Attention SCAD students, parents, young professionals and wannabe Savannah locals everywhere: Have I got a deal for you.
Buy (or rent) our super-cool Savannah loft so we don't have to eat our dog start eating Ramen morning, noon and night.
So I finally gave something back. Granted, in proportion to how I've benefitted from open source software over the years, it's not much. But it's (marginally) better than nothing, right?
I released a Drupal module I call Commentify, which is one of several modules I wrote (or thought up/architected) to integrate Drupal with the proprietary CMS we use at work.
This happens to be the module with the widest potential appeal, since I can't imagine too many people are interested in modules that interface with proprietary registration systems, or with non-mainstream, non-public video vendors. (Randy's Location Ads module rocked, but there's no way that's ever going to be ported to Drupal 5.x or 6.x)
Basically, it lets you attach Drupal as a commenting solution to any sort of foreign content management system.
It was something of an inauspicious release, because I managed to make not one but TWO big, bonehead mistakes with CVS, which I blame on haste and my preference for and familiarity with Subversion.
Embarrassing, but they were fixed with some help from the CVS guru at Drupal.org.
Have I mentioned that I loves me some Drupal?
Oh yes. I probably have. Anyway, in the last 48 hours of last week I managed to take two sites from photoshop mockup to fully functioning. Well, almost, anyway. There are of course some minor issues with Internet Exploder to deal with, and some pages to be tweaked.
We created a common template architecture for niche sites that can rapidly be reskinned with CSS to create unique sites with minimal code changes. The rest, from the Heritage site course guide to the Mom2MomSC.com multimedia sharing page was implemented with a minimum of coding, and in very short order using community-contributed Drupal modules. We plugged in our proprietary Omniture analytics module, Vmix video integration and my own Videowrapper module to round out the sites.
I'm a fan of more abstracted frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Django and the like for highly specialized vertical applications, but for a rapid time-to market general purpose application platform it's hard to beat Drupal, where most of the common hooks like authentication, access control, content organization, are already in place, and hundreds (thousands) of other high-quality modules are just a click away. And if you want to plug in your own alternate solutions (like we have for integration with a proprietary corporate registration system), you can do that too. So basically, you can concentrate on features that achieve your business goals, rather than the ancillary elements.
What would you rather do? Spend your time an energy reinventing the wheel, or building revenue and audience generating products?
IMHO, which is worth what you paid for it, I'd rather run something that got me 95% of the way on a project and let me spend most of my time on the remaining edge cases, optimization and security than spend 95% of my time just getting the framework built to support whatever business goals I have.
We spend lots of dough each year converting material from our dead-tree editions into web-friendlier versions for our web sites. We crank out a bunch of PDFs, and send them through the ether to somewhere where the labor is cheap and the workday long, like Vietnam, Indonesia or Canada or something. Then some poor soul slices 'n dices them into jpegs and links and such, and sends 'em on back, and posts them on our site.
So I thought to myself, "Self, you can do that without having to do something silly like use people and worse, pay for it.
It's a work in progress, but it goes something like...
Shazaam! $35k saved.
Not to mention, jquery almost makes coding javascript fun. Almost.
Well, it's finally up and running - an unholy marriage of Wordpress and Drupal.
I bring you BlogSavannah and its Drupal-powered registration site. After experimenting with a half dozen community modules, I decided to set up the framework for a real event-oriented site, instead of doing a one-off solution. I was able to use the great Event, Signup and Location modules, leaving me with only the sidebar stuff to write code for. Good times. Now we'll have a great framework for publicizing more Savannah events in the future.
Oh, and then there's the event that started all this - the BlogSavannah UnConference 2008. You can get more information and register online for this free event we're holding at AASU on January 25th.
...at the super geeky powers of the Drupal developer community. I've been playing with modules over the last couple of days trying to find the right combination to create a multimedia sharing site for work that even the octogenarian residents of Greater Bluffelson could use.
Of course we've created (and by 'we' I mean mostly Randy) a bunch of custom stuff too. The more I use it, the more I like about it. There's a huge base of code, and the core software makes it easy to implement new features without starting from scratch.
Obligatory Flickr example:
[flickr:56/119630321/b582235ef9|center|500|1000]
