About Drupal

Choosing a platform for the telecentre.org distributed network

Telecentre.org has outlined plans for a distributed network of telecentre network sites around the world, which will include a site for telecentre.org itself. This document outlines the process we followed for choosing a telecentre.org web platform; the platform we ultimately selected was Drupal. For the specific requirements and overall web strategy that guided this process please see the separate telecentre.org online strategy document. The overall vision is of a network of sites that will likely run on a variety of platforms, including a growing number of sites that run on our Drupal-based “support net in a box”.

Drupal and the New Paradigm for Content Management

Most of us who have worked closely with Drupal know that it's superior to other products out there. But when asked why, we seem to have a hard time presenting our case. Either we become too technical (in which case we turn away non-techie users) or we gush incomprehensibly about nodes and taxonomies (in which case we turn off even the programmers!).

Here's an attempt to explain Drupal to both the technical and non-technical audience. Those who are not necessarily programmers, but have brief experience in setting up and maintaining their own websites and intranets will also understand the language. The essay is being revised, so please post your comments to help me make it better!

http://digitalsolutions.ph/couchkamotereviews/newCMS

The Kleercut campaign and open-source networks

For the original article with photo's, please visit:
http://kleercut.net/en/open-source-campaigning

Why are we writing this article?

Every time we see traffic coming from a discussion forum pointing out that the Kleercut campaign site is using the popular Drupal open-source content-management system, it becomes more convincing that there is a philosophical or political alignment between the progressive community and the free-software movement.

When we look further and find the Wikipedia entry on Kimberly-Clark and Kleenex, an article on CorpWatch and another in the ever-popular Grist magazine — all sites supported by free and open-source software — it became a sign that we needed to speak up and add our story to the growing collection of literature on grassroots, open-source-powered campaigns.

What is the Kleercut Campaign?

It’s simple: Kimberly-Clark, the world’s largest manufacturer of tissue products, famous for its Kleenex brand, destroys ancient forests around the world. It does this to create consumer products that are used once and then thrown away or flushed down the toilet. Kimberly-Clark has been linked to the clear-cutting of ancient forests in Canada and the United States, including forests that are home to threatened wildlife like the woodland caribou and wolverine. The Kleercut campaign is an international corporate campaign to pressure Kimberly-Clark to clean up its act.

1,000 new activists a month

The Kleercut campaign launched in mid-November 2004 and has steadily grown into one of the more successful online forest campaigns in recent Canadian history. Month-over-month, more activists have visited the site, taken action, spread the word to others and joined the Forest Defenders e-mail list, which has grown at rate of about 1000 new sign-ups each month.

Contaire.com: a corporate website based on Drupal

Drupal is well suited for community plumbing, alright. But what if you want to apply its power, elegance, and simplicity to your corporate website? In this article, we explain our approach to creating a corporate website with Drupal, show you how to create your templates and arrange your content. So why would you want to enter into such a formidable endeavor?

Note: the original article is on contaire.com's site, and contains additional screenshots and illustrations.

• Both the layout and the underlying HTML of our old website needed a face lift.
• We specialize in sophisticated content management solutions, yet our website consisted of static HTML pages with an absolute minimum of PHP code to avoid the worst code duplication. We knew we could do better.
• At times we were slow to post updates of our site. The process of doing so should be more straight forward.

CSC-SY.net Migrated to Drupal

CSC-SY.net has been recently migrated from PHP-Nuke to Drupal, the migration process involved moving stories, forum topics, polls, posts and comments, private messages, and user accounts, we also had to port the theme we were using with PHP-Nuke to PHPTemplate, localize Drupal into Arabic, and finally configure Drupal to provide PHP-Nuke's features (and much more), details of the reasons behind the migration, and of the process itself follow.

Intro

CSC-SY.net is an Arabic community website for computer science students, it was started one year and a half ago, we chose PHP-Nuke in the beginning for several reasons, it was easy to flip the layout to RTL, which is a must for an Arabic site, PHP-Nuke had an Arabic translation, and its features were close to what we had in mind when we planned for the site. we were aware of PHP-Nuke's security issues, but with 3rd-party patches and our own modifications it went well in the beginning.

During the period of time we used PHP-Nuke, we realized how poorly-written PHP-Nuke was, as the site evolved we needed new features to be added, and with PHP-Nuke it became a nightmare, because it usually involved modifying so many files, making version updates another nightmare in turn, we had to update individual files by hand to patch security vulnerabilities, exploits were often found and updates had to be done often, every while we thought of moving to a more secure CMS, but the site was doing OK overall and we could live with PHP-Nuke, until several months ago, when the site's control panel started acting strangely, most of the strings were missing and after some debugging we couldn't fix it, we decided it wasn't worth the hassle, it was time to move to a new CMS.

The site was aging and missed all the new web features, like blogs and RSS feeds. We wanted to end the PHP-Nuke security nightmare. Web standards played a role in the decision, the new CMS had to be XHTML/CSS complaint, use UTF-8 encoding, and needed to be active in development.

After some investigation, our choices were narrowed down and finally we decided to choose Drupal, the main reason behind it was the tight integration of all site sections, more specifically forum.module, although it looked basic in the beginning, several sites customized it to look and act like other popular forum packages, so we thought it would be possible with our site, on the other hand, using a CMS that features a forum module instead of integrating another forum solution meant better security and compatibility.

After some investigation and testing, we realized that the migration process had three major points: data migration, theme creation, and localization.

Data Migration

Data migration seemed easy in the beginning, given that many scripts were available to do the task, but after further investigation, it turned out that none of them did what we wanted exactly, each solution missed something that had to be migrated, our plan was to migrate almost all of the site's content stored in PHP-Nuke's database, the migration involved moving the following items:

* ~770 users
* ~240 stories and polls
* ~360 comments
* ~17500 forum posts
* ~7110 private messages

Data migration made us research how PHP-Nuke and Drupal store those items, and research the best way to move data from one system to the other, given the large amount of data needed to be migrated, we had to develop a set of scripts to migrate our data, we made use of the already available scripts, and improve upon them, to create a semi-automatic script that fixes PHP-Nuke's database oddities (like date/time being stored as text, or having duplicate usernames, ...), migrates the data to Drupal's database, and we had make sure our work to fix things after running the script is minimal.

In addition, we had several private sections in the PHP-Nuke site, like admin forums and private message, we had that in mind while working on the script, a bug in the script could expose private data to the public.

We opened a beta section on our site to let users test the migration process, the script evolved as members reported bugs, and in the final stages before the migration, it had all what we needed for the data migration to be complete.

We had minor problems while working on the data migration other than moving across databases, data in PHP-Nuke is stored in windows-1256 encoding, but Drupal uses UTF-8, unfortunately MySQL 4.0.x doesn't support UTF-8 natively, so we had to figure out some workarounds to get over this, Arabic characters take more that one byte of storage in UTF-8, MySQL didn't realize this, leading to chopped-off text, we developed a script to convert PHP-Nuke's database to UTF-8 first, without losing any text, it involved increasing the length of some fields, and using iconv, at the end, all text data was migrated successfully.

Another side of data migration was converting BBCode (used by Nuke's phpBB forums) to something Drupal could parse, in the beginning it seemed that bbcode.module could handle this, but later it turned out that phpBB adds random strings to BBCode, so we updated our scripts to strip them out, we decided to do so instead of converting BBCode to HTML because we were planning on installing bbcode.module anyway, we guessed members used to BBCode would prefer to use it over HTML after the migration.

Theme Creation

When we opened up the first Drupal beta on our site, members complained about two things, forum threaded look and the theme in general, we started with a theme based on SpreadFirefox, but the majority didn't like it, we switched to FriendsElectric later and got less complaints, but later we realized that we had to develop our own theme for several reasons:

• Using a contrib theme from Drupal.org would make our site look like many other Drupal sites.
• Our site would keep the look it had for a year and a half.
• None of the contrib themes looked particularly similar to our original theme, or suitable for our site.

With that in mind, we started to port our PHP-Nuke's theme to Drupal, the original theme is based on tables, and hardly made use of CSS if it all, we based our work on Box_grey and ported the theme to XHTML/CSS, as I said earlier, Arabic is a right-to-left language, so the theme's layout needed to be so too, this complicated things a lot, especially that drupal.css doesn't take this into consideration, and assumes that the theme's direction is always LTR, after coding and debugging, we came up with a theme almost identical to the original theme, working well with Mozilla and IE browsers, the theme works with Opera and KHTML, but with minor annoyances.

Another aspect of the theme was making the forums flat, the forums were the core of the old site, and a major change from flat to threaded look wasn't welcomed by our community, so we worked on making the new forums look like phpBB, in other words, the forums' theme had to show the member's avatar, post count, registration date, and other info, to the side of the post body, the fourms should behave like phpBB in being flat, new replies should always appear in the bottom, with some theme work, it all was possible.

We also made modifications here and there to make the site look right, comment.module assumes the layout is LTR too, we had to fix this, we also added topic icons to the homepage, and did some changes to the user page.

Localization

As I said earlier, we chose PHP-Nuke in the very beginning of the site because it had an Arabic localization, later when we were evaluating current CMS's to choose what to migrate to, Drupal had "having a recent Arabic localization" as a plus,however, we then realized we couldn't use the localization available at Drupal.org, it wasn't updated to 4.6, wasn't consistent and had many typos, instead of fixing it, we decided it would be easier to start fresh, it didn't take long, and we had a localization customized for our site, right now all the site is fully translated into Arabic (including contrib modules we use) except for some parts of the admin area.

Drupal Configuration

After the migration work, Drupal needed to be configured to cover the old site's functionality, and provide new features we had in mind, Drupal's core covered frontpage news, polls, forums, comments, and user profiles, we installed many contrib modules as well, some of them are:

• article: for the articles section of the site.
• attachment: makes it easier for members to upload files with there posts.
• flexinode + taxonomy_dhtml: for the downloads section.
• image: for the gallery.
• privatemsg: for private messages.

In addition to many other modules that add more functionality, the most welcomed one by the community is TinyMCE, we also have taxonomy_access for the site's private sections, like admin, mod, and active members forums, and quote, freelinking, and bbcode for easier posing of content, troll, mail, and adminblock for easier administration.

After the migration we enabled two new sections, blogs and wiki, both were welcomed by the community, and provided functionalities that weren't possible before, blogs provide a space for each member to talk about their personal matters, and the wiki is where the community collaborates and makes decisions.

Drupal's tight integration made the whole site more active, members used to prefer the forums over other sections, and given that the old forums (phpBB) weren't that integrated with the rest of the site (PHP-Nuke), many members didn't realize that content was posted to the other sections as well, now with Drupal, /tracker provides a list of all updates, forums feel more like a part of the whole site, comments on news, polls, as well as forum posts count towards member's post count, and many other small details that made members participate in all site sections now, thanks to Drupal design and integration.

Drupal's search engine friendliness made our site reach top 3 links in many Google searches for phrases that are major and popular in Arabic, the site is even the number one result for some generic single-word searches now!

Members are glad with the new features and speed of the site, there are some minor bugs here and there, but we worked/are working on fixing them quickly with the help of the community.

We believe that CSC-SY.net is one of the first Arabic sites on the Internet that utilize Drupal, have a right-to-left theme and full Arabic localization, and it's definitely the very first fully-Arabic community site powered by Drupal, we hope that the site will convince other Arab web admins to try out Drupal, seeing how it can handle Arabic just fine, we are sure they will be satisfied with it as we are.

A Final Word

I'd like to thank the Drupal developers and contributors for their awesome work that made our new site happen, I've done the migration process almost single-handedly, and now I'm very satisfied with the results, I'd like to give back to the community, I've already contributed two patches for contrib modules, and I have some more, I'm also willing to contribute the Arabic localization if it's possible, I'd like to thank the folks at #drupal-support, especially chx and BuddaBoy for their help, and brick for the interesting chats, since I've started with the migration, I usually stick in #drupal-support and offer help as much as my knowledge allows me to.

-Ayman (CSC-SY.net site admin)

Destination Bride - Wedding Resource Website Powered by Drupal

Website: Destination Bride

The owner's original dream for this website was to build a comprehensive resource directory for all major wedding destinations in the world; the completion of which was to coincide with the release of her new book on the topic. The problem was that her "static" website was nowhere near completion and was full of inconsistencies.

Problems with a Static Website

She found herself frustrated by the time and complexity involved in expanding the current "static" website that had been developed for her. Editing the pages with Macromedia Contribute was not too difficult, but waiting (weeks) for "the other" web design company to add a page, then to sort through the inconsistent or incorrect menu links was really gumming up the works. Just to add a database-driven menu system - without any other content management - was going to cost thousands.

In addition, much of the website was not spidered by the major search engines. The Javascript menu and non-clickable breadcrumbs (what's the point?) were suspected as the problem here. Most of the pages that were found by Google had no descriptions in the results. Many didn't even have titles! The website was not performing well in the search engines as a result.

The Task at Hand

I was originally asked if I could create a database for the menu structure. With our friend Drupal, I was able to provide a complete, content managed, SEO friendly website solution at a fraction of the cost of my competition. Here's how I did it:

• Flexinode created the regional pages with data entry for area overview, climate, currency and other information. Eventually, flexinode will allow couples to maintain Personal Wedding Pages.
• Taxonomy support for the Banner module was developed for use on this website. Advertisers sponsor regions and/or resource pages, and banners are served up according to respective vocabulary terms.
• Menu on the Fly assisted in building the enormous resource navigation structure.
• Edit as New allowed for the addition of the 29 identical resource pages listed under each of the 50 included regions.
• Nodewords allows for the customization of keywords and meta descriptions. Default node titles alone helped place several of these pages in the top ten of Google - without any content yet!

• Hopefully Google Sitemap will help.

• I used the Image module to upload regional maps.
• The Wedding Planning Packages are organized with Book pages (Drupal core) for easy browsing.
• Amazon Associate Tools simplified the migration of her existing books from the old website to the new one. The "related books" feature for nodes will allow for future additions.
• Mail allows for the sending of simple newsletters to registered users and advertisers.
• Originally, FCK Editor was installed to allow the website owner and her staff to edit the pages, but they decided against editing the content themselves. But they could if they wanted to!

What About the Design?

She was also very pleased that the design didn't have to change. I started with the box-gray theme and was able to recreate the look and feel of her existing website almost exactly. Promoting nodes to the front page took the place of the few little blurbs placed on the previously "static" home page. Blocks house menus, ads and news items in a simplified and consistent way.

A Happy Ending

It's been two years. But with two months of amazing Drupal Power, this website is nearly complete. The content for all regions including links, maps and other information is posted. The resource naviagtion tree is always accurate. The banner system keeps track of statistics and expiration dates. News and other important items are promoted to the front page to generate interest in the content offered. Users are starting to register themselves. And the wedding team at Destination Bride can focus on what they do best - plan amazing weddings!

God Bless Taxonomy - Creating CraftyTraveler.com with Drupal

(A non-programmer, non-admin web designer wades in!)

Having just sold my share of the web development company (www.pangomedia.com), I decided I needed a second career/hobby. I'm a bit of a travel buff, and have always been frustrated with the cruddy travel sites on the web, so I decided I'd make a repository of screened/edited travel guides (user submitted) at www.craftytraveler.com.

Being a web geek that is decidedly from the graphical side of things, I was hesitant about Drupal. I was very used to having a programmer/admin at my disposal (I no longer did), so I was hesitant to go beyond my solo-comfort-zone (static HTML). But the idea of managing thousands of travel articles (categorized and searchable) was fairly horrifying. And I'd heard enough clients say "If we had KNOWN it was going to get this big, we woulda built it right from the get-go!" that I was damn well going to set it up so that it could scale up as it needed to without a major retrofit.

I'd set up exactly 1 Drupal site before in my life, so I was definitely not a Drupal expert. I'll walk you through the assorted development stages of the site and talk a bit about my learning experiences as I went.

1. Prototyping

I'm a bit of a nut for user-interface and design (in that order). Despite the fact that I knew Drupal had limits, I was resigned to designing an interface FIRST, and then trying to poke and prod Drupal to make it work. So I created a Photoshop document first (jpg shots here, here and here, then chopped it up into a prototype HTML document (can be seen here). I fiddled with it for a few weeks, asking friends and colleagues for feedback to refine it and submitting it to the infamous "Mother Test" (putting it in front of my Luddite mother and seeing if it confused her). It finally passed muster, and the next step was uncharted territory for me-- installing a PHP/MySQL application by myself.

2. Drupal Install

What a delight! The mystery of installing a PHP/MySQL application was a mystery no longer-- in fact, it was ridiculously easy. With a simple FTP program and PHPMyAdmin (web based MySQL controls), I installed my first solo instance of Drupal. The directions were spot on, and no errors (initially) cropped up. I later found out that my hosting company (like MANY out there) was using a slightly old version of PHP which rendered the search functionality of Drupal thoroughly broken. No biggie-- I had to migrate to a new server. Though it'd be good to make darn sure what your hosting company is running (version-wise) before you get deep into development of your site.

