Fox Valley Computing Professionals

PHP Québec is pleased to announce the seventh edition of the PHP Québec Conference. The Conference will take place in Montréal, Québec, Canada between March 4 and 6th 2009. We are looking for speakers willing to share their expertise with Canadian and United States PHP professionals. The Conference features technical talks and Labs dedicated to advanced software development techniques with PHP5 and PHP6, XML, web services,databases, etc., project management where speakers and visitor swill try to find solutions to actual business problems. Organizers will prioritize new and original topics in English or French. For more information, visit the website: http://conf.phpquebec.com

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/software/A_New_Drupal_Book_Drupal_in_Education';

Bill Fitzgerald, of FunnyMonkey, has written Drupal for Education and E-learning, due out from Packt Publishing in late October. Targeted for Drupal 6, this book covers how to set up community sites to support interactive teaching and learning. This book gives an overview of the functionality of Drupal core, and then gives precise instructions on using CCK, Views 2, Organic Groups, and a range of other contributed modules to extend the functionality of your site.

This book is written with the needs of educational users in mind, but the information in this book can be useful for site administrators, or for people looking to build a community/social networking site in Drupal.

read more

Lullabot is pleased to announce the largest independent Drupal event ever. Do It With Drupal is a 3-day seminar focused on the configuration, architecture, and processes behind building successful Drupal websites and communities.

The event is geared at attendees with a wide range of Drupal experience. For new developers and decision-makers, DIWD will offer a great introduction to Drupal and the Drupal community. For more experienced Drupalers, DIWD will offer a great chance to pick up tips and tricks straight from the experts and a chance to connect and socialize with other Drupal professionals.

The Do It With Drupal Seminar will feature the following highlights:

read more

Some of you may have noticed we recently gave the Bryght hosting system a facelift and added some functionality under the hood. Bryght Drupal hosting combines a custom install profile with a tuned hosting environment, incorporating best practices used on Drupal.org, to make a fully functional, out-of-the-box VPS.

read more

After a week of delay due to DrupalCON related travel, it is time for our monthly open review meeting. We will meet for the next round of proposal reviews on Thursday, September 11th at 14:00 Eastern (US) (18:00 UTC).

The meeting will be held in IRC #drupal-dojo on irc.freenode.net. (See http://drupal.org/irc for information about using IRC.) We will meet for 1:30 with the following agenda:

read more

The PHP Barcelona User Group is proud to announce its first international PHP Conference. It will be celebrated on Saturday, September 27th, at Barcelona. The PHP Barcelona User Group (aka PHPBarcelona) is a non-profit organization aimed at spreading and interchanging knowledge among the PHP developers community of Barcelona and surroundings, and also evangelizing the PHP technology on universities and enterprises as well. This year they had celebrated another events but this one is the first which will be developed completely in English. The highlights of this conference will be the talks of internationally recognized PHP developers, like Derick Rethans and Scott MacVicar among others. For more information about Barcelona PHP Conference 2008 and to register, please visit http://phpconference.es

At the end of 2007, Aten Design Group worked with The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation to deploy iCitizenForum.com, a Drupal website about Citizenship. The following case study documents some of the factors that led to choosing Drupal, and outlines the technical approach for the project.

Background

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation operates the world's largest living history museum in Williamsburg, Virginia. The foundation preserves and interprets a 301-acre Historic Area; operates museums, outreach programs, and the John D. Rockefeller Library; and carries out important research and archaeology pertaining to the origins of America. In accordance with its mission, "That the Future May Learn from the Past", the foundation is concerned not only with recreating the 18th-century experience, but with facilitating education about the idea of America–both in its beginnings, and in its relevance for the future.

iCitizenForum.com, a website that promotes discussion around the topic of Citizenship, is a fitting extension of this core mission.

read more

Now that everyone is (hopefully) recovered from Drupalcon Szeged, I wanted to create one more front page post with a roadmap for the portion of the redesign project involving Mark Boulton Design. Mark and Leisa provided insight into their approach to the redesign in their keynote and really built up excitement and enthusiasm for the project. I highly recommend it to anyone even a teensy bit interested in the redesign process. Over the next three months (September 2008 – December 2008), the d.o redesign team will be tackling:

• User research
• Revised information architecture
• Content audit and editing
• Wireframes
• Usability testing
• Brand style guide
• Finalized design .psd

To be sure, they have a lot of work ahead of them. No worries – they’re totally on it! However, it also should not be underestimated how much work is ahead of us, the community. Again, I’m not worried, but it’s important that everyone is clear that the scope of the work we’ve contracted MBD to do is only the beginning.

