developmentseed
A Themer's Cheatsheet
I’ve had design coming out my ears the past couple weeks while working on the the designs and themes for DrupalCon DC, DC Bikes, Stumble Safely, and the New America Foundation’s recently launched State of State Health. Working around the clock on theming has been a good reminder of how even veteran Drupal themers can use some brushing up on their fundamentals. Inspired in part by this simple sticky, I put together a wallpaper that includes the reminders and diagrams I found myself needing the most.
The Next Level in Team Communications: Jabber Integration with Drupal
We’ve done a lot to set up team communications tools that help us work more productively. So far we have an intranet with a HTML shoutbox and an XMPP server for secure instant messaging and group chats, and we use the Notifications and Messaging frameworks so we can subscribe and get notifications of updates from just about anywhere. Our next challenge is to put all these pieces together and have notifications and messages passed around from anyone to anywhere.
The missing piece to do this and glue these pieces together is a messaging broker that can take incoming messages from multiple input channels, do some processing with them, and route the results to anywhere. We recently got this working. Meet the Messaging processor, an architecture capable of handling multiple channels and configurable processing queues. This is a high level block diagram of how it all fits together.
Note: Though the following screenshots are from live sites, this is still in the development stage and we are not releasing all the code (yet). Stay tuned for upcoming releases of all these modules.
The Ingredients
- XMPP server and the XMPP Framework, with a few patches to allow persistent XMPP connections
- A (100% PHP Drupal) chatbot that can connect periodically to the chat room and post read messages
- A shoutbox module (integrated with our spaces architecture) that allows setting up shoutbox blocks for informal message blasts, tied to a specific team or site section
- Messaging and Notifications frameworks, which are fully released as contributed modules
- The new Messaging processor, which handles incoming messages, processing, and routing between channels
Week in DC Tech: Thanksgiving Week Edition
Most of us are looking forward to a short work week and a lot of upcoming turkey (or tofurkey). But for those who haven’t skipped town already and aren’t involved in Thanksgiving preparations, there are a few tech events happening. Here’s a look at what’s happening this week in Washington, DC and, as always, you can find a full listing at DC Tech Events.
Tuesday, November 25
6:00 pm
Routinely Targeted: Attacks on Civilians in Somalia – A Human Rights Defenders Speaking Tour: This one isn’t technology related but will certainly be an eye opener. Two activists – one a photojournalist and the other a women’s rights activist – will speak about daily life in Somalia and the violence that many civilians regularly face.
7:00 – 9:00 pm
Dorkbot DC: Always one of the geekier events of the month, at this month’s meeting Alden Hart will talk about LED projects and the lessons he’s learned working on microcontroller LED designs.
SMS Gateway Featured in a MobileActive Guide to Using Mobiles for Citizen Media
The SMS Gateway was featured in a report recently released by MobileActive as an open source mobile tool that could help make citizen created media more accessible. The SMS Gateway acts as a bridge between mobile phones and Drupal websites, letting people send sms messages to a website and website administrators send messages out to mobile phones via the site. We first built this proof of concept to improve election monitoring efforts, but built a flexible infrastructure so the SMS Gateway could be used for many different purposes. The tool could easily by use by a citizen media publication to allow citizen reporters to send mobile content to a central website and either post it directly or add it to the editing queue and give the site’s editors and easy way to contact its contributors.
The report discusses many other mobile tools that could also be adapted to be used for advancing citizen media. You can read the full report here.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt Talked Open Data, Innovation
In a talk put on by the New America Foundation today, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked about how government policy should spur innovation, and how it can. It was good to hear Schmidt emphasize the benefits of opening up government data – and how that would lead to more technical innovation, more analysis of that data, and more citizen-driven policies coming from a better informed and more engaged populace.
We’ve been thinking a lot lately about open data, in part because of our work last week on two mapping mashups that used data released by the DC government. This work was an experiment to see what could be done with open data like this, and the result was a lot of interesting mashups that let DC residents find out a lot more about where they live, a lot easier. Beyond this recent work, we’ve also been talking about open data with a lot of our clients recently, who know that other organizations working towards a common cause could greatly benefit from having access to this data but don’t know a good way to give it to them. It’s great to see the support for open data and the common standards that come with it gathering steam, and it would be amazing if the federal government threw in their support behind this and even better participated and opened up much of their own data.
You can watch Schmidt’s entire discussion in this video.
Hey, That's a Nice Map! New Custom Mapping Module for Drupal
Putting your content on a highly custom map is now as quick and as easy as putting those same nodes in a list. That’s because the Nice Map module can do the heavy lifting for you by acting as a WMS client that integrates with Views. A WMS – or Web Mapping Service – is a standard that lets applications like websites request a map from a mapping server. Using the WMS standard gives you the flexibility to use a public WMS server or to use your own mapping server where you have complete control over the maps, which is what we’ve been doing recently for our custom mapping work.
Washington, DC Drupal Meetup Tonight
The November DC Drupal Meetup will take place tonight at 7:00 pm at Stetson’s. So far two people have volunteered to give a five minute lightening presentation. Jeff will talk about the new module Nice Map, which allows you to make good looking maps like you can see here. Ian will discuss the strategies we’ve implemented to more efficiently build websites. Anyone is welcome and everyone is encouraged to give a lightening presentation. If you’d like to present, please post your topic here and come ready to talk tonight.
DC Drupal meetups are for all levels of Drupal developers and users, so don’t be shy if you’re a newbie. These meetups are great opportunities to learn more about Drupal and what you can do with it, meet developers working with the platform, and meet users to hear about their experiences working with Drupal. You can find more details about the meetup in the Washington, DC Drupal group. Hope to see you tonight!
Week in DC Tech: November 17 Edition
Welcome to winter, Washington, DC. Temperatures plunged on Saturday night, giving us our first real taste of winter. Unfortunately according to the forecast, this cold weather is here to stay for at least the next week. Luckily, there are lots of indoor tech events taking place this week to give you a warm post-work activity or at least a stopping point in your commute home. Here are a few of the events we’re planning to attend this week. You can find a full listing of local technology events at DC Tech Events.
Monday, November 17
7:00 – 9:00 pm
DC Drupal Meetup: Drupal is one of the most popular open source content management systems out there, and this event is your chance to meet the people working with it every day. Whether you’re a Drupal developer or user, or a wannabe Drupal developer or user, come out and meet the local Drupal community.
Tuesday, November 18
11:30 am – 1:30 pm
‘The Intersection of Marketing and Technology: Like most industries, marketers are in hot pursuit of determining how to best use technology and social media to get their messages to their audience. Experts will discuss the more promising strategies at this lunch event.
Drupal on the Cover of Information Week Magazine
In an issue largely dedicated to discussing how open source software has become a serious competitor for business technology solutions, Drupal landed front and center on the cover of Information Week. Drupal has been a leading content management system for the nonprofit and media sectors for some time, and it’s great to see its merits being recognized by the business sector as well.
Knight Pulse Beta Site Launches on Drupal
This week the Knight Foundation launched its latest Drupal project Knight Pulse. The Knight Foundation works on a broad range of issues related to innovative media work and improving access to information for people and communities. Knight Pulse is a new community site designed to bring everyone involved in the work Knight sponsors together to talk and learn from each other.
Building a new community site can be hard to do. Everyone already has their preferred venues where they go to blog and network, and adding a new one to the mix successfully is a challenge. Rather than trying to build the next Facebook, Kristen Taylor and Marc Fest from Knight’s communications team decided to take an iterative approach and start small with a core feature set, experiment with some ideas, and measure their results and feedback to see what works well. The Knight Foundation loves Drupal, and in this case they’re relying on the modularity and extensibility of Drupal to carry out this process so they can learn as the site grows and expand it later to meet demand and respond to community requests. (This is why they’re currently calling the Pulse site a “beta” release – it’s going to continue to grow and evolve.)
Washington, DC Government Pushes for Open Data and Tech Innovation
Today Alex, Jeff, and I had the opportunity to talk with some of the DC government’s leading technology officers about open data at the Apps for Democracy press conference. Washington, DC is emerging as a leader in opening up government data, and I have to say we’re proud. The city opened up more than 200 real time data streams as part of the Apps for Democracy contest, a competition they sponsored that asks local web developers to take this data, analyze it, and put it on a website in a way that DC residents will find useful, and rumor has it that they’ll open more data streams up in the near future.
Here’s a photo of Alex, Jeff, and I with Mayor Fenty at the press conference. We’re psyched to have a mayor who encourages innovation in technology and comes out to give awards for it.
