Open Source at DrupalCon Denver

March 19 will be here before you know it. Thousands of people will flock to Denver, Colorado for a week of learning and networking with Drupal community members.

DrupalCon is the official conference of the Drupal community and draws an international audience. If you are not familiar with Drupal, it’s an open source content management platform that powers millions of websites—including opensource.com and whitehouse.gov.

Now that the agenda is finalized, I decided to take a look and see which sessions are most interesting. More importantly, I wanted to see how big of an impact open source has at this years event. I didn’t even get past the keynotes before the open source influence was obvious.

Almost all the keynote speakers have ties to open source. Dries Buytaert, creator and project lead of Drupal and co-founder and chief technology officer of Acquia, kicks things off. In previous years, he’s given a state of Drupal-style address.

On day two, Mitchell Baker, Chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation, speaks. Baker frequently talks about the power of the participatory, open source model. The Drupal community is no stranger to this type of collaboration. Baker will also highlight Mozilla’s commitment to an open, innovative web and the infinite possibilities that presents.

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Dive into Drupal at DrupalCon Denver

Drupalcon 2012 in Denver goes beyond open source to focus on the them of Collaboration for Every Device. Here's what to expect at this year's event: 

DrupalCon Denver is an international technology conference running March 20 - 22 of this year at the Colorado Convention Center and provides educational sessions on Drupal, the free, flexible and robust open-source Web CMS.

Drupal's Global Success

Drupal is widely adopted by organizations such as AT&T, Amnesty International, LinkedIn, New York Stock Exchange, Stanford University, and Whitehouse.gov. Powering millions of websites and software applications, this project is constantly being improved by a community of hundreds of thousands of passionate people from all over the world — many of whom will be at DrupalCon Denver.

The three-day conference costs as low as US$ 350 and is a highly collaborative community event for 3,000+ Drupal developers, designers, project managers, users, evaluators and enthusiasts.

Discounted training for all levels is offered on March 19th, and March 24th is devoted to code sprints. The exclusive DrupalCon Party is also a way to get acquainted with the community.

With a conference theme of "Collaboration for Every Device", 3 inspiring keynotes and 8 session tracks will explore Drupal's adaptability, brand openness, rapid deployment, scalability, success stories, best practices and more. Be sure to check out all the fantastic topics being covered at DrupalCon, see the full schedule details here.

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For more information on Drupal Development, Drupal Expert, Drupal Developer and Drupal Programmer visit http://www.dckap.com  

Drupal Announces Two Community-Elected Board Members

The Drupal Association held its first election for two at-large board members. Donna Benjamin and Steve Purkiss were elected by Drupal community members and then ratified by the Drupal Association Board.

Drupal Leadership

Angela Byron, Drupal 7 co-maintainer and Drupal Association Board Member, announced the winning candidates in a comment on the Drupal board voting page. The official Drupal Association announcement says:

The two new board members were elected by members of the Drupal Community and then ratified today by the Drupal Association board. They join the current eight Board of Directors of the non-profit Drupal Association in helping to establish policy, hire and manage an executive director, review and approve the budget and financial reports, and participate in fundraising."

Drupal Board

Benjamin is from Australia and Purkiss is from the United Kingdom. The winning candidates were chosen out of ten nominees from around the world. The Board of Directors will meet for the first time next month at DrupalCon in Denver.

Last month, Acquia announced the appointment of two new members to its board. Thomas Bogan is the Chair of Citrix’s board, and Paul Sallaberry is a venture capitalist and has held senior positions at Open Vision, Oracle and Veritas. (Drupal founder Dries Buytaert serves on both the Drupal and Acquia boards.)

Drupal Growth

In July 2011, Acquia, which provides Drupal support and services, landed US$ 15 million in funding to grow and accelerate its international expansion. This was the fourth fundraising effort for the young, rapidly growing company, which was founded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert.

DrupalCon, which will be held from March 20-22 at the Colorado Convention Center, is a three-day community event that is expected to draw more than 3,000 Drupal developers, designers, users, project managers and enthusiasts. The theme for the upcoming Drupal event is Collaboration for Every Device. 

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Myths & Realities of Drupal

In the decade since its quiet emergence onto the scene, Drupal has become an industry standard in the web content management and web publishing field, one with an almost cult-like following among developers.
With its sophisticated, easy-to-use Drupal Core system and thousands of modules for additional customization, Drupal has something to offer everyone, whether you’re a high-performance development team or a small business owner who doesn’t know the first thing about Web Content Management Systems (Web CMS).

The rise of Drupal has led companies of all sizes to consider it for their content management needs, and for good reason. Its open source nature makes it incredibly cost-effective, while its options for customization are unmatched for flexibility.

