Lucidus is proud to announce the launch of the Health Games Research web site.

Working the dedicated crew at the Health Games Research program office at the University of California Santa Barbara. Lucidus and Communicators Group crafted a beautiful easy to update website using the Drupal Content Management System.

Someone asked me about our involvement with non-profits and Drupal's suitability compared to Convio recently. Here are some thoughts I shared with him and thought might be interesting to a wider audience.

More than 50% of our projects are with non-profits and it has been extremely rewarding. Almost all of them include Drupal. In general, we end up with non-profits that are a bit more established in scale. They are good partners that understand the value we deliver to their projects.

Lucidus is proud to announce the launch of the C&S "Nourishing Change" web site.

Working closely with our partners at Communicators Group we implemented a custom theme on a Drupal based solution that is not only beautiful, but is easy for the good folks at C&S to update themselves.

Many of us will be heading to Concord NH tonight to attend the initial meeting of the NH Drupal User Group.

Lucidus is excited to become a more active member in the Drupal community and supporting this user group is just one of the ways we will be doing that in 2009.

While the user groups tend to cater to a technical crowd, we also hope to have some "Lunch and Learn" events at our office where our customer can hear about the latest news impacting their websites and share best practices amongst themselves

Wow! Drupal is getting a ton of recognition in the open source community. The Drupal project is a finalist in FIVE different categories of the SourceForge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards including:

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.

Forrester Research just released a report discussing the open source CMS software market and identifying two that they should pay attention to: Alfresco and Drupal. Drupal is getting a tremendous amount of love these days and it's not surprising.

Here is my CMS for Web Designers presentation from TODCON. I discussed why a designer would want to use a CMS (particularly Drupal), how to install it and some theming basics.

One of the most valuable services we provide as an "Internet Strategy & Services" firm is to seek out "best-of-breed" web applications (typically open source) for our customers and recommend them. As recently as a year ago, we were recommending Joomla/Mambo for content management to our clients. Late last year we changed course and made the transition to Drupal as our best-of-breed recommendation. Over the next few weeks, I'll delve into the reasons why we chose to make the switch. Today's reason is the simplicity of finding and editing web pages within Drupal.