pingVision is delighted to support DrupalCon Szeged 2008 with sponsorship.

Although we are not sending anyone to Szeged, we support DrupalCon as a semi-annual event that helps cultivate and strengthen the Drupal community. There's nothing like putting hundreds of Drupal aficionados in the same room to generate some real excitement and learning. Not only that, any profit from the conference goes to benefit the Drupal Association (of whose General Assembly I am a member). (We're hoping there's a profit. As of last week, meeting the expenses was looking to be a near thing. We certainly want to do our bit to help avoid a deficit!)

We really wish we could be there. I think last month's DrupalCamp only whetted our appetites for more Drupal camaraderie. But it just wasn't in the cards.

Free pass available

As DrupalCon Szeged starts in just a few hours from now in Hungary, this comes as an extremely late announcement, but if there is somebody – a student, perhaps, or a Google Summer of Code participant – who would like to attend but simply cannot afford to buy admission, we do have a sponsored pass available. (Sorry, but for transportation/lodging/etc. you're on your own.)

If you are interested, please contact us right away and tell us about your interest and participation in Drupal.

DrupalCon * 2009

We are definitely looking forward to the announcement of the next DrupalCon to take place next year in North America. There are several very strong proposals that have been submitted, and the Drupal Association Board will be announcing the winning city during this week's DrupalCon. Where ever it is, we'll see you there!

One of the signs of maturity of an open source software is when some really high-end books about the software start hitting the shelves.

Pro Drupal Development set a new high mark when it was initially released. Now this Second Edition covers even more (and has the higher page-count to show for it), with everything updated for the Drupal 6 API.

We just received our first seven copies, to get us started. We'll be picking up some more as needed.

You can pick up your copy at Amazon. Go there through http://drupalbook.com and a piece of the sale benefits the Drupal Association.

Lo and behold, this past Wednesday, after waiting all day for the Drupal 6.4 update that was rumored to be coming out, it finally was released at around 6:30pm MDT. We saw it at the DBUG Meetup during setup, and I knew that once again it was time to do some updating. At pingVision, we have an entire dev/test/production process for all of our clients' and our own sites. But when it comes to my own sites, I prefer to do it myself as much as possible so that I can keep my fingers in code and configuration, even while my more official presidential responsibilities tend to pull me in other directions.

And yet my own sites are still under Subversion, so it's not just a matter of uploading the new code and being done with it. No, I have to do it through SVN.

Now if you are like me (and unlike our developers), and have a general preference for a good GUI over using the command line, and are working on OS X and using version control like Subversion, then you likely have run into the problem that the architects of Finder have not deigned to solve: You cannot "merge" folders in OS X using Finder. No, Finder will overwrite folders completely.

Why is this a problem? Anyone who uses Subversion (or other version controller) will know what I'm talking about: If you try to just overwrite wholesale a folder that's under version control, you end up deleting the hidden .svn folder, which has the versioning information. And that leads to Dante's SVN Inferno, where all sorts of error demons torment you while you wail with pangs of regret: Oh, why didn't I merge that folder instead of replacing it?

Using Unix command line, you can of course use mv -v to merge folders, but that forces you to use command line. Since OS X is built upon Unix, I and many others wonder why Finder does not offer this option, not even with contorting combinations of control, option, command and shift.

It's ridiculous. –Especially when you consider that your basic (s)ftp applications can merge folders without a problem. This isn't rocket science.

A trick to merge folders on Mac I figured out a couple of years ago (when I was first introduced to SVN workflows) is this: ftp from your computer to your computer, using your favorite ftp application.

That's right, rather than copy or drag files from folder to folder using Finder, you drag files from folder to folder using ftp. (I use Transmit, but this will work with any ftp app that can merge folders. A free one I can recommend is Cyberduck.)

To enable this approach, all you need to do is turn on ftp access in OS X.

You do this in Preferences -> Sharing.

Click the checkbox to enable "file sharing".

Then, with the file sharing option highlighted, as pictured, click on the Options button down in the lower right-hand area of the window.

