Australia wide

We're just about to release a purpose-built Drupal admin theme called "Polpo" onto Drupal.org and before we do, it'd be great to get some feedback from Australian Drupalers before we release it to the global masses.

You can download v 0.9 it at http://github.com/previousnext/polpo/zipball/0.9.0-beta

Screenshot attached below.

As a Drupal semi-newbie I'd find it educational to know what more experienced Drupal developers use in terms of hardware, software, workflow, etc.

So what's your set-up? It would be nice to be able to build a best practice superset from lotsa people's set-ups.

My set-up is currently:

PC Pentium 4 CPU 3GHz
1BG RAM
160GB HD
Windows XP SP3

• xampp for localhost
• WS FTP Professional for FTP-ing to and from production site
• Peazip for unpacking D modules

• phpMyadmin

• Firefox for building/administering Drupal sites

• Firefox plugins - Yslow

We finally flicked the switch over on another ABC site built in Drupal this week, so all you 70s and 80s music fans can check out the official Countdown website at http://www.countdown.com.au.

This is an update about Em Space training services.

We were using the CAE training labs (in Melbourne) for training, but this was a bit too rigid. So we've limited ourselves to corporate training, training teams at our clients' premises.

However, we now have a flexible training service that can travel around. This means we will be able to train in unusual places with minimal preparation in advance. This also means that we can use our own offices for training - avoiding the pain of booking venues, but also keeping our space flexible (not having to lock it up with cheap desktop PCs).

http://www.mcfarlaneprize.com/

Nominations close August 31

"Founded in 2006, in memory of the late Nigel McFarlane, The McFarlane Prize is be awarded to an Australian designer or team for a site launched or significantly upgraded between September 1st 2008 and August
31 2009. Sites may be designed for Australian or non Australian individuals, organisations, companies or governments, but must be designed and developed by an individual or team which works in Australia

Being a recent convert to the way-cool iPhone 3G, I thought it might be helpful to have a thread for Drupal-related iPhone productivity.

Here's some starters, (and thanks to realityloop):

Drupal Notifier
http://drupal.org/project/drupal_notifier

AMSU
http://aremysitesup.com/

Cydia
http://theiphoneproject.org/?page_id=36

There's a web app version of the O'Reilly "Using Drupal" book ($5.99).
http://toc.oreilly.com/2009/03/oreilly-ebooks-now-in-stanza.html

When I mentioned the #drupal-au IRC channel to a work buddy, he didn't believe that people still used IRC as it's too old. I guess IRC clients are not as prevalent now that we have so many different channels, social networking sites, SMS and Chat clients at our fingertips.

I'm on a Mac and I still haven't worked out what IRC client to use but lucky for me there is good one that plugs into Firefox. Do a search for in your addons for Chatzilla. It's easy to use and will get you chatting to Drupal devs right away. Ask anything anytime Drupal related and you probably get a helpful answer.

A group of Brisbane Drupalers met today to discuss organizing our first DrupalCamp.

We are organising the camp for later this year, most likely in November.

Since we have a relatively small Drupal community here in Brisbane, compared to Sydney or Melbourne, we are hoping to attract/welcome interstate participants, as well as those coming from broader QLD.

The ABC recently launched a suite of sites for digital radio - and they were built in Drupal!

The sites are:

http://abcdigmusic.net.au/
http://abcjazz.net.au/
http://abccountry.net.au/

Apart from the slick design these sites use a lot of third party integration to pull information from various sources, such as musicbrainz, youtube and wikipedia. For example check out http://abcdigmusic.net.au/artist/peter-gabriel

Maybe we could persuade Fergus, one of the project owners, to come and talk to the Sydney group one meetup!

The blog post from Dries is at: