Bryght

Hello, fellow Newspapers On Drupal group members, and thanks to Ken for the introduction. As he mentioned, Placeblogger, a Drupal based site I worked on -- with a LOT of help from Drupal shop Bryght -- won some Phase 2 funding from the John S and James L. Knight Foundation, which gives grants to organizations and projects that advance journalism.

The interesting thing about this funding:

1. What gets created with the funding must go into the public domain.
2. The goal of the foundation is to get tools into the hands of newspapers.

I think that's pretty exciting!

For my project, the fact that I'm on Drupal helps me meet both these goals. The project hasn't been completely nailed down yet, but it's likely that much of the funding will go towards creating Drupal modules -- and then using Placeblogger, the site, as a sort of proof-of-concept. I suspect that we'll spend a lot of time on location and Aggregator2, but at this moment we're not tied down to anything.

So help me do some thinking: if you had a little money to fund Drupal module development to aid newspapers, what would you tackle?

I would really like members of this group to consider themselves informal advisers to this project, and to benefit from it directly.

There was record turn out at the January 25th meeting with approximately 30 people vying for chairs in the Bryght office in Gastown. The longest distance traveled award goes to a certain Toronto based "Bryght guy" joining us via webcam.

There were 4 presentations:
- Contec (Drupal + Mobile Phones)
- BPO Canada
- Dale McGladdery on making a scheduling grid with Views
- Steven Wittens with a demo of his new jQuery widgets

Check out my rough notes on Drupal, Contec and mobile and my video of most of the January 2007 introductions. A fab night (I believe we had over 30 people!), wish I could have stayed for the pub!

Hope everyone is enjoying 6th birthday/5.0 release day. I've been tinkering with install profiles, and have a working one in our public SVN. See https://svn.bryght.com/dev/browser/bryghtbase/DRUPAL-5/trunk/profiles/basic

If you've got control over your server space, you can actually check out the entire trunk (replace "browser" with "svn" to get the checkout URL -- e.g. https://svn.bryght.com/dev/svn/bryghtbase/DRUPAL-5/trunk/) and get all the supporting modules and a DRUPAL-5-0 install.

I personally didn't squash any bugs at the Vancouver Drupal 5 Bug Hunt but I had a blast munching on the pizza provided by Bryght and drinking the beer that Lyal brought. There was even a little bit of Xbox action going on too!

I installed Drupal 5 Beta 2 (kudos on the improved installer, not having to edit settings.php is a good thing, the only problem I had was the wrong permissions on my directories). I also love the revamped admin interface. Much more logical for newcomers to Drupal methinks although it will be hard to defeat my 4.5/4.6/4.7 URL and interface "muscle memory"!

Steven Wittens announced in his blog he's moving to Vancouver to become a "Bryght Guy"!

Here's a clip of Dries and Stephen discussing some Drupal history after OS CMS: Drupal Boys from Belgium, Dries Buytaert and Steven Wittens

Welcome to Vancouver, Steven! Hope you'll have time for a Drupaliers meeting. Beer and chocolate can be arranged :-)