This reveals the kinds of file sharing you want to enable, and one of them is ftp. Enable that.

Underneath you will now see a message that provides the IP address where your computer can be reached. You just enter that IP address into your ftp app as the remote server. You may need to enter your username and password for your Mac.

That's it. Now just drag folders over from your desktop into the appropriate area on your ftp app and the merge will happen.

Note: Depending upon the ftp app, you may need to set appropriate preferences to merge folders. Here are the settings I use in Transmit:

This way you can maintain your website in a dev environment on your Mac desktop or laptop, and manage updating tasks easily without having to do SVN gymnastics or work in Terminal.

I welcome your comments.

The Knight News Challenge Garage is a site where people intending to apply for a grant from the Knight News Challenge could workshop their applications, get feedback from mentors and peers, and – hopefully – improve their chances of winning some of the $5 million being granted this year by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

We designed and developed the site in 2 weeks, from wireframes to beta deployment.

Last month we were commissioned to develop rather quickly a community website where potential applicants to the Knight News Challenge could workshop their applications, get feedback from mentors and peers, and – hopefully – improve their chances of winning some of the $5 million being granted this year by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
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We designed and developed the site in 2 weeks, from wireframes to beta deployment. The Garage is running Drupal 5, with some customized implementation of the Organic Groups modules. We love working on rapid timetables; it's something we do quite a bit of.

Anyway, here is the video announcement by Kristen Taylor, Online Community Manager for the Knight Foundation – video courtesy of DotSub:

If you are multilingual, you can help get the word out. On the Knight blog, Kristen writes:

We've used a video-sharing service called DotSub above so that the video can be subtitled in many different languages–the News Challenge is an international contest and open to everyone.

You can help us get the word out by going to this video on the DotSub site here and subtitling it in another language (thanks in advance for your help).

There's money to be had here. Seriously, if you have an idea for a project that might fit the mission of the Challenge, go to the News Challenge Garage and start workshopping your application!

pingVision is currently hiring for the position of intermediate-to-advanced level Information Architect for web applications. We are looking for a seasoned Information Architect with experience with User Interface and web design to work with our creative team on frequent projects for world-class clients such as BMW, the Knight Foundation, Stanford University and Popular Science.

We're looking for a detail-oriented person interested in joining our <?php print l("our growing design and development team","about/people"); ?> for work on a wide variety of web and media projects.

We are looking for someone in or willing to relocate to the greater Boulder/Denver area. Sorry, telecommuting is not an option. This is a full-time position.

DrupalCamp Colorado 2008 has come and gone. I personally felt that the diversity of participants and the energy of the group was remarkable.

I felt that the networking opportunities the event offered were significant and I want to try to expand on the 30 or so people I managed to talk to. I have created a LinkedIn group called DrupalCamp Colorado. To join, log into LinkedIn and do a search in Groups for "DrupalCamp Colorado".

Here at pingVision we've largely switched over to making all of our clients' websites with Drupal 6 - there's a number of advantages in doing that, but sometimes there's one major disadvantage: The website they want would be great with module X, but module X doesn't have a Drupal 6 version yet.

In those cases, we convert 'em ourselves, and post a patch appropriately. I wrapped up updating the wonderful Invite module to Drupal 6, and that made me think back on the various updates we at pingVision have done so far:

• NodeCarousel
• NodeQueue
• Favorite Nodes
• Custom Error
• Profile Privacy
• Thickbox
• DrupalVB
• Invite
• And I'm working on upgrades for a few of the User Points Contributed Modules, especially userpoints_invite.

It's really kind of fun converting a module to Drupal 6 - for one, you really get a good feeling for how that module works. You also can learn some interesting features of Drupal's extensive API that you haven't run into before, and when you're done you've helped out the whole community.

Give it a try! Find a useful module that doesn't have a patch for Drupal 6 yet, get a copy of the most recent code, and open your browser to Converting 5.x Modules to 6.x and work your way along. Also, it can help to get a copy of Coder and use that to look for any changes you've overlooked.

