Drupal

Last night I gave a presentation that reviewed different strategies for creating photo galleries in Drupal. The short version is that there are a multitude of options available and they vary widely in their popularity and complexity. As is often the case with Drupal, the more of the system the more power you have, but the trade-off is in the work (and knowledge) required. There are a number of examples as well, but you have a Drupal gallery you'd like to show off (or even a module you think deserves mention) please tell me about it in the comments.

In yet another fit of late night browsing, I came across a little gem called Tidy Service:
http://www.upstartblogger.com/tidy-service-101

Sure, lots of the web editors out offer some kind of markup validation or cleanup, but what excited me about this one particular is that as a service, it can be used anywhere. Sure you can use it to beef up free (but excellent) editors like Textwrangler, but to me the biggest opportunity here is cleaning up code in the browser.

At Podcamp London today co-web geek Anthony Vella-Zarb and I gave a presentation on using Drupal for social media. Includes some introductory information on Drupal, including why it's great for online communities, and the power of the community behind it.

We also talked about some of the modules that make Drupal great for social web sites, focusing mainly on Service Links, Flickr, Picasa, iTunes, Embedded Media Field, Activity Stream, the Facebook modules, and Twitter. After some illustrations and a quick example, we moved on to offering up some resources for learning more.

Tonight the London Public Library won some bling at the 2008 IABC Virtuoso Awards for their new web site. Unknown to most in attendance at the ceremonies is that the site is built on Drupal. Good to see that there are others in London interested in Drupal. Maybe there's hope yet for a DUG-London!

Congrats to the web team at the Library!

Last Friday I gave a repeat presentation of my talk on Theming Fundamentals, first delivered at the 2008 Toronto DrupalCamp. Because it was intended for an audience with a disparate technical knowledge, I tried to keep it more focussed on the general principles than the technical details.

Last week was a short week here in Canada (we took the Monday off to drink beer - I mean, celebrate Queen Victoria's birthday), and the person at Surge from whom I get the most help with web development was off sick on Tuesday an Wednesday. Plus, I was off to DrupalCamp Friday and Saturday, which meant losing another work day, plus preparing two presentations.

Just read an interesting comparison of recent builds of the two most popular content management systems at AllDrupalThemes.com. It sounds like the results posted in part one are based on simple latency on a small setup. It will be interesting to see if there are any differences when they post the second part, which will focus on scalability, but so far the results looks very good for Drupal.