Digital School Solutions is a new child company of long-time Dtek client Aussie, focused specifically on the technological side of Aussie’s broader school professional development mission. According to DSS: “Digital School Solutions is committed to helping schools and districts re-think teaching and learning to transform themselves into vibrant 21st century learning communities.”

Just before the winter break, we helped DSS launch their new Drupal-powered web site. Under the hood, the site is very similar to Aussie’s site, functioning essentially as a Drupal multi-site (technical challenges of multi-sites with SSL using cPanel to be written up in a future blog post!).

Like Aussie’s site, the DSS site features the custom paid event registration system we helped Growing Venture Solutions develop, as well as audio and video content, blogging, fine-tuned user management, and all of Drupal’s standard content management goodness.

On the front-end, the DSS site was designed to match Aussie’s site, with the DSS logo and a modified color scheme. The front page sports a jQuery-based slideshow, editable by site administrators, rather than the Flash movie used on Aussie’s site. Numerous theme improvements and further Drupal 6 optimizations were made in the process.

Visit the new DSS site at digitalschoolsolutions.com, and stay tuned for more DSS and Aussie news.

We’re just wrapping up a big development push on aussiepd.com, the Drupal-based web site we built for Australian United States Services in Education last year. The site was upgraded to Drupal 6, and enhanced to allow on-site payment for AUSSIE event registrations. While we were at it, we moved the site to a new Virtual Private Server hosting account to provide better performance than the old shared hosting.

Background

AUSSIE has hosted workshops, conferences, and professional development sessions for the educational consulting community for years. In the past, they’d always used separate web sites and services to store the event data and allow users to register and pay for these events (lately they’d managed events at eventbrite.com). With AUSSIE’s site running Drupal, it was clear we should find a way for event data, registrations and payments to all be handled internally so that we could present everything under the AUSSIE brand, provide users a more compelling and less confusing experience, and ease the burden on site administrators. The new aussiepd.com does just that: consolidating all of this functionality into AUSSIE’s web site, with the PayPal API used for seamless integration of payment transactions.

How we did it

To achieve this, we started with a couple of Drupal powerhouse contributed modules: Ubercart for ecommerce, and Signup for event registrations. The missing link was provided by Signup Integration for Ubercart (aka UC_Signup), a custom module developed for this project by Ezra Gildesgame and the Growing Venture Solutions team. UC_Signup ties the registration and payment steps together into one smooth process for site users.

GVS put a lot of work into the module, including usability testing at their office in Denver, while I oversaw the general project, Drupal 6 upgrade, and hosting migration. It was great to work with Ezra to address AUSSIE’s needs, while giving our work back to the Drupal community.

Other goodies at the enhanced site include automated event location mapping thanks to the Location module, locally hosted videos thanks to the Blue Droplet Video module, and all of the standard administrative, usability, performance and security improvements of Drupal 6.

See for yourself

Have a look at the new aussiepd.com, and if you’re involved in education, watch for upcoming AUSSIE events in your field!

We’re thrilled to continue supporting AUSSIE as they build their online presence, demand more from their web site, and use it in the service of the educational community.

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.

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!]

The Drupal content management platform is a favorite tool of ours here at Dtek. The Drupal community continues to grow, and Drupal is powering more and more web sites out there. A few sites of particular interest to me personally have caught my eye recently:

• President Obama’s Official Stimulus and Economic Recovery web site (and write-up by Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert)
• Human Rights Watch (and write-up by Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert)
• World Food Programme (and write-up by Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert)
• Mother Jones (and write-up by Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert)
• Google’s Measurement Lab (and write-up by Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert)
• Al Jazeera Creative Commons repository of video footage from the recent Gaza violence (and write-up by Drupal rockstar Robert Douglass)
• bobdylan.com
• And last but not least, Rhys and my alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis