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• Themes | Graph Paper Press

Workflows are a basic building block of business applications. While the Workflow module provides a good base to start building workflows in Drupal, it has not kept up with the rise in complexity of Drupal application requirements.

Central to a workflow is the notion of state transition: when does a "Job Bid" node move from state "Proposed" to state "Accepted" or "Rejected"? Who can trigger this transition? There are obviously n2 possible transitions for an n-state workflow, making what is commonly called a state transition matrix.

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This Sunday I will travel to Port-au-Prince as part of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team to build upon the work done by the OpenStreetMap community to expand maps of Haiti in response to the earthquake. Immediately after the January 12 quake, Google opened up its GeoEye imagery and hundreds of people pitched in to trace and add the data to OpenStreetMap, quickly building the best dataset available for Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas.

On this trip we'll partner with UN agencies, local and international NGOs, and the Haitian government to work towards making sure that these maps are sustainable, that we have local participation and ownership, and that responders from the international community are well prepared to take advantage of what OpenStreetMap can provide in their future deployments. I'll be traveling with Nicolas Chavent, whose energy and connections will be essential to making the three week mission a success.

The preparations for the trip have been intense. On top of planning meetings with Nicolas and other partners, I've been buying a lot of hardware we'll need on the ground, prepping laptops with a variety of software and data, and working with Tom and AJ to update Haiti map tiles and load up Maps on a Stick on usb drives and hard drive so it's ready to travel with me. Schuyler Erle's packing list has helped me not have to think about what to bring for myself, so I've been focusing on how to get two pelican cases loaded with laptops, all-in-one printers, GPS's, USBs, cameras, and a variety of cables, cords, batteries, and other miscellany that will let us operate independently and offline during our time in Haiti.

Happy Cog presented the 2nd annual Cog’aoke at The Scoot Inn during Austin’s South by Southwest Interactive. Here’s one of the videos I shot for Sooz TV of PJ Maximus (also known as Rannie Turingan) performing “Faith” by George Michael. Check out the denim jacket that Rannie wore, complete with hand-sewn jewels and Faith design on the back. Follow Rannie on Twitter to keep up with his karaoke adventures in Toronto.

As a member of the organizing team, I am happy to invite you to the Drupal Dev Days (aka DrupalCamp Germany 2010), which will take place on May 8th and 9t in Munich. We already announced the event on many German-speaking channels, but I would like to invite those of you who might be coming from further away.

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This afternoon as part of Sunlight Day at the Center for American Progress there will be a discussion on Building Transparency in Government focusing on how government led efforts to open up data - including the Open Government Directive and Data.gov - are working and how open data is being used. Eric will be there to discuss the efficiencies of open data, specifically talking about the recent work we did with data from 2009 presidential election in Afghanistan.

The event is being live streamed here, and below are Eric's slides for the talk.

Stuff goes on at your organization, and you need to tell people about it. That’s frequently the level of consideration people give their website calendar. That’s selling yourself short. Calendar tools, especially those that work on content management systems like Drupal, are full of features that can help you engage more people at your site and your events.

Sometimes you want to add events that don’t show up until they’re relevant. Maybe there’s a special launch you don’t want anyone to know about until a particular date, but you don’t want to have to remember to add it later. By scheduling your event to appear on a certain date, you don’t have to. You can also similarly set events to expire.

If you have an RSS-using audience, they can subscribe to your calendar’s automatic RSS feed to find out what’s happening as soon as you add it.

Some events are really special, and you want them to show up on a particular page of your website, such as the homepage. You can have a Featured check box that lets you highlight events without having to redundantly enter them in two places.

ICalendar format allows you to share event information and display events in different programs, such as Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar. You can have a tool that lets people automatically convert your website’s events in iCal format so they can easily add it to their personal calendars.

Rather than a plain link that says Calendar, add a little date-picker that lets people choose a date in the month and see what’s happening then.

Websites can look much more active if you can see what’s going on in the immediate future. Your website can automatically create lists to show what’s happening in set timeframes.

If you have a training session that happens every Tuesday of every month, you can add it once and have it appear on every Tuesday thereafter.

Some of your events may appeal only to staff members, some may relate to holidays. You can create categories on each of your events to create classifications that show events that match only those categories.

If you have an event coming up that you need people to RSVP to, you can do it directly from your calendar.

Similarly, you might need people to register for an event. Why not include the sign-up form directly in the event itself?

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Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under CMS, Promotion, Tech Trick.

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Ixis worked with Manchester based agency Worship Digital to produce a great multi-media based community site for the legendary Haçienda club brand in Manchester (UK).

The project included the usual News section for promoting upcoming activities and history of the nightclub, and alongside this an events area which allowed pinning an event on the world map using a custom Drupal CCK field.

