As Ubercart marches toward a beta release, I'm pleased to see more and more stores popping up in the live sites directory. I was just as happy to see a post in my Google Alerts from another development shop finding Drupal + Ubercart to be a good solution for e-commerce development. The guys at Sundays Energy have been doing this openly for a while, and I know several other developers who have pumped out multiple incredible sites (izi are you out there? ). The post that just came up today, though, was different. It not only praised our beloved CMS for having a good e-commerce module package in Ubercart, but it also praised Drupal over against the likes of Joomla/Wordpress (and their e-commerce extensions) and other dedicated e-commerce solutions like osCommerce and ZenCart.

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Last week I had the opportunity of being interviewed by the great team at Flying Fruit. We discuss the growing trend towards virtual companies and the benefits and challenges for Lullabot in being a geographically distributed team. Listen to entertaining stories about our early years as well as tender tales of the harder decisions we've made along the way.

http://www.fallingfruit.tv/episodes/staying-small-staying-virtual

We just concluded our second boot camp in San Francisco earlier today. Running a boot camp is a bit harder than it seems. We'd like to than the good folks from Chicago Techonology Cooperative (Tom, Brandon), Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) (Blake, Patricia) and USPIRG/FFPIR (Wes) for attending and being willing and gracious bootcamp participants

Similar to the first bootcamp, we structured this bootcamp as a mixture of design and coding sessions. We also split into smaller groups for a couple of sessions to address some more specific issues with the respective organizations. Some of the highlights and things accomplished include:

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Kurund and Lobo will be in New York City on Dec 19th / 20th. We have a potential space near Union Square for Dec 19th that we could use if we get enough folks interested. We will tailor the session based on the needs of the folks who sign up :)

If you are interested please send me an email (lobo at yahoo dot com) along with ideas on what you'd like the session to be about. We'd love to get some user feedback, comments and critique of CiviCRM. We'll spend some time explaining a few things coming in CiviCRM v2.0

I have been playing lately with Yahoo! pipes again and they really made the project a lot better. With just three boxes I was able to get the ical feed from groups.drupal.org (agenda) and map it on the earth. If you have a Y! ID, go to drupal events on pipes and see where the Drupal event action is right now (even on Google earth with the KML export).

Too bad I do not have a Google Mashup account yet otherwise I could easy turn this GeoRSS in an embeddable map combining Google maps and Yahoo! Pipes

the blessing and curse of cck is the ability to quickly create very complex node types within drupal. it doesn't take very long before the input form for a complex node type has become unmanageably long, requiring your user to do a lot of scrolling to get to the bottom of the form. the obvious solution is to break your form into multiple pages, but there is no easy way to do this. there do exist two proposed solutions to this, the cck wizard module and a drupal handbook entry. however, the well-intentioned cck wizard module doesn't seem to work, and the example code in the drupal handbook becomes tedious to repeat for each content type. to fill the void, i bring you cck witch

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Amnesty International launched a total overhaul of their website on December 10th (World Human Rights Day). The new site was developed in Drupal, with CRM components provided by CiviCRM and was integrated with a sister project to migrate Amnesty International's ancient lotus notes database of 50K+ reports and press communications to alfresco (http://alfresco.org), an open source document management system.

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By default, drupal provides a number of regions to put blocks in and lets you put them pretty much anywhere in the page you want to. But, there are a few exceptions to this rule. What if you want to put a region in a node? What if you want to put a region in between a node and the comments on that node? This may not seem so easy out of the box. Let's take a look at how to put a region in a node.tpl.php file.

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Drupal is pretty flexible in its look and feel. A Drupal site can look like almost anything. The way the look and feel of a site is defined is through theming. Drupal comes with a few themes out of the box. To change a theme, you do it through the admin of your site--you can look at which themes you currently have installed at /admin/build/themes.

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When more than one person is working on a site there invariably comes a moment when something breaks but nobody changed anything . . . or did they? A version control system catches the file changes, but what about Drupal settings? A new module addressing this issue appeared on the module RSS feed last month so I took a look.