The fact that DC seems to be firmly behind open data is pretty revolutionary – they’re one of the first governments in the United States to do something like this. We spoke with Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra and City Administrator Dan Tangherlini and they both see that it’s not only the citizens who benefit from open data and the more information that comes with it, but also city governments who benefit from all the tools that are made with this data too. There was even talk about how our entry Stumble Safely could be repurposed as a tool for police officers to better identify crime hot spots around bars : )
Stumble Safely Launched on Drupal for a Fun, Late Apps for Democracy Entry
As you can see, we think that what the DC government is doing by opening up its data and asking people to mash it up is a great idea. We hope that more cities follow the lead. To put put our support behind this initiative we decided to enter another website in the contest - one that focuses on the lighter side of things. Welcome to Stumble Safely, a website that will help you find the best bars and a safe path to stumble home on.
You can see some of our favorite spots on these maps like The Raven, Solly's, and Stetson's (where we have our Drupal meetups). It doesn't matter when or where you start drinking for Stumble Safely to help you. You can see on these maps the crime data based on day time, evening or night to check out what's most relevant for your party schedule. And since drinking is all about bringing friends together, we are listening for key terms like Adams Morgan, Busboys and Poets, and others that show where the party is on Twitter and posting the messages here.
Stumble Safely was built for the Apps for Democracy competition. If you like Stumble Safely, vote for it!. The purpose of the competition is to show what's possible when governments open up city data so people can use it how they'd like on websites like this. With this website, we're using data from DC Crime Data,DC Road Polygons, DC Liquor Licenses, DC Water, DC Parks, and DC Metro Stations.
Not only is this about open data, but Stumble Safely is built entirely on open source software (Drupal/Mapnik) and one of only two apps in the competition to be 100% open source.
Vote for Drupal in the Apps for Democracy Competition, Only 12 Hours Left!
You can show that Drupal is the platform of choice for governments by voting in the next 12 hours in the Apps for Democracy contest. There’s no login required and voting only takes three seconds, so vote!
This competition is an experiment by the Washington, DC government to see what developers can do with open data streams of city data. If they like the results, they’ll open up more data and make it freely available next year. This is also a great opportunity to show governments that open source software – and Drupal – rock. Our submission is the only one that’s 100% open source.
The site you just voted on is called OutsideinDC, and it’s a guide to biking in Washington, DC. The site makes it easy to find bike routes with bike lanes, monitor bike theft in real time, and find bike equipment on Craigslist. OutsideinDC runs on Drupal and is a great example of the powerful aggregation tools and mapping work happening with the platform. Drupal and Mapnik can do a lot for other government projects as they have very powerful tools for aggregating and parsing data, and we hope this will be a strong example of that. All the aggregation in OutsideinDC is thanks to FeedAPI and Feed Element Mapper, and we could not have built this website in three days without Drupal’s new spaces module
Thanks for voting for Drupal!
OutsideinDC: A Guide to Biking in Washington, DC
OutsideinDC is a guide to biking in Washington, DC where you can find detailed bike routes for commuting or fun, monitor bike theft in real time, and use Craigslist to shop for equipment. It’s a community space, so if you have a tip or want to sound off on biking in DC, just add #dcbike to a twitter message and it will show up on the front page of this site.
We built this site for the Apps for Democracy competition. If you like OutsideinDC, vote for it!. The competition closes at 11:59 on Wednesday, November 12. The purpose of the competition is to show what great community tools – like this site – are possible when governments open up their data and let people use it. OutsideinDC is built entirely on open source software and is the only app in the competition to be 100% open source. The site is built on Drupal, and there’s no google maps here, just Mapnik, a C++/Python GIS toolkit, which is drawing all the maps and has awesome anti-aliasing rendering.
Making City Data Open and Usable in Washington, DC
The Washington, DC government is testing out an interesting way to make the data it collects more accessible and useful for the people who live in the city – it’s asking programmers to build open source web applications that use it’s data streams. Apps for Democracy – a contest hosted by the DC government with the help of iStrategy Labs and Mashable.com – is rewarding the makers of the most useful, usable, and inventive apps with small cash prizes and good press.
Hats off to Mayor Fenty and his government for coming up with this idea. Not only is it a great way to highlight that the government has opened up a lot of its data streams – including crime reports, current construction projects, housing code enforcements, and emergency alerts – but also get some get a lot of tools made to display this information quickly and for very little cost (only $20,000 total in prize money). Also if all goes well and great apps are made, the DC government is planning to open up more of its data streams next year.
