December 20th, 2008 by Andy
Earlier this year the Popular Science web site was rebuilt with Drupal to much fanfare within the community. The new popsci.com is an example of how Drupal can perform at the “enterprise level”, and I think it’s fair to say that the site set a new gold standard for Drupal. So, I was thrilled to recently have the chance to work on the 2008 Best of What’s New “microsite” for popsci.com — BOWN is an annual event for PopSci, but obviously this was the first time it was built on Drupal.
I was working with Bad Feather, who had a contract with the Bonnier Corporation, publishers of Popular Science, to develop BOWN 2008. The project had to come together fast, but thanks to the hustle of Heather, Brad, Josh and I, and the PopSci editorial and technical teams, we launched BOWN 2008 on-schedule within the existing Drupal framework.
Obviously the heavy development work was already done thanks to the excellent existing Drupal site, but we had our work cut out for us adjusting the Drupal configuration, modifying the existing theme, and managing all of the BOWN content. On the Drupal side, we used the expected Drupal pillars: CCK to create a new content type for BOWN and make some small extensions to a few existing content types to hook into BOWN; and Views to create all of our custom node lists. On the theming front we created new page templates and theme functions to make BOWN match the graphic design spec we were given, including BOWN navigation, block and ad placements.
Check out the write-up of the original Drupal migration for background, then dig in to BOWN 2008!
December 1st, 2008 by Andy
We love Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) here at Dtek, and since it powers virtually everything we do, it’s crucial to our clients, too. But we don’t often have the chance to discuss it with our community, so I thought I’d write up a bit more about it here.
In the office, we use FOSS everywhere from the WordPress blog software generating the web page you’re reading now, to the OpenOffice software we use to author documents on the desktop, to the entire GNU/Linux operating system that runs on our office computers. And of course the Firefox web browser I’m using to write this is FOSS, too! As far as the services we provide, we build our web sites on a FOSS platform: from the operating system to the web server, database server, and scripting languages.
FOSS represents an entirely new model of collaborative production made possible by the advent of computer networks, and the Internet in particular. Crucially, the “F” in FOSS stands for “free” as in speech, meaning that anyone is free to see how the software works, and modify it as they’d like. (The fact that most FOSS is also “free” as in beer is nice, too!) And that’s exactly how it works: people all over the globe contribute to the development of FOSS, often making small contributions piece by piece. But the resulting software, as my examples above illustrate, can be excellent — rivaling and often surpassing similar projects produced in the more familiar, proprietary/closed manner.
It can be hard to wrap your mind around this idea and its implications at first, but it’s fascinating stuff and at the heart of our new economy and culture. At Dtek, it directly informs our professional ethos and fits our personal convictions, too. Ask us more about FOSS the next time we work together! And if you’re interested, here’s some additional reading we’d recommend:
