developers and designers can showcase their Drupal projects all in one place. I hope Drupal developers and designers will use the site as a way to gain exposure to complement their portfolio.

It's also meant to be a fun place where people can interact and see how Drupal can effectively be used for a social network. I hope the site can compliment Drupal.org and Groups.Drupal.org in a fun and different way but ultimately the goal is to promote Drupal!

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"Drupal in Libraries" is the subject of the May / June edition of Library Technology Reports. (http://www.techsource.ala.org/ltr/drupal-in-libraries.html) Authors Andy Austin (aaustin) and Chris Harris (cgharris) present an overview of Drupal for the library audience hoping to show why and how libraries can get started using Drupal.

Library Technology Reports is published by ALA Techsource, a unit of the publishing department of the American Library Association. The ALA Techsource website also runs on Drupal.

Click To Play

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