Posts by theme: Drupal
Of all the conferences that Palantir attends every year, one of my favorites is the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, which is being held this year from March 12-16th. SXSW brings together a wide variety of people from all areas of interactive culture for five days of panel sessions, book readings, film screenings, small conversations, and keynote presentations on a full range of thought-provoking topics (and the parties are pretty good, too!). For the past few years, we've been privileged enough to participate in a number of sessions, and this year is no different.
Everyone knows the top-tier Drupal modules, but with over 5,000 modules available for Drupal it’s no surprise that many useful ones go unnoticed. As a public service to the Drupal community, Palantir is working to raise awareness of some of these unsung heroes.
In part 3 of our ongoing 5,162-part series, we present: Menu Block
The Menu Block module is a little-known module, but has actually been around since June 2008 and is our solution to the limitations in Drupal’s built-in site navigation.
Another year, another DrupalCon. But what a DrupalCon it will be! Set in beautiful (and hilly) San Francisco, "DCSF" is expected to be the largest DrupalCon yet. As well it should be, with Drupal 7 right around the corner.
As usual, Palantir will be out in full force, ready to teach the world about Drupal. While probably won't be able to present every idea we have, you can help decide which of our sessions are selected by casting your votes on the conference Web site before March 1. So what do you want to see?
Filmmaker John Waters began his career as an "underground success", making films that mainstream wouldn't touch because they were too controversial, raunchy, or just plain weird. After several underground successes, however, he started to get noticed outside of underground and indie circles and move into the mainstream, where he had even more commercial success.
Many of his fans derided him for the move, claiming he was "caving into the man" or betraying his underground roots by adapting his style for wider audiences. In an interview for his 1998 film Pecker, Waters made the comment (sadly I do not have the direct quote handy) that the problem with being an underground success is that you then, by definition, cannot stay underground. And yes, that means you sometimes have to change things.
Why do I bring this up? Because Drupal has long since ceased being an underground success and is now a major mainstream open source player... and it's time that the community acted like it.
At Palantir, the values of interconnectedness, freedom, and openness shape and inform the projects that we work on. When we have the opportunity to collaborate with clients who share those values, the results can be pretty outstanding.
That’s why we were happy to have the opportunity to work with Acquia and Red Hat to build opensource.com, a new Drupal-based community Web site that aims to spread the word about how the open source way can bring people together to solve problems that impact the world around us.
As Drupal project lead and Acquia co-founder Dries Buytaert mentioned in his blog post earlier this week, the site is centered around discussions on how open source is having an impact in business, education, government, law, and life. While many people know open source as a software development method, the goal of the site is to take the dialogue far beyond just technology.
You can learn more about how opensource.com was built in our case study, and we hope that you’ll consider checking out the site and joining the conversation today!
Although Palantir uses Subversion for most our development, we do occasionally use other version control systems if a specific client needs to. Typically that ends up being git. I've personally only used it on one project so far, but did discover one interesting little feature that makes me really like it: bisect.
It's been a little over a week since Drupalcamp Chicago, which means we've had time to catch up on sleep and look back on Chicago's largest Drupal event to date. Executive summary: That was awesome, we are so doing that again!
Last week, several hundred people joined a few of us at Palantir for Playing Nicely With Others: Integrating Drupal with Third-Party Data, a webinar hosted by our friends and partners at Acquia. This hour-long presentation focused on different approaches and strategies for migrating and integrating data from third-party systems into Drupal, along with a few examples from some projects that we’ve worked on.
Many of our clients, such as colleges and universities, publications, and museums and cultural institutions, need their Web sites to work seamlessly with information from other systems, such as course listings, subscribers, and collections. We’re also often asked to migrate large amounts of content from legacy content management platforms or static HTML. One of the reasons we like working with Drupal is that its flexibility makes these kinds of migrations and integrations easy to accomplish.
You can view the full webinar at Acquia’s Web site, and copies of our slides from the presentation are posted in PDF format here.
As some of you may have already noticed, we re-launched our Web site right before Thanksgiving last week. This has been a long-overdue project for us; our existing site design dated back to 2005, and received its most recent major update in early March of 2008, when I took responsibility for porting it to Drupal 6, which had only been released only two weeks earlier.
At that point, very few of the major contributed modules, like Views and CCK, had been ported to Drupal 6, so my only choice at the time was to build the site almost entirely from core modules, like the built-in Blog module. Now, there’s nothing wrong with using those core modules for basic site-building, but as the site grew, and we wanted to do more with it, their limitations soon became apparent. Also, the fact that I had put the site together very quickly in a decidedly non-sustainable manner meant that it was very difficult to extend or add new functionality as time went by.
This time around, we decided to approach our own Web site like we would any other project at Palantir, employing our full iterative development process.
I am primarily a themer. I am not a designer, and not programmer/engineer, whatever you want to call it. I am, however, what I like to call a “bridge”, a bridge between the design community and the heavy Drupal developer community. I have a background in art as well as business management in information systems (a.k.a. CS “lite”, for business people who can’t program) – so essentially I can talk the talk to both sides.
What I’m most excited about right now is creating themes and bringing designers and themers into the “inner circle” of Drupal without having to teach them how to use the issue queues and it was DrupalCon DC that got me here. I’m super interested in sharing my experiences with Drupal and theming as well as my best practices for doing that, thus this blog post.
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