Posted on June 1, 2010 - 12:03pm by Robert Douglass.
I recently did an interview about Acquia and Drupal with one of the leading IT magazines in Italy, Data Manager. The interview is running in the current print edition. Below you can find an English version of the interview.
The interview was arranged by one of Acquia's Italian partners, SinerVis, as part of a larger Drupal awareness campaign that culminated last week in the Do You Drupal? event that was held in Milan. Jam (Acquia's Senior Writer) and I attended and got to meet with colleagues from SinerVis as well as with members of "Associazione Drupal Italia", the non-profit that is promoting Drupal in Italy.
The take-away from the event was that Italy is seeing an explosion of interest in Drupal. Every company and service provider we talked to spoke of strong leads from many different industry segments, the need for training more drupalists, and an excitement for hosting more DrupalCamps (and possibly even a DrupalCon).
With such an acute need for training, it was good to learn that SinerVis, one of the leading companies for Drupal training in Italy, has as many as five Drupal courses each month with 10-12 people attending each one. They even teach a class on Drupal Gardens!
The demand for training was also mirrored in the response to the "Do You Drupal?" event. On the first day there was a room full of 50+ CIO/CTOs who listened to a range of presentations and discussions about Drupal and Acquia. Jam and I delivered a 2 hour (bilingual!) introduction to Acquia. The second part of the event, on the weekend, included training workshops for students and the general public. This drew over 200 people for two sessions. Jam ended up teaching for 5 hours, introducing Drupal, Acquia, and Drupal Gardens.
Although I was only in Milano for one day I did manage to enjoy some of the cultural delights. This is me sampling some gelato with graphic designers and account managers from SinerVis. The market for Drupal has rarely looked better.
Here's the interview that appeared in Datamanager.it:
What is Drupal?
Drupal is a modern web content management system that meets the needs of organizations who value speed and flexibility in developing their web presence. It has a vast worldwide community of passionate developers who have built a library of over 5,000 add-on modules in the last nine years. These let you add nearly any feature to a Drupal site that you can imagine. Drupal's core code is also modular, enabling developers to change and maintain the system cleanly. This has made it very popular with people who want highly customized web sites and specific functionality. Read full article »
Posted on May 27, 2010 - 1:00pm by Robert Douglass.
When Google announced their new Font API and Font Directory, they gave the web publishing world a great new tool that is ready to add real business value right now. The directory is a bid to close the gap between the rich visual possibilities of print media and the typographically impoverished World Wide Web. In Google's words:
"The Google Font API provides a simple, cross-browser method for using any font in the Google Font Directory on your web page. The fonts have all the advantages of normal text: in addition to being richer visually, text styled in web fonts is still searchable, scales crisply when zoomed, and is accessible to users using screen readers."
Posted on February 7, 2010 - 5:51am by Robert Douglass.
Drupal's file handling capabilities keep getting better. Beyond the core upload module, the filefield module for CCK has enabled us to build sites with all sorts of files; documents, images, music, videos, and so forth. Searching within these docuements, however, has never been a common feature on Drupal sites. Some solutions have existed, particularly for extracting texts from PDFs and common wordprocessing documents. With Apache Solr, the attachments module, and an extension library called Tika, things can be much better. With Tika you can extract texts not only from Microsoft Office, Open Office, and PDF documents, you can also get text and metadata from images, songs, Flash movies and zipped archives. Searching for these texts is done as part of the normal Apache Solr driven site search. Read full article »
Posted on February 2, 2010 - 9:15am by Robert Douglass.
Tech Support Case Studies
If Facebook has shown us anything, it's that website users like to get timely notifications via email if there is something new to be seen on the site. Acquia Drupal includes the comment notify module that can help achieve this goal for your site. It sends email messages to content authors and commentators whenever new comments are added to content. There are ample subscription options to suit everyone, and an unsubscribe mechanism so that nobody has to endure unwanted items in their inbox. Read full article »
This year, on Sunday, February 7, I'll be back to once again talk about Apache Solr and state-of-the-art search techniques. There's a whole Drupal track, called the Drupal DevRoom, and plenty of other interesting sessions going on, too. If you can make it to Brussels for Fosdem I highly recommend it. It's full of that nitty-gritty hard-core geek stuff that makes open source software tick!
Posted on January 15, 2010 - 1:02pm by Robert Douglass.
How refreshing it is when the US Government does something so right that my chest swells with pride and my heart fills with hope! How exciting it is that Drupal and Acquia can play a role in bringing openness to government. I'm referring to the Open Government Directive (OGD), an instruction from the President of the United States to all federal agencies to drastically change the way that government talks to and shares information with the public.
The OGD is predicated on three principles: transparancy, participation, and collaboration. Here I quote from the President's website:
Transparency promotes accountability by providing the public with information about what the Government is doing. Participation allows members of the public to contribute ideas and expertise so that their government can make policies with the benefit of information that is widely dispersed in society. Collaboration improves the effectiveness of Government by encouraging partnerships and cooperation within the Federal Government, across levels of government, and between the Government and private institutions. Read full article »
Posted on January 4, 2010 - 8:42am by Robert Douglass.
Tech Support Case Studies
We've received several inquiries about adding custom sorts to the the sorting block on search results for our popular Acquia Search product. This is fortunately quite easy, though it currently involves preparing a custom module that implements one hook: hook_apachesolr_prepare_query(&$query)Read full article »
<?php function hook_apachesolr_prepare_query(&$query) { // You can get the 'solr_field_name' from q=admin/reports/apachesolr $query->set_available_sort('solr_field_name', array( // how the sort link is to appear in the sorts block 'title' => t('Name of sort'), 'default' => 'asc', // or 'desc' )); } ?>
