CivicActions

Drupalcon Szeged is one week away. I am glad I am attending, and I am planning on leading a Birds of a Feather (BOF) during the conference. The focus of the BOF is creativity and programming. I want to discuss the weird mix of human behavior and code. Sounds strange I know, so let me describe in more detail.

For many sites a standard Drupal content type with open permissions and revisions will do enough of the 'wiki-thing' for many situations.

However, there are a bunch of other wiki-like behaviors that you might (on some sites) want to add additional functionality or usability - here is a summary of modules to check out:

• Wikitools (pretty configurable - you don't need to have all of this all the time)
  • Node Creation: Let users create new nodes when they type in a node name which does not exist.

Required modules: Panels 2 (which includes various sub modules), views, CCK: date, text, noderefence.

Optional: pathauto, path, token

At the Vancouver DrupalCamp there were, of course, the inevitable questions about what modules people use regularly. Boris suggested at one point that people should add to the growing body of information out there about popular modules.

So here is my short list of modules i use on nearly EVERY site:

• CCK, plus various cck field modules like link, imagefield
  

Earlier this weekDrupalCamp Vancouver Sessions were announced and 2 by CivicActioners were among them. Robin's session on "Introduction To Module Development" will be on Friday and 2pm. I heard Robin give a this talk for Six Hour Startup folks a few weeks ago, and even though I am no developer, it sounded great and others seemed to benefit from it.

It is well documented/recognized that Drupal is really not very good at picking and sticking with a nomenclature that makes sense to the un-indoctrinated. The recent user testing at UMN made that pretty clear.

As the person on the team who is often working on the configuration of a website and running into the language in the GUI and then explaining the newly built site to the client it is often not until I do the latter that I realize how convoluted some of words used in Drupal are.

Introduction

Amnesty International has been advocating for and protecting human rights and human rights legislation internationally for the past 46 years. Its reputation and the foundation of Amnesty sections in most countries also has made it one of the most recognizable names in the world.

The workflow trinity: States, Owners and Rules

Amnesty International has 400+ employees in their London office who work in various capacities from research, to advocacy, to marketing and development of the organization. Their web and press divisions (primary admins of the website) need to create stories and press releases with input from all of these employees. As a result, workflow became a very important part of this project.

Today's Module Monday is a quick one. I can't believe that for so long so many people have lived with the "node/add" page or the "Create Content" menu items as the primary way to add a new node to a Drupal site -- I can't believe I put up with this for so long! Well, last November I was working on a project and we ran up against this "problem", it was particularly acute due to the use of Organic Groups.

The CivicActions team is in high spirits today with the launch of our newest project, MeNotMeth.org.

MeNotMeth.org. is part of an $11-million California state campaign of billboards, bus wraps, cable TV ads and the website aimed at discouraging gay men from using methamphetamine. A statewide survey recently found that crystal meth use was 11 times more common among gay men than in the California population overall.

Better World Advertising provided the brilliant design and wireframes which CivicActions developed and themed in Drupal.

From the start the project we were under a tight deadline, due to a looming marketing campaign which included the website URL. Despite the pressure BWA and CA always remained friendly and flexible, contributing the the successful launch!

The site functionality includes user-submitted video functionality (including transcoding lots of different file types), basic registration, content moderation, Spanish-language internationalization, a self-assessment module, and more.

Community Contributed Modules

In addition to all the contributed modules, one notable module was specifically developed for this project:

mm_flvtool2 found at (http://drupal.org/project/mm_flvtool2) gathers meta data from a flash file and attaches it to the node. This is how we are able to display the length of the videos on the Your Stories page of the site.

Of course, this is part of a bigger package of using XSPF Playlist and FLV Media Player which provides the flash player for videos and the TV commercial - both in English and Spanish.

All uploaded video is stored on Amazon's S3, while displayed through Drupal, using the Arthur's contributed Media Mover module.

Media Mover, XSPF Playlist, FLV Media Player received new commits and patches because of this project. For instance, flvmediaplayer allows an administrator to set the "style" of the player (e.g. foreground color, background color, allow full screen and more.