Attached: A slide presentation that I did for a local Drupal meetup on upgrading modules to Drupal 6.

While pingVision as a company is one of the many sponsors of DrupalCamp Colorado 2008, several pingVision people are doing presentations and panels.

Here's a quick run-down:

Kevin Bridges

...is doing a BOF on Project Workflow Management and Client Expectations.

Waterfall, Agile, Scrum, UML, Process Diagrams, Wireframes, Design Comps ... how does it all fit together into a clearly defined purpose?

John Fiala

...has a presentation on Advanced AHAH and Modifying Forms, which gets into that lovely UI goodness of dynamic forms generation, drag-and-drop, etc. He's also doing a presentation on Using SimpleTest to Prove Your Code. Very useful to any coder.

Ezra Barnett Gildesgame

...has a presentation on Drupal Benchmarking and Performance, covering:

- Factors that affect performance
- Measuring performance
- Different types of hosting (Shared, VPS, "Grid", Mosso)
- Techniques used to make enterprise websites scalable (ie Facebook, LiveJournal)
- Basics of Performance-friendly Drupal Module development

Greg Hines

...is presenting on RESTful services and Drupal, and will be showcasing his brand spanking new REST provider module which provides something of a REST API.

Ben Jeavons

...is presenting on Contributing to Drupal, which is about how anyone can participate in the Drupal community. He is also presenting Drupal Lightning Demos:

Rapid-fire demonstrations of modules, themes, Drupal-powered sites, fancy Drupal code snippets and anything else Drupal related that can be demoed in 5-10 minutes. These are quick, 5-10 minutes including time for questions, demos of something you've built on or with Drupal. Unless we have very few demos there probably won't be time to go looking at code so just show how it works or what it looks like.

He's also doing a session on the Drupal Community:

I'd like to talk about the Drupal community, the ways in which we are open and sponsor participation and the ways we've push people away. Because we have pushed people away. What do we do that is right and what are we doing wrong?

Make it better?

There is also going to be a BOF about Making DrupalCamp Colorado better, led by Kevin Bridges and (hopefully) many other interested folks. Maybe we can pull together a DrupalCon proposal?

The geek weekend

I was going to be joining Greg Knaddison in a session where we, as permanent members of the Drupal Association General Assembly, were going to give a little update on what's been happening and attempt to answer questions that may arise, but that proposal was rated lower than the others, so it's not going to happen. No, this is a weekend to get your geek on! See you there!

Today is the last Friday of July, making it SysAdminDay, when we show appreciation for all the hardworking, oft-under-appreciated sysadmins who make our new economy hum along like a well-tuned machine.

Here at pingVision we have several people who serve in the sysadmin role. Our heavy lifter is Andy Lasda, who has scripted our deployments and been involved in most all of our hosting environment setups and performance tuning.

Andy Kirkham is another expert sysadmin in our ranks. Between the two Andys, there's no solvable problem they cannot solve. Yes, you can say "rubbish" and dismiss it as mere enthusiasm, but in this case I think I'm right.

;)

Kevin Bridges also does a fair bit of our sysadmin work and configurations. And of course Ezra Barnett Gildesgame, who is in fact doing a DrupalCamp Colorado presentation this weekend on performance tuning techniques for Drupal.

Thank you, Andy, Andy, Kevin and Ezra! And thank you to the Rackspace Fanatical Support sysadmins who've kept our servers running optimally.

In case you've somehow missed the news, DrupalCamp Colorado is happening this weekend.

greggles posted a nice rundown of things to do for DrupalCamp. Registration is easy. The price is an affordable $10 ... or $25 at the door (if there's room -- the cap is at 100 people).

Hey, and we can haz stickers! Maybe your laptop wants one, too?

DrupalCamp Colorado 2008, happening in Denver, is less than two weeks away, but it's still not too late to submit your session proposal.

It's also not too late to register.

As one of many sponsors of DrupalCamp Colorado*, we hope to see a full house of both the new Drupalers out there as well as the experienced veterans. There are going to host a mix of sessions and BOF's geared towards all areas of interest ... or at least your interests, if you get your session proposal in! (No pressure.)

