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Recent Blog Posts

Howto: Create Screencasts

Submitted by Greg on Mon, 2007-11-19 08:32

Technology

I was recently asked how I create the screencasts on this site. This has been an evolving process.

Wink from Debugmode

I used a piece of software called Wink to create the screencasts. It has the benefit of providing the "next/previous" widgets which are nice. A drawback is that it creates snapshots of the screen in bitmap and then merges them together into flash. So, you can only use the Wink editor to edit the screencasts.

CamTasia - Full Featured, Full Price

For a Drupal Dojo Session about CVS I used the CamTasia recording system. It was pretty good, but is quite expensive. I don't think the price is justified in the features that it offers. CamTasia is basically an all-in-one solution which is great in a lot of ways, but, as often happens with all-in-one solutions, it isn't the best in many ways.

Krut - Cross platform Java Recorder

For my own projects, I now use Krut which is cross-platform and creates regular movies/sound files which you can then edit using standard movie editors. The drawback to standard movies is the lack of "next/previous" navigation - but most movie players will give you a progress slider which is good enough.

Voice Recording

I had been using just a plain old headset/microphone combo unit which I used also for VOIP calls. I now have a Rode Podcaster and use a pop filter which makes it super easy to provide high quality sound.

Improving the Project Module - Funding Worthwhile Projects with Collective Bounties

Submitted by Greg on Wed, 2006-09-13 10:35

Planet Drupal

Drupal Project Module History and Future

The Drupal Project Module is one of the oldest non-core modules that is still in active development and use on sites around the world. The core developers of Drupal are committed to using this module as the controller for "projects" hosted on Drupal itself. There are many people who like Drupal and want to use it to create a system for hosting projects. Two such projects that I'm aware of include the QCodo QForge and the future plans for JQuery.com as mentioned in the Lullabot podcast 21: interview with JQuery founder John Resig.

Help the Project Module Move Forward

Because the Project module is so old, it did things in ways that are not standard for Drupal. This makes it relatively unpopular for use on other sites as it lacks several important features. There are several particularly nasty bugs and Derek Wright (dww) has signed up to maintain Project module and tackle these bugs so that the Project module will get more attention and use around the world. More attention means more improvements, which means that one of the key pieces of Drupal's infrastructure can really start to shine and enable development rather than being a "I guess we have to use it" kind of feature.

So, if you use Drupal you should want to help the project module. It's important. It's a feature that lots of people want, and it has someone interested in making it better. Derek has setup a page explaining this in more detail and you are encouraged to give him more money. Read more about his plan and follow the link to donate. As of writing, Derek is at a little over $1000. That's a great start, but still pretty far from the desired end point.

Growing Venture Solutions, LLC gave funds thing to help with the process and to make sure that this module moves forward. Won't you do the same?

Why choose one CMS over Another?

Submitted by Greg on Wed, 2006-07-12 10:26

Planet Drupal

I recently got an email asking me this question:

A quick question about Drupal, Civic Space and Joomla and other PHP Open Source CMS?

Why choose Drupal over Civic Space? Why Drupal over Joomla/Mambo? Or PHP Nuke?

Which is easier for a novice to use? I've checked http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ and http://opensourcecms.com/ to learn and I've talked to one developer who is a big fan of PHP Nuke...

This is an interesting question for me. Personally I have only used a handful of content management systems and I've built a handful of similar tools from the ground up. But I'm very clearly a Drupal consultant at this point, so how did I get here and why Drupal? Now that I'm using and endorsing Drupal, is that the right decision? Is there reason to stay?

The Nuke Series

The first Open Source CMS I used was PostNuke - a member of the Nuke family of forks and hacks - and it worked pretty well. It gave me integration with Gallery, which I really liked, and it seemed to work pretty well. I had also used phpBB and while I liked it, it was clear that phpBB was more or less just a forum system and it was a security riddled one at that. When I needed to integrate Gallery and phpBB with Postnuke to get the functionality I wanted, and then I added a calendar which crashed the whole thing....I knew that something wasn't right. Many many megabytes of code that wasn't intended to work together and, not surprisingly, doesn't work together.

