Community IT Innovators. Established 1993. Serving social mission organizations with integrated technology services you can trust.

Comparing Open Source Content Management Systems: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone. (Free registration required)

CITI helped sponsor the report with a paid ad in the directory section. We implement both Drupal and Wordpress sites.

CITI’s Drupal team launched three sites in one today, for the Crop Science Society of America, the Soil Science Society of America, and the American Society of Agronomy.

Four developers from CITI are attending DrupalCon this week in our home town of Washington, DC.  Just like last year when CITI sent two developers to Boston, DrupalCon is again the best place not only for brushing up and learning new skills, but also for catching up with old friends and making new ones.

As always, when we sit through various sessions, we’re not only trying to learn as much as we can about how our fellow Drupalers are using and improving Drupal, we’re also trying to look at things through the lens of the social mission organizations that we serve. Over the next three days, we’ll be posting what we find in this vein and in our own geeky interest.

1. The GeoSpatial Web and Associated Modules

A number of Drupal modules are available in and production, assisted in large part by Development Seed, for creating mapping stacks that don’t have to rely on the standard Google Map.  After Jeff Miccolis of Development Seed explained the various Drupal tech and resources available (mapnik, mapstraciton, gmap, nicemap, cloudmade, http://www.opengeospatial.org, Open data commons, open street map and NASA to name a few), neogeographer Andrew Turner led a fast-paced primer on all the applications for geographic data beyond points on Google map that developers and organizations can leverage.

We’ve done our share of Google maps, but some of the more advanced applications have us champing at the bit to start playing around.

Video should be up soon, but in the meantime presentations by Andrew Turner can be found on his slideshare.

2. The Importance of Search and Drupal Search with ApacheSolr

In a presentation on Drupal Search, Acquia representatives and others talked about search functionality as the main way for people to find content on your website.  Traditional methods like nav menus or site maps are very structured approaches that tend to fail because: a) new content will inevitably end up not fitting neatly into the categories originally created via the IA process (especially w/ web 2.0 where site visitors are supplying much of the content), and b) it’s unrealistic to assume that site visitors would categorize your content in the same way as you would.  Example: if you wanted to buy hand made paper from Amazon.com which of the main nav categories would you look under?  They suggested that a search engine like Apache Solr could be configured so that site visitors run into fewer dead ends. Acquia is also now offering Apache Solr as a hosted service!

To sum it up: search capability should be robust and front and center on the home page, and not tucked away in the top right corner as an after thought.  It’s a better way to help people find the content they want than IA is.

Video

3. Data Collection Through SMS

With the web moving towards user generated data and the pervasiveness of handset, SMS can be an amazing tool for getting information from users.  A few of us sat in on a presentation by Will White on an SMS Framework module integration with Drupal for a proof of concept political polling operation.Will explained the Drupal module and its compatibility with other modules like user groups and user notifications. A few links:

SMS Framework Documentation
Decentralized Data Collection
Parsing Data from SMS Messages

A brief Q & A afterward offered up a plethora of free SMS campaign solutions including use of Twitter as a free SMS campaign platform, as well as Frontline SMS, gnokii, and dotgo.

Video is still being uploaded… we’ll link when it’s up!

4. Great New Features Coming in Drupal 7

In a great talk on new features for users and developers (about the second half) given by Drupal Documentation lead and release manager, Angie Byron (aka webchick), we learned a lot about improvements that will make our lives (and our clients’ lives) much easier with the next release of Drupal 7.

Video

CITI is proud to be a sponsor of of the upcoming DrupalCon Conference in Washington DC, March 4-7th. DrupalCon is the official Drupal unconference that attracts the most talented open source developers and innovative web shops in the world.

CITI is pleased to support this fantastic event and we look forward to collaborating with Drupal colleagues from all around the world. CITI is a contributing member of the Drupal community. We try to give back our code to the community whenever possible.

About Drupal

Drupal is a popular, open source content management system that powers websites for everyone from presidential candidates to pop stars to newspapers to neighborhood community groups. It’s used by thousands of individuals and organizations around the world.