3. Templating

(note: from my first Drupal experience, I took one valuable piece of information: FIXED WIDTH TEMPLATES ARE A PAIN IN THE BACKSIDE. You will save yourself a ton of heartache if you design your site with a percentage-based design-- i.e. one the expands to fit the browser window).

My first step after install was to create the visual wrapper (template) of the site. To start, I just duplicated one of the directories in the "themes" directory and starting hackin' around to see how it was set up. I strongly recommend using the PHPTemplate engine over the XTemplate engine (which seems to be the default, strangely). It took a few minutes to install, and made templating a lot easier.

To create my template, I took my prototype HTML file and stripped out all of the content, and renamed it page.tpl.php. I then took one of the stock page.tpl.php in one of the other theme directories and started copy-pasting anything that looked remotely like PHP into what I thought would be the appropriate place. If it was inside the <head> tag in the working template file, I put it there in my prototype. If it was in the lefthand column, I dropped it there in my prototype... Well, you get the idea. Remember, that I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag (though the PHP statements were intelligently named, so they were generally pretty obvious). Once I ran out of PHP stuff to move over, I uploaded my revised file (now named page.tpl.php) and lo and behold! It worked (once I set it as the default template). It still looked cruddy (because I had to monkey with the other tpl files and the CSS), but it was definitely my template!

As I dug in a bit more, I realized that most of the other tpl files really didn't require much editing-- most of the visual controls were in the CSS file(s). To move the text styles in the direction I wanted to, I just started one style at a time. I found a piece of text whose style I wanted to alter, and looked at the code to try to figure out which style controlled it. Sometimes it took a bit of trial and error (there is evidently a global stylesheet in the misc directory called drupal.css which can override some stuff you might want to do), but I eventually got the text styles about how I wanted.

4. Taxonomy & Categories

Taxonomy is the term that makes most Drupal newbies grumpy, but it's really the thing that sets Drupal apart. My goal was to eventually have thousands of travel guides. I knew that a browse-interface was the way to go in the early stages (it's no fun to search a largely empty database) but eventually I wanted the home page of my site to be a simple google-esque search interface with a few advanced options. If a person (eventually) wanted to search for articles written by women about traveling in the Middle East that included discussion of adventure travel and local cuisine, I wanted them to be able to search for EXACTLY that. Which is where taxonomy came in.

I first created a vocabulary (category) called "World Regions". Makes sense. I then added a series of terms under that category (North America, South America, Europe, etc). I didn't go any deeper than the main regions of the world (yet). To accommodate the ability to search/browse by style of travel, I added another vocabulary (Category) called "Travel Style". Under that, I created a series of terms (Adventure Travel, Local Cuisine, Nightlife, etc). I created a final vocabulary called "Gender", under the assumption that woman travel writers might talk about things that women care about, and threw two (hopefully obvious) terms in that category. Note that right now, content is largely offered through a browse interface. But as soon as I feel I have enough content, I can (in about 5 minutes) open up the capability to search/sort/browse by travel style or gender.

Here's the great thing. I really didn't want a big empty site to scare away visitors. I could've created a deeper regions category, creating a subcategory of each world region for countries, provinces, states, cities, etc, but I didn't. Instead, when I received and approved an article (I got 70 in the first 10 days of the site being live), I create the appropriate subcategory for it. My first article was on Jack the Ripper Tours in London England-- so I create a term called "England" and assigned Europe as it's parent.

Here's the other great thing. I didn't both to create a "London" term and assign it as a sub-sub-term of Europe (under England) - why bother breaking stuff down that deeply until I have a whole pile of England articles? So I left it floating under England where it will live happily with any other England Articles. Once I get enough articles about England that they get awkward to browse through, I'll create some new terms to further define the articles. It only takes a few scant clicks to re-assign a story to a different bunch of categories/terms.

5. Modules

Drupal by itself feels incomplete in a lot of ways-- and I think that's on purpose. Rather than force developers to deal with their users in a specific way, they leave a lot of functionality open-- to be filled by the gazillion modules that are available (or you can try to develop one yourself, though that is certainly outside my skillset). A lot of these modules are fantastic. I was a little frustrated by the fact that you pretty much have to install the module to see exactly what it does/what it looks like-- but given that it really only takes 5-10 minutes to download and install a module, this didn't turn out to be a big deal.

Here are a few modules that I (easily) installed and configured:

Taxonomy Context - This is the core of my current article navigation scheme (on the lefthand side). World regions are obviously very nested, so a nested list like this seemed ideal. Essentially, this allows you to regurgitate a category specific list (in this case, World Region) as a block (either in the left-hand column or right-hand (though presumably you could put it anywhere if you installed Flexiblock)

Path and Pathauto - These allow you to have (overridable) URL paths based on your taxonomy and story/page/node names. This is a big deal for search engines, and allows people to have a good sense of where they are in the site besides. A good example is /usa/tennessee/bbq_in_memphis_tennessee.

Inline - There is a lotta grumping in the Drupal forums about the assorted image handling modules. Inline (and img_assist) are both quite handy for adding images to stories. Ultimately, for what I wanted, I ended up using a combination of these and a few free PHP scripts to do what I wanted.

6. Problems and Frustrations

There really weren't too many frustrations/problems in the development of this site-- but there were a few land mines that maybe others can avoid or will be dealt with in future versions or modules.

a. The search functionality in Drupal 4.6 requires a relatively recent version of PHP. Not a huge deal for me to move it to a different server when I found this out. But if you have a shared hosting company that you love who happens to be running an older version, you're likely outa luck. "You want me to upgrade PHP on a production box with the PLESK control panel for you, a $10month hosting account?! Bwahahahahaaha!"

b. Image modules. I wasn't able to find an image module that fit my needs exactly. Some of my authors submitted articles with no images, some provided a single image, some provided a whole gallery. For those that provided many images, I wanted to have both a simple-to-set up slideshow gallery as well as dynamically sized popup windows for inline images (you can see both of these in action here). Unfortunately, no modules did the trick. Eventually, I'll likely have a contract programmer write a module, but for the time being, I used a few free PHP scripts that I found out there. Which leads me to...

c. PHP Code Input Format. If you want to put PHP into a node (story/page/whatever), Drupal won't create a suitable teaser-- it just uses the whole dang article for teaser. I understand there is a committed patch for this, but I couldn't get it to work-- so demoted the node off of my front page. <sigh>

d. Tables in nodes. Even if you don't do PHP Input Format, you have to be careful about putting table code of any flavor into a story. When Drupal creates the teaser, sometimes it'll pull a chunk of that table as part of the teaser, thoroughly borking the HTML of the rendered page. I dealt with this by dropping any tables well past the 200 characters that Drupal uses as a teaser.

None of these things were a big deal, but they definitely forced me to do things in what I thought was a non-ideal way. I'm also happy to admit that (because I'm a non-programmer) there may be solutions to this that are a lot less stupid than the ones I came up with. In fact, I just saw the module Teaser Module, which should deal with my C & D issue!:-)

Pando: Sharing Big with Drupal

About Pando

Pando is small New York City-based startup with a large mission: to make it easy for anyone to send and receive large files via email, IM, and RSS and to post large files for free download on any Web site. To accomplish our mission, we developed a small piece of consumer software that runs on top of our BitTorrent-based P2P network. The goal of our Web site is foremost to drive downloads of the Pando client, but the site also houses documentation, FAQs, promotions, corporate info and even content feeds, which we'll explain below.

We chose Drupal for our primary company web site and for a number of related side projects. Over 3 million people have downloaded the Pando software on www.pando.com, and we're currently getting over 100,000 page views a day. (Our P2P network, by the way, now delivers over 40 terabytes/day of user generated data daily).

Choosing Drupal

When preparing to launch the web site to promote the first Pando beta we reviewed a number of options. We use Java, Tomcat and MySQL for our protocol application server so, wanting to play to our strengths, we first looked at Java-based options like blojsom. Not finding anything satisfactory, we then reviewed LAMP-based CMS frameworks, including Drupal. Pando CTO Laird Popkin had used Drupal in the past and was impressed by its powerful flexibility and relatively elegant implementation compared to other available CMSes.

Zero to Launch

In just a few days we assembled a basic theme, pulled together initial content and got our first site up and running. We made good use of the page and book modules right out of the box and quickly added front page, quotes and theme editor modules for design flexibility. We started with Drupal 4.5 to make life easy on our sysadmins, who could install it as a pre-built Debian package.

Rapid Hacking

Early on, we needed to quickly add a web-based user registration system to integrate cleanly with the Pando platform. Grabbing a copy of the existing LDAP integration module, modifying it and lightly hacking Drupal core, we were able to get the system up and running to spec in a few days. This wasn't the ideal implementation, but it was fast to implement and we met our deadlines.

We also needed to do some basic data collection to measure downloads of our app and collect email addresses from our beta testers. Again, on a tight timeline and with little Drupal expertise in house, and with relatively modest requirements, we simply put together some custom php snippets embedded directly in specific pages to collect and report on this data.

Cleaning House

Our ability to get up and running rapidly with little Drupal-specific experience was a testament to Drupal's generous flexibility and power. Once on our feet we brought on board a LAMP developer with some Drupal experience (Scott Trudeau) to help us move forward.

With Drupal 4.7 on the near horizon and a business decision to remove the user registration requirement in place, we made the update to 4.7 a priority. Since our web-based registration was integral to earlier versions, and since we'd altered core and hacked up the LDAP module to support it, the upgrade took some careful attention but went very smoothly. As our user base grew, we added extensive help and support documentation, using the book module extensively.

Search Engine Optimization

As Pando began to grow in popularity, we looked for ways to spread our reach even wider. One key area we sought to improve was in search engine optimization (SEO). Drupal turned out to provide a number of handy tools to make this task easy. We made use of the built-in path module to ensure human and search-bot friendly URLs; we grabbed the page title and node (key)words modules to have better control over page metadata; and used the site map and XML Sitemap modules to help search bots index our site.

Continual Development

We continually add functionality to our primary site and take advantage of the rich set of tools the Drupal community has provided. We used the Send module to build an "email postcard" system. Because send required the mimemail module, we found use for that in some of our php snippets that which had been using php's mail() function. We also began to use some simple taxonomy structures to create modified themes for special cases and to generate an RSS feed for our monthly newsletter.

Latest Projects

Pando's main site gets the most traffic and attention, but we're also using Drupal for a number of other projects.

Pando RSS

Pando supports RSS so that users can subscribe to video podcasts (for example), with P2P technology allowing for efficient delivery of higher quality files than typical podcasts.

To support this, we built a web site (rss.pando.com) that provides a sample Pando RSS feed.

To make it easy for podcasters to produce Pando RSS feeds, we then built a tool using Drupal (leaning heavily on the actions, workflow and views modules combined with Drupal's cron hook) to automatically index and convert rich media RSS feeds to Pando RSS feeds that can be subscribed to with the Pando client. Pando RSS audio and video podcasts are available from the Pando Podcast Gallery.

Pando Developer Toolkit

We recently launched a Developer Toolkit that allows web sites and applications to easily integrate Pando. Since we use Drupal so heavily, we have implemented a "demo" Pando module that demonstrates how to use the new Pando developer toolkit to make it easy to use Pando to share large files on any Drupal web site, which combines quite nicely with Drupal's powerful community capabilities. For example, anyone can submit content using Pando, which can be moderated, published, discussed, voted on, and syndicated via RSS. This module takes advantage of the Drupal 5.0's improved multi-step form handling capabilities, and may implement some dynamic behavior using the new jQuery javascript library. We are also working on producing a "one click Pando sharing site" based on Drupal 5.0's distribution profiles.

Pando Developer Web site

We're planning a launch of a separate Pando developers' site based on Drupal to house projects like the Drupal module. We are excited that this site will allow us to try out more of Drupal's community and project management capabilities.

Conclusion

Our experience with Drupal has been a largely positive one. It measure up to our early impressions of it's power and flexibility and has grown well along with us. We're delighted to be part of the large and growing Drupal community.

VisitPMR.com: quick site building with Drupal

Drupal-powered sites don't have to look like Drupal at all. The brief for developing www.VisitPMR.com (a travel information site for the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic) called for a commercial look to compete with official tourism "brochure sites" from other countries. At the same time, we wanted Drupal's taxonomy features, ease of editing content, and ease of adding new content.

The site was done by two people in just five days ... thanks to the magic of Cascading Style Sheets and the even bigger magic of Drupal.
We started by making a design and then incorporating it into the phptemplate engine. Then we added just five modules: Feedback, front_page, image, img_assist, image_exact; all of them standard without any modifications. In the design template, we placed the left hand blocks underneath the main content (rather than to the left), and let the right hand blocks stay on the right. This required a simple copy-paste edit to page.tpl.php to overcome the 4.6 limitation (in 4.7 you can place blocks anywhere, as this layout required, but at the time of building we wanted production ready rather than a beta).

In less than a week's worth of work we launched a site that would have taken a month, and more manpower, to build otherwise. Within days it already started ranking high in search engine results; raising awareness about the new country as a potential travel destination.

www.VisitPMR.com

Why Linux Journal converted to Drupal and how it went

We had been looking for a "Content Management System" for quite a while, and one of our employees discovered Drupal while researching CMS software on the web. Drupal appeared to be much more flexible than PHP Nuke, which we were using, and the more we looked at it the more impressed we became. At that time all of the features we thought we would need, except one, which we decided to write a module to provide, were on the table to be implemented in the next Drupal release.

We decided to convert Linux Gazette to Drupal in order to become familiar with Drupal under real life high usage conditions and to setup Doc Searls' IT Garage to experiment with Drupal's blogging and other interactive abilities. After we were satisfied with Drupal's ability to handle the traffic at Linux Gazette as well as its interactive abilities at Doc Searls' IT Garage and had set up and tested Drupal's flexibility by creating several sites for internal corporate use, we decided to create a Drupal site to replace the Linux Journal PHP Nuke site that we were using for Linux Journal. We started out with version 4.3 of Drupal but by the time we decided to convert Linux Journal to Drupal, version 4.4 was out so we started building our new site using that version. There were not any major problems, just the typical learning curve requiring new ways of looking at problems, nothing we could see that would prevent us from using Drupal for the new site. Most of our time was devoted to developing methods to convert the old articles and content of Linux Journal magazine to the new format required in the new site.

One thing that Drupal did not provide was a method that we could use to display static content in the main center section without the other content that Drupal normally puts there. We wanted to be able to link to static html and text files and have only that file be displayed in the center section. To do that Mitch Frazier created a module he called xstatic.module. The xstatic module allows you to define one or more base directories that can be used for storing HTML files, PHP files, text files, and image files. When the xstatic module is used in the URL, the argument to it is interpreted as a file path name. This file path name is searched for relative to all each of the predefined xstatic directories. The file type extensions are appended automatically. If the file is found its contents are displayed in the main (center) section of the Drupal page. If the file is a php file it is first evaluated and the result is displayed. This allowed us to create anything we wanted in the center, without having to create a node, while maintaining a consistent Drupal "look" with the site's header, sidebars, and footer intact. The xstatic module gave us a great way to separate all information that is not editorial content from the marketing and business oriented pages as well as providing us with a simple way to quickly integrate existing HTML files into the site.

After converting 10 years of articles and getting the "look and feel" we wanted, we decided to do the roll over from PHP Nuke to Drupal at 8am on Nov. 1st. Unfortunately on the evening of Oct. 30, while doing the final move of the articles to the new site, we discovered that Anonymous users could not leave their name or email address when making comments. This was a feature we "had" to have and was only available on version 4.5. On earlier versions of Drupal you had to have an account before your name would appear with your comment. This was a "show stopper" and even though we had less than 48 hours to do it in, we decided to install a new 4.5 site and bring over the blocks, theme and other changes we created for the earlier version. Mitch Frazier had it working in 24 hours and we spent the rest of the time before the roll out testing and doing minor cleanup.

The new site has been well received by Linux Journal subscribers and www.linuxjournal.com readers. Lots of helpful suggestions have been made and new features implemented because of them. Because of this warm reception, when we decided to create a publication called TUX, which is primarily for the new Linux user, we decided to use Drupal for its web site. Since we were short of time, we simply cloned the Linux Journal site. We then made cosmetic changes and cleaned up the database. This allowed us to have a working site while we worked on a completely new layout and design. The new TUX layout and design has been finished and is now in place. Steven Wittens, one of the core Drupal developers helped us with the look and feel of the new TUX site which is based on the phptemplate theme.

On the Linux Journal site, Drupal version 4.5 is handling 400,000 hits per day, and MySQL is handling the storage and the searches for 5,000 articles and over 14,000 comments. We are currently using these contributed modules; print, spam, subscriptions and themedev on both the Linux Journal and TUX sites. We are also considering using weblink, userpost and webforms as well. We are very pleased with the power and stability of Drupal and because of this are creating internal Drupal sites to be used for information dispersal and coordination between employees and departments. We are considering using a node level permission module that Matt Westgate is developing to control access to information in these internal sites. We are constantly amazed at how versatile and powerful Drupal is and at the new uses we find for it.

The Drupal Community has been a great help in answering questions and making suggestions that allowed us to create, design and convert our existing web site to Drupal as well as create new ones. To return the favor we are planning on releasing the xstatic module that Mitch Frazier created, some time after the first of the year. Mitch is also working on a few other new ideas and we will be releasing them after they are fully developed and researched.

Many thanks to the Drupal Community from the staff of Linux Journal, TUX, Doc Searls' IT Garage and Linux Gazette.

--
Keith Daniels
Web Coordinator
SSC Publications, Inc.

Publishers of:
Linux Journal
TUX
Doc Searls' IT Garage
Linux Gazette
A42
Groups of Linux Users Everywhere

CivicSpace

CivicSpace has been a core contributor to the Drupal community since CivicSpace's inception with the Howard Dean for President campaign in the United States. CivicSpace focuses on delivering simple Drupal install profiles designed for civic groups through a free and open source download and through our on demand service.

Services

CivicSpace On Demand. Get Drupal + CiviCRM in an instant, pre-configured package with fully functional CiviMail (mass email) and CiviContribute (online donations). This is a service for individuals and groups that want to get a dynamic community oriented website up quickly and easily.

• Have Us Create Your Site
• Do It Yourself
• Try the Demo
  Use username/password demo/demo.

Drupal Contributions

CivicSpace is proud to employ some of the leaders in the Drupal community.

Kieran Lal
Nedjo Rogers
Jeremy Andrews
Robin Monks
Henrique Recidive

Website

www.civicspacelabs.com

Contact

David Geilhufe
Managing Partner

Drupal hosting list

Please edit this page and add the host, with url and a short comment to this list. For a list of official Drupal hosts look into our services section.

Egressive Limited (New Zealand)

Egressive is a hosting provider based in Christchurch, New Zealand, and
specialises in the implementation, customisation, and hosting of Drupal
sites - on servers with Apache2/PHP5/MySQL5/PostgreSQL8.1. Egressive
offers customised hosting solutions and peerless technical support at a
reasonable cost.

GrafiX Internet B.V.

GrafiX Internet B.V. provides transit, co-location, and dedicated servers in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, The Netherlands. We are most proud to be the dedicated server provider of choice for www.drupal.org, as well as some offspring projects such as www.drupaldevs.org.

We believe in 'medieval marketing', and thus our web presence (www.grafix.nl) is fairly humble. We strive to make our combination of service and support legendary, and our name to pass mouth to mouth, spread wide and far by our many satisfied customers.

It would honor us if you will consider GrafiX Internet B.V. as a service provider for your drupal-based deployment! Contact us at sales@grafix.nl or by phone at +31-(0)180 - 450170

We can offer:

• Server co-location starting from 59 €/month (Our network, your hardware).
• Dedicated Servers starting from 200 €/month (Our network, our hardware).
• Raw or managed transit capacity starting from 1 Mbps to gigabits per second.
• Rack (cabinet) space starting from 1/3 rack and up to entire datacenter cages.
• Network, operating system, and security consultancy.

Ixis IT Managed Hosting

Ixis offer managed Drupal hosting for commercial projects who need scalable hosting backed by a solid SLA.

Our Drupal servers are located at the Rackspace datacentre (London, UK) enabling us to offer an enterprise grade service with

• Redhat Enterprise Linux install
• 100% network uptime guarantee
• 24/7 Site availability monitoring
• Managed daily backup facilities
• Drupal installation, configuration and upgrade support

For more details on our SLA and support services for clients hosted with us visit the managed Drupal hosting page over at www.ixis.co.uk

Koumbit

Koumbit is a non-profit organisation whose mission is to promote the appropriation of free, libre and open software by social groups in Quebec, in Canada and abroad. We provide professional Drupal hosting & consulting, among our services.

Find out more about Koumbit at: http://koumbit.org/en/apropos

Our Drupal experience has been summarized here: http://koumbit.org/en/DrupalExperience

Koumbit's contributions to Drupal can be viewed in detail by checking our members' profiles under Track -> Track code. Their profiles are available here http://drupal.org/profile/companies/Koumbit

OpenSourceHost

OpenSourceHost is a specialized web hosting company focusing on providing quality web space and support for open source content management systems, as well as other open source software systems. For Drupal hosting, we provide graphical installation instructions, and if you take advantage of our special offer at http://drupal.opensourcehost.com/ you will receive an additional 100 megs of space and 1 gig of bandwidth added to the hosting package of your choice.

Schultz Consult

Schultz Consult is a Danish company developing for and hosting Drupal sites.

Within the drupal site you would get the following:

For only 149,- Danish Kroner you would get the following:
149,- Danish Kroner is approximately 19.96 €
- Latest Drupal installation
- Unlimited use of webspace
- 10 e-mail accounts
- 1 database
- 5Gb of transfer pr. month.
- And loads of more...

At the moment the site with information about Schultz Consults Drupal hosting is in Danish, but it will soon be translated into English.

You may look at Schultz Consult for more information about our Drupal products.

Synerger Hosting (Australia)

Go to Synerger Hosting

Looking for somewhere to host your Drupal site? Synerger Hosting is an Australian hosting company ready and able to do it. We run linux servers with nightly backups (on and offsite) for both databases and filesystems. Our mail administration system gives you full control of your mail needs through a web interface. Including mailing lists! Yes! Including mailing lists!

We are running PostgreSQL 7.4 with PHP 4.3 giving you a stable platform on which to run your Drupal 4.6 (or later) site. We give you 1GB of space and, if that's not enough, uploaded data is free! Not to mention no extra charges for mailboxes, aliases and webmail. Mailing lists are a very low cost add-on making it a breeze to contact your customers.

Choose Synerger Hosting for all your hosting needs!

Our prices for hosting are (in Australian Dollars):

Drupal site (core)^*

Monthly Price: $20
Setup: Free^** (normally $100)

Contrib module

Monthly Price: Free
Setup: $30/module

Custom module

Monthly Price: Free
Setup: POA

Mailing lists

Monthly Price: $5
Setup: $20

Standalone Mail Hosting (per domain)

Monthly Price: $11
Setup: Free^** (normally $100)

Contact us to put your Drupal site online with Synerger Hosting!

Want us to keep your Drupal installation up-to-date? Site maintenance (e.g upgrades) can be also be arranged. Get in touch for pricing.

We also design and develop custom web solutions and applications. Send an email to our sales team to find out more.

* Per domain. We will install 4.6 and 4.7 (once released) core modules. 1GB of space plus POP3 mailboxes, aliases and webmail at no extra cost (IMAP is available at extra cost).
** Free setup until 30 June 2006 for those that mention this advertisement.

vhost.org.uk

vhost.org.uk is a UK-based hosting company focusing on providing
web hosting and services for open source systems. I've just
finished the first phase of setting up our site and our Drupal
service. For £5 a month (£60 a year), we offer:

- Installation of Drupal 4.6.x or 4.7

- Unlimited web space

- Unlimited email accounts

- Unlimited (and unmetered) data transfer

- MySQL database

Our servers have been reconfigured to be 100% Drupal-compatible
and, if anyone has any problems running Drupal on our servers, I
guarantee that we will either fix whatever causes the problem or we
will offer a full refund (within the first month).

More details can be found on http://www.vhost.org.uk

Oh, and vhost itself runs on Drupal. Which is nice.

CascadeHosting

A small webhosting company run from Portland Oregon, CascadeHosting offers cheap web hosting ($99/year includes free domain registration) and web programming contract services. We'll setup Drupal for free as part of our $99/year account, and answer any drupal related questions at drupal@cascadehosting.com. For more information, check their Drupal page.

2bits.com (Canada)

Location

Located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2bits.com offers services mainly to customers in the USA and Canada, but is available for consulting over the internet.

Services

Using the powerful, flexible and open Drupal Content Management System and Framework for database driven backends for web sites, 2bits.com offers various Drupal services including:

• Development of customized Drupal modules to fit your specific needs.
• Modifications to existing Drupal modules.
• Porting modules to older or newer versions of Drupal.
• Demos, Prototypes, and Proof of Concept web site using Drupal and the modules you need.
• Installation and configuration of Drupal and any add-on modules you need on your web hosting server.
• Upgrading your Drupal server to the latest release.
• Setting up a test server so you can experiment on without affecting your live server.
• Automated backups of your Drupal web site
• General consulting, such as web site troubleshooting, optimization, and performance tuning.