We’re currently working on two projects for Apps for Democracy. To get you excited… one of them will aim to make Washington, DC more bike friendly by exposing information like bike lanes and bike paths, incidents of stolen or damaged bicycles, local bike shops, and bike rental stations. We’ll build both tools on the open source platform Drupal, which will work particularly well since it’s modular, very robust, and had great modules for sucking in data like FeedAPI.
If you’re interested in submitting a project, hurry. The last day to submit projects is Wednesday and the awards will go out on Thursday.
Week in DC Tech: November 10th Edition
Election mania is subsiding in Washington, DC (although it’s definitely not over yet), and this week’s hot topics focus on data mashups, mobile phones, and technology for international development rather than just polling. If you’re ready to dive back into it, check out some of the interesting events happening in the city this week. Below are the events we’re hoping to make it to. You can find a full listing of tech events here.
Wednesday, November 12
1:00 – 4:00 pm
Workshop: The Role of Cell Phones in Carrying News and Information: This event will bring together people who are using cell phones for journalism and activism with the people who want to be. The discussion will center on how are people using cell phones to receive and send news, how journalists and nonprofits are currently using the medium for outreach, and what all nonprofits could be doing.
6:00 – 7:30 pm
The Wondrous World of the First Amendment: An Encyclopedic Look: After some of the confusions in recent weeks by politicians like Sarah Palin, it might be time for a refresher course in what rights the First Amendment really protects.
Go Vote...
For a future that respects and believes in net neutrality, and works to provide a cleaner environment for all of us. For a future where our leaders support businesses and innovation, and provide quality, affordable health care to employees and their families. For a future where the United States is a leader in advocating for peace and works to reduce problems that lead to instability – such as poverty. For a future that will bring better days for us all.
The team here at Development Seed would like to remind you to go vote today for these reasons, and for whichever causes are important to you.
For more of Young Hahn’s images of the future he sees with his candidate, go to www.changefor.com.
Improving Knowledge Management at the World Bank with Drupal
We recently upgraded the knowledge management system of the World Bank’s communications team. We had worked with their team two years ago to build the system – then meant to facilitate internal communications and keep everyone informed on basic news – and when it came time to upgrade the site for infrastructure reasons, they decided to also expand the site’s toolset to facilitate organic conversations within and between different groups of users. Here’s what the new version looks like.
When the World Bank first approached us to work on this custom intranet, they had already committed some resources to Drupal and to open source projects in general, and they decided that they wanted to do this project on Drupal as well. We had also worked with them on several other Drupal-based projects (including the first version of their Poverty and Growth blog and their BuzzMonitor, an early proof of concept for an uber-aggregator like Managing News).
Week in DC Tech: Election Day Edition
Tomorrow is like Super Bowl Sunday for Washingtonians. But after the last push of canvassing tonight and the election parties tomorrow, we’ll hopefully have something amazing to celebrate and will certainly all have a clearer idea of what the next four years will hold for us. Keep the excitement going by changing your technology and outreach efforts. Later this week there are some interesting events happening about Drupal, seo optimization, ICT4D, and other topics that can help you continue to improve your online presence. Here are a few of the events we’re hoping to make it to this week, and you can find a full listing of the week’s tech events here.
Wednesday, November 5
6:00 – 8:00 pm
Northern Virginia Drupal Meetup: Launching a website always takes longer than planned and often ends with some surprises. At this month’s NOVA Drupal meetup, the crew will go over a checklist to launching Drupal sites.
7:00 pm
SEO Social 2.0: This is a meetup mashup, and on Wednesday they’ll be mixing up search engine optimization with social media.
Drupal Named the Best Open Source CMS
Drupal was named the best open source content management system by Packt Publishing for the second year in a row! What a great prize for the huge community of developers who work on Drupal and have made it the robust, stable, and powerful platform that it is. It’s exciting to see Drupal recognized for what it’s achieved, and to see its portfolio grow to include some of the most well known names in the world like Harvard Science, NASA, Warner Brothers Music, Lifetime Television, and the United Nations, to name just a few.
Drupal has come a long when from when we first started working with it five years ago, and it’s fantastic to see all the hard work and smart ideas recognized. Congratulations to Drupalers!