See you there!

* We developed and host the website. The website design is TBD. Maybe that's worth a session at the 'Camp? What do you think?

Dear clients and friends,

Since our last newsletter, there have been some new developments happening at pingVision and in the Drupal world. Here's a quick rundown....

DRUPAL 6.3 and DRUPAL 5.8 RELEASED!

Today is a blue-letter day: New security updates are now available for Drupal 6 and Drupal 5.

*We strongly recommend that all websites get updated to the latest version!* (If you have a maintenance and support agreement with us, or a website currently under development, you need not do anything: We will be rolling out those updates in short order.)

For more information, check the Drupal security page at http://drupal.org/security.

DRUPALCAMP COLORADO ON JULY 26-27, 2008!

That's right, there's a new DrupalCamp happening, this time in Denver at Denver Open Media on 7th and Kalamath.

Come join us in the mountains for two full days of Drupal wisdom and knowledge. There will be a mix of sessions and BOFs geared towards both the new Drupalers out there as well as the experienced veterans.

And new session proposals are invited and encouraged!

For more information, visit the DrupalCamp Colorado website at http://drupalcampcolorado.org. Sign up! We'd love to see you there!

NEW DESIGN FOR PINGVISION WEBSITE

If you haven't visited our website in the past couple of days, you haven't yet seen our new design. It's a long time coming! Please surf by and check it out, and then tell us what you think at http://pingv.com/blog/laura/2008/pingvis....

And if you find a bug, please let us know at http://pingv.com/contact.

DBUG MEETING TONIGHT (WEDNESDAY, JULY 9th)

If you're reading this on Wednesday afternoon and have time, you're invited to drop by this month's DBUG meet-up right here at pingVision in downtown Boulder. More info: http://pingv.com/node/4129.

Thanks!

That's it for this newsletter. Until next time....

-Laura and the pingVision family

We're coming up on the second Tuesday Wednesday of the month again, which means that the Drupal Denver/Boulder User Group is meeting here tomorrow night.

6:30pm - Gathering, pizza, soft drinks
7:00pm - Discussion and presentations

As yet, the agenda is wide open. Possible topics include:

• DrupalCamp Colorado, which is happening on July 26th and 27th in Denver;
• A mini-tour of the pingVision website, newly redeveloped in Drupal 6;
• [Your project or questions]

See you here! [Google map]

Whew! This was a long time coming, and just a tad more than a CSS reboot. We rearchitected the pingVision website from the ground up. Since the initial site had started with Drupal 4.5, there was a lot of legacy cruft in the database, left behind by modules no longer in use and, I have to admit, experiments I tried that didn't quite work out. The old site was launched in January 2005, back when Drupal was still pretty new to me. I've learned some things since then.

So we started over, and simply imported the published content, existing users and taxonomy structures. It was a lot easier than tracking down tables, variables and indexes left behind by modules of yore.

You may have noticed that we now have a video section. As I write this we have nothing completed yet, but we'll have some videos up very soon. We're very excited to get this part of the pingVision creative work back into gear. It's been too long.

This new site, powered by Drupal 6, is the result of weeks of back-burner development and almost a year of architecture and design tweaks, thrashings and polishes. We've leveraged some of our own contributions to the Drupal community, including Nodecarousel and Simplelist, along with some of the wonderful Drupal module staples, such as CCK, Nodequeue, Pathauto and Imagecache.

What do you think? Leave us a comment. We're also giving Mollom a try for comment spam/abuse management, so be nice, or at least polite. ;) And if you find a bug, please spare the comment and just tell us directly.

GPL licenses are designed to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software:

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.

What this means is that you are free to change the code as you see fit. You aren't locked in to any proprietary system, and not dependent upon any single software vendor to update the software powering your website.