The Journal module (Release 5.x-1.0) is very straightforward. It adds an additional text field named "Journal entry" to all Drupal forms via hook_form_alter.

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This video will show you how to set up a local web server on the Ubuntu desktop version. It walks through most of the process using a GUI and uses just a little bit of command line to set some things up. I did it this way to make it the most accessible to even new users of Ubuntu. It walks you through installing the needed packages, setting it up for clean URLs and getting Drupal started.

Well, using the word "awesome" in three out of four posts here is rather commonplace, but lately I have been in need of a simple to set up and use debugging tool, and being a refugee from j2ee, I have always missed some kind of logging facility... so, imagine my joy when lo and behold I read this morning, about the ... great... log4drupal - a logging api for drupal.

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End of February 2008 --- http://Fosdem.org in Brussels Belgium.

Joeri has just launched a call for action to gather as many drupal developers into one of the fosdem developer rooms. For those non-belgian drupal-lovers, yet another great excuse to visit the Capital of Europe.

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FOSDEM, which stands for Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting, is a yearly free and non-commercial event for the open source community, held in Brussels (Belgium).

Each year FOSDEM sets up developer rooms where teams can meet, discuss, hack and present the latest developments about their project. Joeri Poesen from Krimson, a Belgian Drupal company, is taking the lead in trying to secure and organize a Drupal developer room at FOSDEM this year. Thanks Joeri!

(I co-organized a Drupal developer room in 2005 and can attest that it is a fun and rewarding experience.)

In order to qualify for a room, we need a number of people who are willing to present about Drupal. If you're interested, let us known in the comments or reply to Joeri's call for action. Drupal users unite!

By popular demand, here are the slides from the Google Tech Talk I gave with Geoff Butterfield of the George Lucas Educational Foundation back in October.

This talk consists of an overview of Drupal, who uses it, how it works, and what some of its killer modules are, and then specifics about how it's implemented in the site Edutopia.org.

Here's the video:

And here are the slides: http://webchick.net/files/presentations/2007-10-08-google-implementing-drupal.odp

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We, the developers of ON Networks released version 1.1 of our website this evening (its built off of drupal of course... if it weren't, than I would go sharing it with the planet, would i?). The notable improvements are ajax comments, tooltips for episodes, and a global navigation.

In celebration of this small milestone, I figured I'd reveal our favorite jQuery plugins that we're using. (note that our site's jQuery is 1.2.1... which is several versions ahead of the vanilla drupal core).

1. Cycle Plugin -- An early concept of our new homepage used this plugin. While that concept is dead, this plugin is very much alive in my head. Indeed, its one badass little jQuery plugin. For starters, it supports all the browsers I care about, offers tones of cool animations, and its syntax, and expected markup are bloody simple. Best of all, the author was a mind reader, and gave me all the options I needed, allowing me to use it without altering the plugin's source code.

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if your career as a developer has included a stay in the j2ee world, then when you arrived at drupal one of your initial questions was "where's the log file?". eventually, someone told you about the watchdog table. you decided to try that for about five minutes, and then were reduced to using a combination of <pre> and print_r to scrawl debug data across your web browser.

when you tired of that, you learned a little php, did a little web research and discovered the PEAR log package and debug_backtrace(). the former is comfortably reminiscent of good old log4j and the latter finally gave you the stacktrace you'd been yearning for. still, separately, neither gave you quite what you were looking for : a log file in which every entry includes the filename and line number from which the log message originated. put them together though, and you've got log4drupal

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Amazingly, within last month, there were over 100,000 creations for Be My Bra and there are still thousands added daily. The explosion of traffic resulted in fleeting moments of "oh crap is our server going to explode", but we got everything under control, in the end. Thank you to everyone that participated! The application will stay up forever, so create your own if you haven't already.

Also, last month, we launched BMB on Facebook, a fantastic medium to spread important messages like this, especially with the existing functionality already in Playwidgets. Completely powered by Drupal, the Facebook version of the application allows users to send creations straight to their friends by selecting their names from a drop-down within the application. Additionally, users can add a profile block (screenshot below) of their creation, by a simple click of a button. Click here to give it a try.

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