Qualifications and Experience

2bits.com has been an active participant in the Drupal community since 2003. They have contributed patches and features to Drupal core, such as modifications to the contact module as well as the site offline feature in 4.7. They have developed many modules which they contributed back to the community such as:

• Google AdSense
• Click Thru Tracking
• Currency Exchange
• CustomError
• Extended Tracker
• Feedback
• Profile CSV
• Job Search
• Node Vote
• SiteMenu
• Stock
• stockapi
• Topic
• Referer Theme
• User Points
• User Referral
• Spread Fire Fox Affiliate
• Image watermark
• Aggregator Gallery
• Extended Front Page
• Category List
• Recent Block

2bits.com also contributes to other areas within Drupal, including the security team, and the infrastructure team responsible for the Drupal.org web site.

We have also consulted for several web sites. Please see what our clients think of our services in the testimonials page on our web site.

Further Information

Please check 2bits.com company profile on Drupal.org which includes links to our people, and from there you can see an up to the minute list ofprojects we contributed, and CVS commit messages and other information.

Please visit our web site at 2bits.com.

Contact

Use this contact form to get in touch with us.

Advomatic

Advomatic Design is a New York City based web consulting firm. We were founded by two former members of Howard Dean For America's web team, Adam Mordecai and Aaron Welch.

Advomatic Design is here to help your campaign, organization, or business leap into the brave new world of internet strategy, grassroots campaigning and, of course, blogging. We offer multiple services, including blast email, managed hosting, custom theme integration, module development and specialize in moving companies off other platforms such as Scoop and Moveable Type.

We have contributed to and created numerous Drupal modules, including Troll, Flexinode, Roledelay, and Event.

Advomatic has numerous Drupal based clients including Air America Radio, WESPAC - Securing America, TPMCafe, Democrats.com, and Personal Democracy Forum.

If you'd like to learn more about our services, please visit our website or email Adam Mordecai.

Antinomia Solutions

Antinomia Solutions specializes in web development for growing businesses and Non Govermental Organizations (NGOs) with a well founded knowledge of Internet strategies, web design, eCommerce, and online community building. We believe that the Internet is a community and we develop strategies for our clients to harness the people-power of the Internet for their campaigns.

http://www.antinomia.com/

Barry Jaspan

Contact Barry Jaspan or visit my web site.

I am a computer programmer and serial entrepreneur that has founded four successful start-up software companies in the Boston area. I have extensive experience with web design and e-commerce, computer, network, application, and cryptographic security, product development, and engineering management. I deliver high quality, professionally constructed code with thorough design documentation.

Recent Drupal web design clients include:

• WheresSpot (as of November 2006, the Drupal-based site I designed is not yet publicly available). I constructed a complex HTML/CSS theme based on a Photoshop design from their graphic artists, implemented Classified Ads with a multi-stage workflow and e-commerce integration, and migrated legacy data into Drupal.
• The MSNews site of the Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis (as of November 2006, the Drupal-based site I designed is not yet publicly available). I converted their existing site from Slash to Drupal. The site itself is fairly basic (mostly just stories and comments), but I implemented a Drupal theme to match their existing site, implemented a thorough Slash to Drupal data migration tool that preserves users, stories, blogs, topics, and comments, and also implemented the first secure "Remember Me" (Persistent Login) feature for Drupal.
• The Dachshund Rescue Web Site. I re-implemented this site in Drupal to replace a large collection of hand-edited HTML pages.
• Straight Aces, an online poker school. The site is dormant but still useful as a demonstration of my work. I created absolutely everything on that site except for the basic color scheme and the background artwork in the Interactive Classroom application. The site is set up to use e-commerce for online billing but there is nothing presently for sale. If you enjoy poker, I recommend taking one of the sample courses; they are quite informative.

For a complete resume, references, or other information, please contact me or visit my web site.

CivicSpace

CivicSpace has been a core contributor to the Drupal community since CivicSpace's inception with the Howard Dean for President campaign in the United States. CivicSpace focuses on delivering simple Drupal install profiles designed for civic groups through a free and open source download and through our on demand service.

Services

CivicSpace On Demand. Get Drupal + CiviCRM in an instant, preconfigured package with fully functional CiviMail (mass email) and CiviContribute (online donations).

• Have Us Create Your Site
• Do It Yourself
• Try the Demo
  Use username/password demo/demo.

Turnkey site creation. We will build a complete site for you and host it on CivicSpace On Demand for a fixed fee.
Associate Services: Theming & Development. We provide services to CivicSpace Associates to increase their capacity to serve their clients. We offer full themeing services and can expand development capacity.
Custom Development. If its critical to CivicSpace on Demand or the Drupal/CiviCRM communities, we will be happy to build the functionality right and work with you to get it integrated into and used by the community.

Clients

GoodStorm. Ecommerce.
IDRC. Yahoo Groups replacement Drupal.
WhereSpot. Yahoo Groups replacement in Drupal.
Catalyst Creative. Social networking functionality

Drupal Contributions

CivicSpace is proud to employ some of the leaders in the Drupal community.

Kieran Lal
Nedjo Rogers
Jeremy Andrews
Robin Monks
Henrique Recidive

Website

www.civicspacelabs.com

Contact

David Geilhufe
Managing Partner

contAire GmbH

contAire GmbH | http://www.contaire.com/ Arndtstr. 12, D-50676 Köln, Germany
+49 221 4204757 | info@contaire.de

contAire GmbH is a consulting and software development company with a rich background in project work for e-commerce enterprises as well as media companies. Our managing directors are Dr. Olav Schettler and Friedrich Stahl.

Services: contAire GmbH realises complex web-based projects. We compose and realise the software systems that best implement the digital content processes our customers need. Often, such a system is a tightly integrated blend of both commercial and free software components. Drupal has become our favourite when it comes to implementing online community features.

Qualifications: We are an active and esteemed implementation partner of leading software companies Autonomy, CoreMedia, and Six. Our deep project experience taught us to successfully tackle complex tasks in agile environments. Recent clients include Bertelsmann AG (Guetersloh), Sanofi-Aventis Deutschland (Berlin), Roche Diagnostics GmbH (Mannheim), EUROPART Holding GmbH (Hagen), Draeger AG (Luebeck), and MDR Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (Leipzig).

Drupal Projects: http://diabetes-world.net/ - Forum and user profiling; http://contaire.com/drupalsite - Company page + write-up; http://kgs-marienschule.de - School homepage, web-publishing workshops with teachers and pupils; To-be-disclosed site for a large + international research community.

Drupal Contributions: We contributed an early wiki.module, a small teaser.module and a new theme engine for the PHPTAL language. We also sponsored the Drupal booth at Linuxtag 2006.

Cortext Communications

Based in London, and established in 1997, Cortext Communications has been specialising in Drupal development since 2003.

Services

Theme Design
The look of ever aspect of a Drupal website can be styled using a custom theme. Cortext creates themes which are not only designed to look good, but also comply with accessibility standards and optimised for search engines.

Programming
Additional features can be added to Drupal by installing new modules. Cortext can either locate existing modules which match required features, or if no module is available, create a module to enable new features.

Website Set-up and Maintenance
From planning a site, to implementing it, and keeping it running - Cortext Communications is a one stop solution for Drupal based projects.

Recent Clients

Awardees.net
Focus West

Drupal Contributions

Themes

• Pushbutton
  (included in Drupal application)

Modules

• User Import
• Legal
• Side Content
• News Page
• eNewsletter
• Teaser Images

Website

http://www.cortextcommunications.com

Contact

Robert Castelo
Services Manager
Cortext Communications

services@cortextcommunications.com

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8746 0117
Fax: +44 (0) 20 8248 9565
49 Greenside Road
London W12 9JQ
United Kingdom

Development Seed Inc.

Development Seed Inc. (http://www.developmentseed.org) is founded with a single purpose: to bring the latest communications and technology strategy and services to progressive organizations. Development Seed also consults on specific Drupal applications, predominantly focusing on applications needed by international development organizations and projects.

Development Seed has built over 30 Drupal powered websites.

Development Seed writes and customizes modules for many different purposes and niches. Our team is made up of web strategists, application programmers, designers, web publishing experts, and above all, visionaries.

Development Seed clients range from large institutions like World Resources Institute, the United Nations Foundation, and the World Bank, to smaller organizations like Haiti Innovation and Public Campaign.

If an organization is looking to try something new and trusts us, our targeted strategy, design, and custom functionality delivers the results.

Electronic Insight Corporation

Electronic Insight Corporation is a California-based web consulting firm founded in 1997 by Rob Barreca.

Electronic Insight Corporation helps businesses and organizations create a lasting presence on the web. Our services include graphic design, managed web hosting, search engine marketing, custom theme integration, and module development.

We maintain the ChipIn, Notify, Path Filter and Simplenews (co-maintainer) Drupal modules and have contributed to Drupal core and other modules, including Actions, Tagadelic, and Workflow.

