Drupal

A number of years ago I took a client named Alex out to lunch. As is typical, I asked how we could be better. He paused for a moment; thought and delivered the best advice I've ever received from that question. "I don't care about your hours" was his response. He went on to explain how we always estimated in hours how long the work would take. While he appreciated having a metric to measure value. He didn't really have a frame of reference to truly validate the reference. If he knew what it took to build websites, he wouldn't be seeking companies like ours to do it for him.

Remember when your college professors would offer "Office Hours?" Specific days and times where you could drop-in and ask questions to your heart's content. Sure, you could ask questions after most any class or send an email (ok, it wasn't quite email for me) anytime but knowing that she'd be there in-person with nothing better to do than help you was reassuring. Well, we've brought office hours to Lucidus.

So we've been talking for several months about the next phase of our lucidus.net site. It had been around for more than  a year and was looking a bit long in the tooth. Moreover, it was on Drupal 5 and needed to be brought current. However, as with every cobbler, our children were not getting new shoes when customers were ready to pay.

Interesting article in Information Week touting Drupal that states "Drupal is conquering new territory as companies look to build Web sites designed from the ground up to support social interaction." It's great to see the product get the attention it deserves. It seems more an more that the conversation in the open source world has moved from Joomla to Drupal and Alfresco. (Guess we picked the right horse).

When you publish a news item (story) to your home page in Drupal, it is pretty simple. The text creates a teaser on the home page, and that helps to lead visitors in to see the rest of the story as well as other parts of your web site. Very often, though, the break in the text happens at the wrong place. Maybe you'd like to customize how much of your text shows on the home page. Here's how you do it.

Clients often ask how they can change the title of their Drupal website. The title is the text that appears at the very top of your browser "chrome". It is indexed by search engines and helps the search engines to know what your site is basically about. Occasionally site owners want to adjust a word or two and add or take away a keyword. To do this, you will need to have access to the administration area of your Drupal website and probably need to be a site administrator. Here's how:

For those interested in migrating from Joomla 1.0.15 to Drupal, there is now a module we're playing with called "Joomla to Drupal" that boasts the following capabilities:

• import Joomla Users
• import Joomla Sections & categories
• import Joomla Contents & Static-contents including images/pictures

I'll keep you posted as we progress on this but it's nice to see a module that is generally available for simplifying the move.

The folks on the Drupal board just released a new FAQ that answers many of the Drupal licensing questions that are out there. It's actually a pretty good primer into licensing for open source in general.

One interesting note is that if you use CIVICRM (which several of our sites do), the entire site falls under the Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3 which requires that visitors to the website be given a copy of the server-side if they request it.