For more information, see the Free Software Foundation’s website on GPL:

http://gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

The old way: The online brochure

Web 1.0 workflow was like this:

1. You write up your web pages.
2. You give your write-up and a big bag of money to your web designer.
3. Your designer takes what you’ve come up with and designs your website.
4. Once the design for your new web content is finished, the files are passed over to the webmaster, who holds the keys to access and update your website.
5. Finally, your designed website appears ... and you decide you want to rewrite that first paragraph on the home page, or maybe you find a typo ... and you must go back to step 1 and repeat the entire process.

This is what you might call not at all empowering.

The reputation of the Web 1.0 sites has been that they required a team of programmers before, during, and after implementation. Often custom-built, these one-off sites were expensive since they were built from scratch using proprietary code (programs). With proprietary and/or custom coding, any updates were time consuming and costly.

"Web 2.0": Behind the buzz phrase

The most-basic concepts behind Web 2.0 is that website is in the control of the owner — not an outside web development company. To be sure, help is available from web design companies such as pingVision, but the Client does not end up beholding to the designer for every niggling change. The Client does not spend extra time and/or money in making small adjustments — such as a new calendar event. No. The Client can make the day-to-day updates and adjustments himself/herself as easily as updating a word processing document.

This isn’t to say that there never is any design involved in a Web 2.0-type site — but it’s much easier, because what we (designers) do is design your templates so that every new addition you make to the website content is automagically formatted to fit in with your site’s overall design.

This means that the “Web 1.0” phase of your new website is limited only to the initial setup, or when you want to make design changes to the site. Content changes, updates and additions are things you can do on your own.

Because website owners are empowered to publish whenever they want, the entire nature of what websites are has changed. Content now has become more contemporary, more relevant — more responsive to what’s happening. And because websites now happen in real-time — you write it, post it and people read it — websites have become more than simply brochures. This brings us back to the concept that websites are conversations. We develop websites that open doors to communication, whether within an organization or amongst a community of people.

In real-world application, use of Free Open Source Software affords the ability for individuals, communities, businesses and organizations to use and benefit from software that is continuously being developed and improved, without having to invest in a proprietary upgrade path.

Drupal is one of the most powerful Open Source solutions for Content Management Systems because it is robust, easy to use, and constantly growing and adapting to the needs of the large, worldwide community of Drupal users.

Drupal is software that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a great variety of content on a website. Hundreds of thousands of people and organizations have Drupal-powered websites, including newspapers and magazines, community web portals and discussion sites, corporate web sites/intranet portals, video and podcasting sites, personal web sites, aficionado sites, e-commerce applications and resource directories.

Drupal includes features to enable content management systems, blogs, collaborative authoring environments, discussion forums, email newsletters, picture galleries, file uploads and downloads, and much more.

Drupal code is free, as are updates. Modules (special features) are being constantly contributed by the community. The developers at pingVision have found Drupal to be a relatively easy, flexible, and inexpensive solution for their clients.

Drupal-powered websites offer: ease of updating website content, strong search engine optimization, flexible theming and presentation, powerful “Web 2.0-type” interactive tools, and modularity that makes adding new features relatively easy.

One great benefit of Drupal is that it’s being actively developed by a large and growing development community. The software continues to evolve and improve as one of the leading-edge website systems.

Drupal is an open source website licensed under the GNU General Public License (“GPL”), which means that, upon completion and delivery under the terms of this proposal, our clients receive all of the website code, without any proprietary licensing fees or exclusive maintenance contracts required. The GPL license and the open source development of Drupal ensure that our clients are free to modify it at any time.

We are big proponents of the open source revolution that is sweeping the globe. This is about self-empowerment.

We design and build many of our websites using Drupal, which we've found to be an elegant, powerful and very flexible CMS. As beneficiaries of the hard work done there, we actively participate in the Drupal community.

• In Drupal 6, Blocks Need Extra Consideration
• Auto Assign Role
• Drupal for Seasoned Professionals - A Quick Guide to Code and Community

We are proud to have been a featured sponsor of BlogHer 2006. Our involvement with BlogHer began in 2005, when we provided the official chatroom for BlogHer Conference '05. In 2006, we developed a new community website for the BlogHer Network, using Drupal.

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