At the same time I tried getting help in the forum and was surprised by how weak the support was. I tried to ask my question as intelligently as I could and tried to help myself, but the response was really weak. That ended it. On to find something new, that included lots of functions, and that had an active community of support with major sites using the software. I wanted to know that other tech luminaries were using the product.

Finding Something New

At this point I had some certainty that I wanted to make a good decision on the software because I was pretty sure I was going to become a freelancer and stake my livelihood on the product. So, what to choose. Since I don't know the needs of my customers other than flexible, "quick to market", and reliable I went with those requirements. I then tried out Mambo and Drupal and looked at their communities and the software. I found them similarly easy to use, but Drupal struck me with the relatively large number of features supported out of the box and the powerful Taxonomy system. I looked around and noticed one or two of the sites that I visit were using Drupal to do drastically different things and that pretty much sealed the deal. I started using Drupal, posting questions in the forum, having problems still but at least being able to resolve them. Since that time Mambo/Joomla has forked (or I became aware of it, maybe) which makes me glad I didn't choose a project with an unknown future.

Confirmations All Around

Now that I'm here, is there good reason to keep using Drupal? I think so. IBM thinks so. Spike Source thinks so - Drupal is the only CMS or Community Building Framework that they support.SongBird thinks so. SnowBoard Magazine thinks so. Linux Journal thinks so, and wrote a case study on their move from PHP Nuke. Forrester Research thinks so, if you are looking for a blogging platform and "have open source experience and want blogs to be an integrated part of a publishing and community platform" - well, that's the vision that I bring to most of my clients because I believe Newsletters (aka Blogging) are a cost-effective marketing tool.

Two Images to Say It All

Here's an image comparing Drupal to the other Content Management Systems based upon IBM's review:

And here is the Forrester Map of the Corporate Blogging Platforms that they reviewed:

Drupal, WordPress, and Movable Type are the only three that are in both reviews, which says something in itself about popularity and credibility if not usability and feature sets. While IBM's developerWorks clearly favored Drupal as a CMS, Forrestor favors it only if it fits with your goal for your Corporate Blog as being a part of a community.

It's almost as interesting to me what these don't show: anything from the Nuke series.

That's how I arrived at Drupal, and it's also why I think that for at least the forseeable future it's a good piece of software to be working with.

Corporate Blogging and Credibility

Submitted by Greg on Wed, 2006-06-14 09:15

So, one of the ideas that I've latched onto and advised my customers (and prospective customers) to do is a "corporate blog".

Corporate Blogging - Friend or Foe

Businessweek and Fortune and all those junky business magazines are telling you that maybe it's a good idea, but also that it can be bad and blah blah blah.

Why the heck is it a bad idea to 1) with a low cost in terms of money and time 2) communicate your message to your customers 3) engage customers in a dialog about your service/product 4) help future customers find you--since blogs will help you get links and search engine results 5) have a little fun!

Well, I was reading an article on Kuro5hin that describes how to bootstrap a "web company" in 2 months and they had this great line about raising venture capital:

Now there are tons of articles out there on how to attract cash if you have an idea so I'm not going to go into it because we didn't go that route and to be honest all those articles seem like bullshit written by some 40 year old guy that thinks he's hip because he has a hosted blog.

So, the venture capital part is interesting, but the part that struck me was the part that I put in bold above. If you have a website and then create your own blog for yourself on blogger and then stick a link between them it's going to look cheap, it's not going to have the right theme, and after many many hours of your work it's still going to look like a cheap and disjointed separate part of the site. Your customers are not going to be excited and it won't help you gain credibility, links, or search engine results.

But how do I do "corporate blogging" the RIGHT way

GVS projects

Hyperlocal News Installation profile

The Hyperlocal News installation profile is an "internal project" for some of the folks at GVS. Profiles are ways to bundle together Drupal, some contributed modules, and the configuration necessary to make the site actually do something cool. Users are presented with an wizard that sets up...