Drupal for Good

This is easy and quick, nothing fancy, no voting - just post your session idea (title) and your name/contact info and show up to present that day! We have sessions open from 10am-2pm each day (Saturday and Sunday) and each session should plan for 45 minutes each.

http://groups.drupal.org/node/12528 (edit wiki page)

If you can't see or edit the wiki page, be sure to join our group which may be required for editing the wiki page.

Made some progress last night with the Drupal Media Player that I blogged about recently. Dynamic logos!

You have to go to my blog to see the action.

This was created with an hour of tweaking the OpenLaszlo XML, and then pasting the following into this node: print theme('media_player_player', 'http://spindowners.com/files.dm/videos/20051210-w50s.flv', array('logo' => '/sites/aaronwinborn.com/files/my-logo.png');

Couldn't be simpler! I see a dev release as soon as we have an icon for the play button!

Of course, playlists and the like will take more. We've talked about including several players, including a light-weight and one with all the bells & whistles, and have the module call the proper one according to passed parameters.

The Media Code Sprint is underway! Here's a cross-post from my blog detailing the goals of this sprint, which runs through Saturday. We need your help!

Andrew Morton (drewish), Darrel O'Pry (dopry, remotely), and I are heading up a Media Code Sprint in Portland this week! Come help, in person or remotely, if you're interested in multimedia and Drupal! It has now officially started, and as I've volunteered to help keep folks updated, here goes...

First the reasons.

Number One: Better Media Handling in Core

Dries conducted a survey prior to his State of Drupal presentation at Boston Drupalcon 2008, and number one on the top ten (or 11) list of what would make THE KILLER DRUPAL 7 Release was "Better media handling".

Let me repeat that. Better media handling.

People have done really amazing stuff in contrib, but it is difficult (if not impossible in many cases) for developers to coordinate the use of files, as there is no good means for file handling in the core of Drupal. Thus, we have several dozen (or more) media modules doing some small part, or even duplicating functionality, sometimes out of necessity.

We need (better) media and file handling in Drupal core. In particular, there has been a patch for a hook_file in the queue for over a year, which has been in the Patch Spotlight (for the second time, no less) since May! (And has been RTBC several times during that process...) Come on folks.

One of the powers of Drupal is its system of hooks. We have hooks to modify nodes, to notify changes to user objects, to alter nearly any data (such as forms and menus). Noticeably absent is a consistent handling for files or any sort of notification. We need hook_file.

So goal Number One: get media handling in core. The means? Add hook_file and make files into a 1st class Drupal object. We'll be creating a test suite for functionality in the hook_file patch to validate it and "grease the wheels" to get it committed.

The other goals of this sprint pale in comparison to the first in utility, but are still highly desirable and worthwhile.

Number Two: Refactor File Functionality in Core

I thought some of the folks here might be interested in a project we're working on - it's called Rootswire - http://www.rootswire.org - and is an aggregation of different political and place blogs. Our first big effort is to build a group site for all of the bloggers covering the Democratic convention. The site is up in beta right now (yeah, yeah, I know - it needs a lot of theming love) and we're currently working on the mechanical aspects of it, and getting bloggers on-board. It's all Drupal, and we're using feedapi and the calais module to import the feeds and automatically tag them.

This is a writeup of how and why United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley chose Drupal for the redesign of supportunitedway.org. I'll talk about our history with Drupal, how we structured the new site, which modules we used, and how we migrated data from our old site.

On May 27 and 28th, the third NetSquared will take place in San Jose California. The idea behind NetSquared is to explore the use of the Web and emerging technologies to foster social change.

Our mission is to spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations. There's a whole new generation of online tools available – tools that make it easier than ever before to collaborate, share information and mobilize support. These tools include blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasting, and more. Some people describe them as "Web 2.0"; we call them the social web, because their power comes from the relationships they enable.

I have been asked to present on Drupal as it relates to social change and the non-profit community. My background is heavily rooted in the non-profit world, having worked for various arts based non-profit companies. I also studied arts, technology, theatre, and non-profit management at Virginia Tech. My presentation will occur on the 27th between 4:45 and 5:45 pm.

I was wondering if anyone on here new of a site that maintains a pretty current list of non-profits that use Drupal as their content management system by any chance, particularly higher profile groups and that sort of thing... like showcase sites of the non-profit world...?

-=- christopher