We’re very excited to have just helped the International Women’s Health Coalition launch their Young Visionaries campaign! Young Visionaries is a contest designed to help youth who are inspired by human rights and women’s health share their visions for change, and win grants to continue their work. The general public can vote for their favorite visionaries, with final awards decided by IWHC’s panel of guest judges.

Young Visionaries is built on top of Akimbo, the WordPress-powered main IWHC blog. The nomination form allows youth to describe their vision, upload a photo, embed a video, and link to their web site or online profile. We’re using the herculean TDO Mini Forms plugin to provide a usable interface for submission of the nomination form, the Vote It Up plugin for the voting, the Vipers Video Quicktags plugin for handling of the videos, and the Cycle Lite jQuery plugin for the front page slideshow.

On the front end, the application ties in to the impressive Thesis theme already used by Akimbo, functioning essentially as a sub-theme for that section of the site. We used Thesis’ extensive customization and hook structure for most of the Young Visionaries sub-theme, though we did have to modify a couple of core Thesis files to facilitate the sub-theme. Tying it all together is our own custom logic and “glue code”, and theme files specific to Young Visionaries.

A diverse group of Young Visionaries have already been nominated! Have a look and vote for your favorite, or maybe even encourage someone you know to nominate his/herself.

Check out the IWHC Young Visionaries web application on Akimbo!

We just launched threeintentions.com, a web site that will build a community around the idea of the mind / body / spirit connection. The site provides related resources and represents teachers working in the field.

Three Intentions is organized by Brooke Warner, based in Berkeley, who Bad Feather and I worked with closely from conception and initial sketches, to branding and site mocks, to execution in WordPress. The site provides profile information, a blog platform, and event organization for Brooke and the Three Intentions teachers, whose numbers will be growing as the site gains traction.

Take a break from your daily grind to stop by threeintentions.com, and be sure to let Brooke know that Dtek and Bad Feather sent you.

The Pratt Center for Community Development works for a vibrant, livable, and sustainable New York City. We’ve been working with them for five years, on everything from deploying multiple web sites and blogs, to consulting on various online services, to producing web site content. As we’ve worked together, the Pratt Center has begun to seize the potential of online publishing and promotion. They’ve been demanding more from their online tools, and it was becoming inefficient and costly to rely on us to manage their content.

Well last month we helped the Pratt Center take the biggest leap forward in the organization’s online history when we launched their new Drupal-powered web site at prattcenter.net.

The new site sports standard Drupal goodies like multiple types of content, arbitrary groupings of content with separate RSS feeds, and a powerful interface for administering the site. We also developed many custom content types and fields that fit the Pratt Center’s specific needs, using some rockstar modules contributed by the Drupal community, like FileField, Imagecache, and Embedded Media Field.

We tied it all together with a custom theme built around the Pratt Center’s branding, custom menus, whatever content listings we could dream up thanks to Views, and CCK node and user references.

All told, the Pratt Center now has an incredibly powerful platform for managing their own online presence and publicizing the great work they do. All of the day to day content management is in their hands, with many site features handled automatically by Drupal.

This allows us to serve the Pratt Center much more efficiently: we’re in a more administrative and consultative capacity, applying software updates, supporting their usage of the site, and helping them make architecture and policy decisions about this amazing technical platform at their fingertips.

PrattCenter.net now runs on Drupal.

Highest Common Denominator Media Group is a Brooklyn- and Dallas-based film company that has produced some inspiring projects. The Farm: 10 Down, which re-examines the lives of six inmates in Louisiana’s maximum-security Angola prison, 10 years after HCD’s award-winning The Farm first introduced us to them, premiered on the National Geographic channel on Tuesday.

Before the film premier, we worked with HCD to do some serious spring cleaning to their existing WordPress-powered web site. We audited the site, rewrote large portions of their custom theme, cut the number of plugins used on the site by more than half, removed and secured some potentially dangerous code, and worked with HCD to help them better understand how to manage their site.

Thanks to Bad Feather for the introduction! We look forward to continuing our work with HCD, helping them make more proactive and forward-thinking changes to their web sites and online tools, and generally support them in their mission of telling compelling stories that inspire us to action.

I had a great time at DrupalCampNYC6 today! I got in on sessions about mobile Drupal sites, the Token module, Drupal and the Semantic Web, and mapping and geocoding in Drupal.

It’s fun to get together with fellow geek open source developers and share experiences about our favorite content management system. It’s also excellent to start putting faces and real people with folks I’ve only interacted with digitally. Too bad we can’t make it to DrupalCon DC.

Many thanks to the event sponsors, all the session presenters, and Eric at OpenFlows and all the other volunteers who organized the event.

[EDIT 3/2: Check out the write-up in today's NY Times!]