Electronic Insight Corporation has many Drupal based clients, including UC Berkeley, Qualcomm, Inc., TracerLink, General Lock, Vantage Counsel, HiBEAM, and others.

To learn more about our services, please visit our website or contact Rob Barreca.

Gerhard Killesreiter

gerhard@killesreiter.de
Freiburg, Germany

Gerhard is a freelance Drupal IT consultant. He has closely followed and participated in Drupal's development for over four years.

Services Consulting on Drupal setup and training, custom extensions to existing and development of new modules according to the client's specifications.

Qualifications During my work with Drupal I have implemented solutions for a variety of problems including - but not limited to - an access control module, a remindme extension for the event module, which I also maintain, and the listhandler module. In the past I managed to reduce Drupal's execution time by improvements to the database queries. Recently I have been successfully trying to decrease Drupal's page execution time even further by caching some data structures. I have also been successfull in getting a significantly improved locale.module into the Drupal core for the 4.5 release and worked on PHP 5 compatibility for the 4.6 release. A pending project is the improvement of the Drupal's revisioning system.

Recent Clients

• Familytimes.com required some improvements to the Amazon module.
• University of Vienna, Department of Pedagogics, required a module to evaluate their students' progress.
• Design Nine, Inc., project to be disclosed.
• TokenCoach, project to be disclosed.

Gus Geraghty (Dublin Drupaller) - m3m

m3m (modern media muse) is a small consultancy based in Dublin, Ireland & Manchester, England that has over 14 years experience dealing with small and large organisations (Client list), in particular music industry clients (Record Labels, Artist management, publishers etc.) and clients from other sectors, including; banking, financial services, software companies, conferences, government, universities, training and localisation to name a few.

m3m's lead consultant - Gus Geraghty (Dublin Drupaller) has been working with Drupal since 2004, contributing modules, documentation and support and is equipped to help advise, structure and build a Web 2.0 style site using Drupal on a freelance/contract basis.

Key services would include:

• Feasibility studies - evaluating the value and opportunities of moving to Drupal or building a proposed site using Drupal.
• Site structure - developing a Drupal site architecture and site specification.
• localisation planning - structuring a multilingual and multicultural Drupal site
• eCommerce - the construction, from scratch or conversion of ecommerce solutions using drupal
• Module development & modifications - developing or adapting existing modules for specific needs
• Training - training staff so updating and maintenance can be handled in-house with the client
• Theming - migrating an existing design & layout to Drupals Theming sysyem. The development of new themes, including desktop, wireless, mobile and pda themes.

For more details contact, Gus Geraghty (Dublin Drupaller)

m3m - modern media muse
1 Church Lane
Rochdale
Greater Manchester
England
OL16 1NR

t. (Manchester): +44 (0)161 408 4300

w. modernmediamuse.com
e. email Gus

Heydon Consulting - Gordon Heydon

gordon@heydon.com.au
Melbourne, Australia

Services: Consulting, Drupal implementation, Customisation of modules and core to allow for a best intergration into your business. The creation of plugins for HTMLarea module to allow for better intergration, and not to disadvantage uses who are not using HTMLArea.

Qualifications: Gordon has been an active member of the Drupal community since 2001, by first maintaining and contributing to existing modules. Later developing several modules such as the HTMLArea intergration module which allows for <textarea /> tags to be converted into a WYSIWYG. editor. Other contributed modules include the filestore2 module and an extensive modification to the image module. In addition to the contributed modules, their has also been a number of contributions to core in the form of new APIs and extensions of existing functionality.

Heydon Consulting is dedicated to the ongoing development of drupal, and working with customers to create a CMS that will fit your needs now and into the future.

For more information see http://heydon.com.au/consulting

John Handelaar

john@handelaar.org
Based in Cork, Ireland

Services

I build Drupal sites in general, but also have extensive experience in porting your existing data (even if there's a lot of it) into Drupal from wherever you have it right now. I'm based in the Euro zone and have business facilities here in Ireland, as well as in the UK and the US.

Example sites

• MBR.org, an enormous Drupal install delivering over 2 million pages per calendar month. As part of the build process I ported a quarter-million forum posts from EZboard into a Drupal site. This site also uses the Ecommerce module suite, and I developed a payment gateway for Linkpoint.com in order to integrate the customer's existing provider into the new platform.
• ABCtales.com, the UK's largest community site for writers. It's an offshoot project of the Big Issue Magazine. The data, in its most recent previous incarnation, was in Plone. This site has four custom Drupal modules dedicated to handling its story collections.
• Evolt.org, the biggest and best web developer community anywhere, moved to Drupal in 2005. I moved the data.
• I've developed a number of UK Public Sector sites in the last 18 months, including Broadband for Guidance, Connexions Central London and Nextstep Hertfordshire

At Drupal.org

You'll find me looking after the Performance and Scalability Forum, and maintaining some modules, including Whatsrelated and the CV Builder suite.

Contact details

...are on my personal site's contact page.

Koumbit.org

Koumbit is a non-profit organisation whose mission is to promote the appropriation of free, libre and open software by social groups in Quebec, in Canada and abroad.

More about Koumbit at: http://koumbit.org/en/apropos

Our Drupal experience has been summarized here: http://koumbit.org/en/DrupalExperience

Koumbit's contributions to Drupal can be viewed in detail by checking our members' profiles under Track -> Track code. Their profiles are available here http://drupal.org/profile/companies/Koumbit

leafish.co.uk - website development

Leafish is a UK-based web design, development and hosting company, founded by Paul Byrne and Dylan Sides. We provide dynamic, CMS-driven sites built on Drupal. We have had several years experience in using Drupal and many of its contributed modules. We have made contributions to core code, and have written several custom-built modules and themes for our clients.

We provide Linux-based hosting, with all the necessary features required to run any kind of Drupal site, from simple static sites, through blogs and community forums, right up to e-commerce sites. Our hosting comes with POP3, IMAP, SSH, PHP, MySQL, Majordomo mailing lists and is fully managed, should our clients wish.

We can also provide Drupal consultancy for existing sites and projects. For example, custom themes, additional custom modules and administration of Drupal sites.

• Check out some of our work to date.
• Get in touch!

Lullabot Consulting Group

Lullabot provides Drupal consultation and training services to customers who want to quickly and fully harness the power of Drupal while avoiding the pitfalls along the way. We have immense experience with Drupal and other open source software and stay abreast of the latest developments, trends and technologies.

Lullabot.com provides Drupal-centered resources and education for developers and end-users alike. We regularly publish video and audio podcasts with Drupal-related interviews, news and tutorials.

Moshe Weitzman

Contact Moshe. He lives in Boston, MA USA.

Moshe has been a consistent contributor to Drupal core and Contrib since November 2001. As such, he has pretty much touched the whole core code. He maintains the user.module, the bootstrap code, and the groups.drupal.org web site. He is also a member of the Security team and a Permanent Member of the Drupal Association.

Services: Consulting services include site planning, information architecture (i.e. wireframes), installation, training, and ongoing support. Custom Drupal software development my specialty.

Moshe is intimate with Drupal's inner workings, and can complete custom projects with speed and quality. He is maintainer of the folliwng Drupal areas:

• Distributed Authentication
• e-mail handling
• official Maintainer of Drupal's user system
• Hooks such as _init(), _exit(), and _syndication().
• glossary module
• syndication module
• token authentication
• organic groups
• diff
• Simpletest unit testing framework
• taxonomy browser
• taxonomy multi editor
• taxonomy_dhtml module
• web server authentication integration
• significant system documentation