The community will be the driving force in the redesign of Drupal.org and the Redesign Group will be the central hub for all interested. Be a part of it.

read more

The premiere PHP Conference – Celebrate the 14th event with us! Today the ICP is the reference whenever substructures of existing technologies should be extended or the basis for new developments should be created. Thus, you do not only profit from the concentrated know-how of worldwide acknowledged, international PHP-experts but also from the professional transfer of knowledge between industry and development. With its mixture of topics the International PHP Conference provides an ideal resource for all professionals and their successful daily routine within the whole PHP-spectrum. Insights into current Web 2.0 technologies, Security, Best Practices for tools and components, Enterprise know-how, databases, architectures and more are provided at the ICP 2008. The International PHP Conference celebrates it's 14th Edition. Celebrate with us, and profit from our Celebrate 14teen offers! 199 € / Special Price 149 €* / Special Price for Freelancer 99 €** / Student Price Offer is valid till 30th September! Register now! * Confirmation with your company's letter head ** With Student ID. Limited seating available

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/software/Drupal_is_a_2008_Open_Source_CMS_Award_Finalist';

Last year Drupal won 2007 Best Overall Open Source CMS. That was before we released Drupal 6.

This year, Drupal 6 was nominated for best CMS in two categories. Please help us by voting for Drupal in both of them:

• Best Overall Open Source CMS
• Best PHP Open Source CMS

"Following six weeks of intense voting, Packt can now exclusively reveal the Content Management Systems that have made the final of the four different categories. With the final voting stage opening on September 1, the competition is likely to be strong with new CMS's joining some of the more established names in each category to compete for a share of the $20,000 prize money."

"As usual, judging comes from a panel of experienced and respected figures from the Content Management and Open Source industry. They will be selecting their top three based on a number of factors including performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security.

The final judge is made up of votes from customers and visitors to www.PacktPub.com. You have the chance to support your favourite CMS by submitting a vote when the final five are announced."

read more

php|tek 2008: Chicago The publishers of php|architect Magazine and Python Magazine are proud to announce the joint php|works / PyWorks 2008 conferences in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. php|works and PyWorks feature over 65 talks, 10 tutorials and 5 tracks on topics ranging from web development to database optimization with PHP and Python over the course of two days, social events in the evening and plenty of networking opportunities with industry peers. This year, the PHP Community (and the Python Community, too!) meets November 12-14 for one of North America's premier PHP conferences of 2008. Join us to hear top speakers such as Derick Rethans (eZ Systems), Chris Shiflett (OmniTI), Mike Potter (Adobe) and more.

Drupal Essential Training

with: Tom Geller (Publishers bio)

...is now live in the Online Training Library at Lynda.com! Contact me privately via email or comment here if you have a well-known site and would like to publish a review of the full series, and I'll do my best to get you a DVD or free site pass. (It's normally $25/month for access to all their videos, which I think is a really good deal.)

read more

Another amazing Drupalcon has come to an end. Thank you to everyone that made the journey to the beautiful town of Szeged, Hungary. We truly turned this city into DrupalTown! Drupal folks covered every part of the town making it difficult to get away from them but who would want to! The amount of talks, connections, and learning that happened at this conference was amazing. This community is truly awesome!

But we're not stopping! Drupalcon North America has been decided and will happen in the March/April timeframe in the United States. We are not announcing the location or exact dates until the final contracts are signed, but watch for them on the Drupal.org front page! Start saving now!

By the way, did you attend Drupalcon Szeged? Couldn't make it?
Tell us about it in the Drupalcon Szeged 2008 Survey.

Although Drupalcon Szeged may be over and Drupalcon North America isn't for another seven months, that doesn't mean you have to wait to meet your fellow Drupallers. The following camps are occurring around the world in the next several weeks. Find more listed over at groups.drupal.org/events:
Sept. 6th-7th Victoria Canada DrupalCamp and Beerfest!

read more

The much-anticipated second edition of Pro Drupal Development has shipped! Newly updated and revised for Drupal 6, it includes more than 200 pages of additional content covering the Actions API for automating complex operations, the Batch API tools for managing long or complex processes, and other new tools. As with the first edition, it covers important foundational issues like building modules, working with FormAPI and the node system, using Drupal's search tools, and more. Purchases of the book made through its web site also benefit the Drupal Association.

When Pro Drupal Development was first released in 2007, it was a runaway success, hitting the Amazon.com top 100 in just a few days. As critical tools like Views, CCK, and Drupal are shipping for Drupal 6, the book's release should help give another important boost to the Drupal development community.

DrupalSN.com (Drupal Social Network) is a Social Network website about Drupal and built with Drupal. It is engineered from the ground up by thomjjames with a tiny bit of help from BioALIEN in getting this write up polished and published on the Drupal front page.

What is it?

DrupalSN is essentially a Drupal showcase both in terms of the site itself and also as a place where Drupal developers and designers can showcase their Drupal projects all in one place. I hope Drupal developers and designers will use the site as a way to gain exposure to complement their portfolio.

It's also meant to be a fun place where people can interact and see how Drupal can effectively be used for a social network. I hope the site can compliment Drupal.org and Groups.Drupal.org in a fun and different way but ultimately the goal is to promote Drupal!

read more

"Drupal in Libraries" is the subject of the May / June edition of Library Technology Reports. (http://www.techsource.ala.org/ltr/drupal-in-libraries.html) Authors Andy Austin (aaustin) and Chris Harris (cgharris) present an overview of Drupal for the library audience hoping to show why and how libraries can get started using Drupal.

Library Technology Reports is published by ALA Techsource, a unit of the publishing department of the American Library Association. The ALA Techsource website also runs on Drupal.

Click To Play

read more