MAPLight.org is a Drupal site I’ve been working with for quite awhile. Their upgrade to Drupal 6 and redesign launched last week. We worked with Chapter Three for design and theming; and MAPLight’s excellent team for the idea, research, and quite detail-oriented QA. It is already getting some mentions in the media.

Both money and legislative data sources have modules to pull the same source data into your database. OpenSecrets Open Data for donations to U.S. Congress; Legislature for votes and more from GovTrack.us. MAPLight’s research is available in an API.

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Boston native, poet (and friend of Sooz) Mignon Ariel King is featured in a profile on the WGBH website for Basic Black. Watch the video below and then read the interview. Follow Basic Black on Twitter.

Happy Cog presented the 2nd annual Cog’aoke at The Scoot Inn during Austin’s South by Southwest Interactive. Here’s one of the videos I shot for Sooz TV of the Moulin Rouge version of “Lady Marmalade” by SXSW Interactive supergroup Soul Sisters. The group features Tara Hunt, Amanda Coolong, Corvida Raven and Karen Hartline.

Watch more Sooz TV videos and subscribe to Sooz TV on YouTube and Vimeo.

When using PHP functions such as array_map and preg_replace_callback, you are forced to pass in a single-parameter callback function, making it impossible to send additional context information to the callback. But it ain't necessarily so.

Function objects, aka Functors, are here to help.

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I have an interesting problem, on a data migration project I'm currently working on. I'm importing a large amount of legacy data into Drupal, using the awesome Migrate module (and friends). Migrate is a great tool for the job, but one of its limitations is that it requires the legacy database tables to have non-composite integer primary keys. Unfortunately, most of the tables I'm working with have primary keys that are either composite (i.e. the key is a combination of two or more columns), or non-integer (i.e. strings), or both.

Table with composite primary key.

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Jay just posted a blog post, called Building enterprise social communities with Drupal, sharing a white paper that we have written at Acquia. In this white paper, we answer questions like: what kind of social features Drupal supplies, why Drupal is the best choice for building a social site, what Drupal modules are useful when building a social site, and some examples of successful enterprise Drupal communities.

The reason we wrote this white paper is simple: many of the enterprise organizations that we talk to ask us these questions over and over again. Building social business sites is a very hot topic in the enterprise. The work environment in these organizations is evolving, and increasingly more, people want to connect, create, share and find people and information relevant to their work. Needless to say, not all social business sites are equal -- some are team collaboration sites, some are community sites, and others might be networking sites. They can exist behind the firewall for internal teams, or they can be external facing sites to engage with partners and customers.

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Jay just posted a blog post, called Building enterprise social communities with Drupal, sharing a white paper that we have written at Acquia. In this white paper, we answer questions like: what kind of social features Drupal supplies, why Drupal is the best choice for building a social site, what Drupal modules are useful when building a social site, and some examples of successful enterprise Drupal communities.

Jay just posted a blog post, called Building enterprise social communities with Drupal, sharing a white paper that we have written at Acquia. In this white paper, we answer questions like: what kind of social features Drupal supplies, why Drupal is the best choice for building a social site, what Drupal modules are useful when building a social site, and some examples of successful enterprise Drupal communities.

The reason we wrote this white paper is simple: many of the enterprise organizations that we talk to ask us these questions over and over again. Building social business sites is a very hot topic in the enterprise. The work environment in these organizations is evolving, and increasingly more, people want to connect, create, share and find people and information relevant to their work. Needless to say, not all social business sites are equal -- some are team collaboration sites, some are community sites, and others might be networking sites. They can exist behind the firewall for internal teams, or they can be external facing sites to engage with partners and customers.

We wrote this white paper because we wanted to demonstrate that Drupal provides a great platform to build these kind of social sites for the enterprise. If you are interested in building a social site for your enterprise and don't know where to start, have a look at our white paper. Also, if you've built, or have a Drupal site around which you have built a successful community, we'd love to learn about it, and learn from it.

Drupal has come a long way since Acquia Marina leapt onto the scene in 2008 with an unprecedented number of theme settings. Many themes followed suit, and we were thrilled at the extra power and flexibility that these theme settings gave to Drupal users. These theme settings had come out of lots of time spent in the forums and on IRC, finding out what site builders were constantly running up against and wished they had an easy way to change. We constantly got feedback about how great they were in the Acquia themes, and how much our customers enjoyed them in our premium Drupal themes.

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I was asked to speak at this year's Career Day at our local high school, and thought it would be an awesome opportunity to skew the vision of young minds towards the possibilities that a work life in web design / development can offer. I did a similar talk a couple years ago at the last career day, and realized that in order to keep these guys from drifting off I had to make a concerted effort to break the third wall.

So, I put together this presentation that basically converts the room into a web development firm and introduces the multiple roles you can take on, all the while building out a spec for a popular web site clone (MySpace was the choice each time). I was really impressed with the kids' willingness to participate, and heard it went over pretty well.

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