Recent Clients

• Moodcenter.org is deploying a portal site where patients complete surveys and receive instant graphical feedback about their mood state over time. This portal requires integration with a survey engine, statistics application, and PHP graphing utilities.
• Marlboro College is integrating the Drupal authentication system with their own LDAP based directory. The Drupal ldap_integration.module is powering that integration.
• National Society of Hispanic Professionals is relaunching their web site using Drupal as a Content Management System and community engine. Special planned enhancements include a powerful new calendar with deep taxonomy integration.
• Music For America based their ambitious site on Drupal, and asked Moshe to develop modules for tracking their artists, venues, contacts, and more. Moshe delivered a flexible node module which could serve all these purposes at once. This module was incorporated into the Civicspace project. Planned enhancements include affiliate tracking and enhanced subscription features.
• University of Vienna is now running one of the most advanced Drupal pods in the world. They maintain one Drupal site for many courses in their catalog, while maintaining a single user account across all sites. They also share language translations across sites. Moshe's design notes for this implementation are documented in this email (note: the stumbling block was solved).
• Rowland Institute at Harvard uses Drupal as an intranet for their community of scientists and technicians. Moshe delivered installation and webmaster training to Rowland, along with ongoing support.
• CodeOrange is a thriving community site based loosely on current news. Moshe developed the Node moderation module which promotes the best nodes to the home page every day based on moderation ratings submitted by the community. Additionally, Moshe is currently working on enhancing Drupal's moderation systems in order to highlight strong posts, and hide troll posts.
• Weedtracks and ShareNewYork are community web site built around legal online sharing of music. They are marketplacea where users may upload songs and then receive commissions based on how many users download and purchase these songs. It is an innovative business model in a sector which has shown promise, but never made much money. Moshe is delivering custom modules for upload/download, automatic MP3 data extraction, FTP integration, ecommerce and PayPal integration, and more.
• Finnish Broadcasting Company enables their users to create and grow organic groups. These groups are similar to Yahoo Groups, where anyone can create a public or private group, and users post messages to their group home page. FBE has also sponsored Moshe to build photo gallery functionality based on a tagging system like Flickr and Del.icio.us. This work is being released back to the Drupal community. Thanks FBE.
• Echochamberproject is an open source, investigative documentary about the how the television news media became an uncritical echo chamber to the Executive Branch leading up to the American war in Iraq. Moshe provides custom development and consulting to
  this fine project.
• Enterprise Sales Forum. Moshe implemented a number of innovative email newsletter solutions here, in order to inform busy sales professions who need bite sized chunks of high quality news.
• Avid. Moshe implemented a large web application where filmakers and editors can collaboratively author a finished video project .The solution managed the whole video workflow from conceptualization to shooting to editing to post-production.
• Fearlessliving.org. Moshe enhanced the Drupal ecommerce suite such that buyers could receive periodic templated emails as a result of their purchases. The module allows for certain products to configure these templated emails and configure the time when the emails should be issued.
• Quadstone delivers predictive analytics solutions to large enterprises. Moshe integrated custom analytics documents produced by Quadstone software into the Drupal search engine.
• Wheresspot is relaunching their online community in Drupal. Moshe is working to integrate Mailman mailing lists with the drupal forum thus providing integrated web and email forums. Wheresspot.is moving from Yahoo groups to this Drupal+Mailman solution.

Contact Moshe

Ontwerpwerk

Ontwerpwerk is a multidisciplinary design agency based in The Hague (in the Netherlands). Our interaction design team is committed to designing and developing Drupal powered websites with custom made designs and custom made functionalities. Ontwerpwerk creates corporate websites, intranets, ecommerce sites, online communities and webapplications. As Ontwerpwerk is a full service company, we take care of hosting and support as well.
See www.ontwerpwerk.nl/drupal for examples of our Drupal websites.

We contribute to the Drupal project by providing support in the forum, maintaining modules and by running workshops and hosting Drupal Drop In's.

Please contact Emil Heijkants.

Ontwerpwerk
multidisciplinary design

Prinsestraat 37
2513 CA Den Haag
Postbus 45
2501 CA Den Haag
Nederland
T +31(0)70 313 20 20
www.ontwerpwerk.nl

pingVision, LLC

pingVision, LLC is an interactive media and design company based in Boulder, Colorado. Since its transition from an informal partnership headed by founders Laura Scott and Kate Lawrence into a limited liability company in January 2006 as pingVision, LLC, pingVision has designed and developed websites for corporations, non-profit organizations, educational institutions, online media ventures and virtual communities.

With strength in design and coding, we bring to every job experience and expertise in Drupal-based web development, PHP, MySQL, Flash, video production, postproduction and encoding, DVD authoring, and interactive design.

• Laura Scott (laura s) has been designing and deploying websites for individuals and businesses since 1994. She has over a dozen years' experience in television and video as an editor, motion-graphics artist and compositor and producer for HBO pictures, various indie film companies and a number of Fortune500 corporations. Laura has been involved with Drupal since 2004, designing and developing myriad sites, including BlogHer.org. Laura is a Drupal documentation contributor, manager of the Community group on Groups.Drupal and active participant in the Drupal support and discussion forums and email lists.
• Kate Lawrence (klawrence) has held management positions at Hewlett-Packard, DuPont and a number of venture capital-backed start-ups. Kate holds a double-major undergraduate degree in Chemistry and History from the University of Washington, where she also did Masters Degree work in the History Department and the Far Eastern and Slavic Institute. Her post-baccalaureate academic studies have been in applied mathematics and life sciences. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, specializing in Technology Management and New Ventures.
• Rich Orris (rorris) has been involved with Open Source software since 1999, working as lead developer for CivicActions, LLC, web developer, graphic designer and house manager for Empire State Plaza Performing Arts Center (The Egg), and technology and information specialist for the Home Care Association of New York State. A graduate of Wesleyan University with a BA in Computer Science, Rich is an expert in web standards, PHP, MySQL, Linux, Apache, JavaScript, Shell scripting, AJAX, Ruby on Rails, XHTML, XML, CSS, Drupal, CivicSpace, CiviCRM.
• Greg Knaddison (greggles) has been contributing to Open Source projects since 1999. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School with a degree in Information Systems, Greg's technology experience spans the gamut from profitability models built with Excel macros to web-based decision engines built on top of Oracle. He has worked for large firms, including Arthur Andersen and Price Waterhouse Coopers, as well as for Azure Solutions and Charter Communications. Greg is an expert in Drupal, Linux, PHP, Python/Jython and MySQL. Greg is "disorganizer" of the Denver Drupal User's Group, is a Drupal.org site maintainer, and has been an active patcher in the Drupal community.
• Ian Shorrock is a University of Colorado graphic artist with a computer science background. Prior to joining pingVision, Ian worked as graphic designer for CU's Fiske Planetarium. As a freelancer, he has done Flash-based, database-driven web design for a number of independent projects.

For more info, please visit the pingVision website: http://pingv.com

Suuch Solutions

We are US/West-Africa-based company looking to expand our experience with the Drupal platform by offering maintenance services for already installed Drupal bases.
Here is a link to our Drupal.org profile: http://drupal.org/user/23178.

Please consider working with us when looking for affordable support [http://sbs.suuch.com/drupal/basic] for your Drupal projects.

Sympal

Sympal uses Drupal, but has a new view on this application: simple.
We are based in the Netherlands and our site is entirely Dutch, so please just mail us any requests or questions you have, if you do not speak Dutch. Requests are also very welcome, when you just wish to receive more information in Dutch.

Sympal: Your site is made ready and delivered to you, completely preconfigured and optimized for your wishes and ease of use. Hence our name: simple.

Drupal and our servers are always kept up to date with the latest security patches and latest stable Drupal release. On top of that, our configuration comes with a lot of intersting preconfigured modules and themes. So that we can get you rolling quickly.

No more fiddling with install manuals, no more wading trough spaghetti admin interfaces. We quickly allow you to work on your site, not make you work on Drupal, but on your content and your website.

Teledynamics Communications

Teledynamics Communications Inc is an internet and open-source consulting company based in Sauble Beach, Ontario Canada. Established in 1983, TCI has been involved in large-scale Internet portal research for over 10 years. Our portfolio includes community sites for military, manufacturing and emergency response applications, Sympatico-Lycos and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. For more information, visit Teledynamics Communications' Drupal services page or check their Drupal related information.

Trellon, LLC

Trellon, LLC, established in 2004, is a political consulting firm specializing in the Internet and New Media. Our core competencies include building online communities, contact relationship management, volunteer and grassroots mobilization, advocacy campaigns, fundraising and constituent intelligence. We help our clients develop strategies to advance their policies and agendas by leveraging technology solutions focused on outcomes.

Trellon has created and contributed to numerous Drupal modules - EventFinder, Petition, and Volunteer - just to name a few.

Operating out of Washington DC, New York City, Chicago, San Francisco and Las Vegas, Trellon is a steadily growing, and our team of experienced professionals possesses a diverse background including work in political campaigns, healthcare, government and non-profit sectors.

A few of our clients include Moms Rising, Sunlight Foundation, Alliance for a Better California, IronWeed Films, alonovo.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact our business team at Trellon.com.

Webschuur.com

webschuur.com is a small scaled company that builds content management system (CMS) driven websites. We can provide the help and advice to create a dynamic website, from scratch or from an existing site. Whether you are looking for cutting edge technology for your organizations web-based communication, or for solid solutions for your companies web-presence: we can offer it!

For more details please do not hesitate to get in touch with us.

Bèr Kessels (ber@webschuur.com)
Turnhoutsebaan 34/3
2140 Antwerpen
België
Telephone ++32 (0)3 6632292
www.webschuur.com