Year: 2010

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DrupalCon 2010 Notes: Case Studies in Academia: ASU and Johns Hopkins

Session page on Drupalcon site.

  • Arizona State University
    • central service that includes support for Drupal
    • Drupal support and consulting includes module development and data integration
    • provide shared web services that support php generally
    • brought standards for web experience to ASU in 2006
    • Drupal provided enough options, tools, variation to make it attractive across departments and schools
    • worked hard on building community around Drupal users
      • built successful user group
      • user group is part of the job, Drupal as their day job
      • brought Lullabot in for training
    • lots of buy-in
    • brought consistent user experience, support
    • increased content reuse
    • some challenges
      • clean up of unused sites
      • growing pains
      • slow change, trying to change institutional perception, showing Drupal as legit
    • lots of Drupal developers on campus, not all development occurs in the web dev group
  • Johns Hopkins University
    • Drupal used for grants sites
    • driven by limited budgets and resources
    • CCP
    • lots of funding sources drove static sites
    • K4Health
      • brought in Drupal as a platform
      • uses OG for site w/in sites
      • web services to integrate existing old data
      • uses Google search appliance
      • custom modules
        • InMagic import
          • document management system
          • needed to import this legacy data into Drupal
          • makes use of web services hooks to InMagic
        • file cart
          • light weight way that users are allowed to d/l files, specifically allowing use in developing countries
        • OG toolkits
          • uses OG to create private collaborative areas and then use public features to make work public
          • glues a lot of other modules together
          • looks like it makes use of OG easier.
        • KSS search
          • access multiple search engines through a single search interface
        • e-learning

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links for 2010-04-26

  • xslet 1.1.0
    xslet is a collection of XSLT applets. It includes"xslbook", which displays a book-style document in Web browsers without any other transformation tools, and "xslui", which displays Web pages with modularized XML files in Web browsers without any other transformation tools.
    (tags: xml xslt javascript)
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links for 2010-04-16

  • Change Management
    (tags: drupal module)
  • AROUNDme
    Using AROUNDMe collaboration server you can create multiple collaborative group, webspace, community or social networking websites. Each group can create a multiple page collaborative web site. They get social tools such as a guestbook (a wall), a group blog, a forum and a wiki which they can drop into web pages. Each group is fully customisable using xHTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. Groups can be private or public.
    NB: this is a couple of years old and doesn't appear to be under development anymore.
    (tags: collaboration php mysql spaces socialnetworking)
  • Apache Solr Facet Builder
    (tags: drupal module apache solr)
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links for 2010-04-15

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Congress bans Caller ID spoofing, including VoIP

Under the bill, it becomes illegal “to cause any caller ID service to transmit misleading or inaccurate caller ID information, with the intent to defraud and deceive.” The bill maintains an exemption for blocking one’s own outgoing caller ID information, and law enforcement isn’t affected.The change will affect “any real time voice communications service, regardless of the technology or network utilized,” so VoIP calls are included. In fact, the Congressional Research Service summary of the initial text makes clear that VoIP was a key target here.

via Ars Technica::Congress outlaws all Caller ID spoofing VoIP too.

You can find the Senate and House bills on thomas.loc.gov at:

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Google adds collaboration tweaks to Docs

Google Docs has always had easier-to-use collaboration features than much of what Microsoft has to offer. Docs has been particularly useful for individuals and small businesses who need to throw together a document quickly with geographically scattered users, but the newest additions allow users to see each others’ edits on a per-character basis. This means you can watch what your coworker is typing into a document in almost realtime, and up to 50 users can be connected to a document at a time.

Ars Technica::Google turns up the heat on Office with collaboration tweaks.

Near real time collaborative editing is an excellent feature. The article points out that not all the new s is good. With the demise of Google Gears, Docs offline mode is coming to an end.