Despite its attractiveness, several myths have sprung up around Drupal, and though the years since its introduction have helped clear up some of these myths, others have only become more ubiquitous. The same open source nature that makes Drupal a cost-effective option, combined with the sheer number of modules available for customization, has led to the perception of Drupal as an anarchic “Wild West” for developers, one without any guiding direction, and therefore a risky investment for companies looking to harness it for their website development.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. In this article, I’ll dispel three of the most commonly-held myths around Drupal and its uses, offering up reasons why rather than adhering to the misconception of Drupal as the Wild West, companies should strongly consider it as their CMS of choice — when it fits their business objectives.

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For more information on Drupal Development, Drupal Expert, Drupal Developer and Drupal Programmer visit http://www.dckap.com 

Drupal 7.12 and 6.24 released

Drupal 7.11 and 6.23, maintenance releases which fix security vulnerabilities are now available for download.

Drupal 7.12 and 6.24 also fix other issues reported through the bug tracking system.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement, more information on the 6.x releases can be found in the Drupal 6.0 release announcement. Drupal 5 is no longer maintained, upgrading to Drupal 6 is recommended.

Download Drupal 7.12
Download Drupal 6.24

For more information on Drupal Development, Drupal Expert, Drupal Developer and Drupal Programmer visit http://www.dckap.com
source: http://drupal.org/

Drupal Developers for Content-Rich Online Stores

Magento integration would provide a perfect blend of powerful, flexible eCommerce and great community and content management. Offering features such as one-page checkout, guest checkout, multiple address shipping, many shipping and pay portal options. Drupal sites could take eCommerce to a whole new level, while offering much better content management.

Drupal Content Management System (CMS) provides unique abilities to build present and manage the content of the web-site. Magento is the best open source e-commerce platform in the world, which gives the user an exhaustive set of features. Drupal-Magento is a set of modules that bring Magento functionality into Drupal.

Drupal has a solid community. There is the CCK module to quickly add additional fields to a content type and make it available to the content producing team. Content versioning, workflow and so on, is easy in Drupal.

The goal is to combine the strengths of both platforms providing user a powerful e-commerce platform with a front-end that can be easily themed and managed.

Drupal-Magento modules provide:

•    Synchronization of Magento products to Drupal 

•    Custom product options

•    Up-sells, cross-sells, linked products

•    Synchronization of Magento categories into Drupal taxonomies

•    Synchronization of Drupal users to Magento customers, synchronization of addresses

•    Synchronization of currencies and currency conversion rates

•    Stock management

•    Full-featured shopping cart

•    Fully theme-able and customizable checkout process

•    Coupon codes

•    Payment modes API

•    Shipping methods API

The modules have several features and provide an API that allows Drupal developers to hook into the process of synchronization or write modules to synchronize data. This module requires a Magento extension. Consult drupal developer, drupal developers, drupal programmer, drupal programmers, drupal development, drupal expert.

The Drupal-as-the-main-component implementation is based on synchronizing Magento products, categories, orders and so on into Drupal.

Although this gives flexibility, it may be complex to implement. Magento frontend functionality needs to be rewritten for Drupal. Magento would then only be an e-commerce backend accessible via Web services. You would be able to use Drupal modules and flexible templates, achieve much better performance and so on.

It is a decision to make whether the site is more about content or about commerce.

The straightforward solution is to integrate on the service layer. Whenever you are on the e-shop product page, you call a Drupal service to bring related content, say, blog posts. It is so also with category pages.

There are some challenges, though. Whenever you add a CCK field or a feature like rating to a content type, you need to modify the layout and write templates for data coming in from Drupal.

Consult Drupal experts for Custom Drupal Development, Dedicated Programmer, drupal CMS development, drupal consulting company, Drupal Custom Development, drupal customization, Drupal Developer, Drupal Developers, Drupal Development, drupal expert, Drupal Integration, Drupal Installation, drupal module developemnt, Drupal Professional, drupal programmer, Drupal Programmers, Drupal Web Developer, drupal website developers, Hire Drupal Developer, Hire Drupal Programmer.

A more complex path to take is to integrate the Drupal rendering engine into Magento: a tightly coupled architecture. It may make sense when using many Drupal features.

Adapted from ‘Magento and Drupal Integration’ (Evaldas Taroza, Nov. 11, 2009)

Drupal has a solid community. There is the CCK module to quickly add additional fields to a content type and make it available to the content producing team. Content versioning, workflow and so on, is easy in Drupal.

Consult Drupal Developer, Drupal Developers, Drupal Programmer, Drupal Programmers, Drupal Development, Drupal Expert.

Using both Magento and Drupal as the main components is reasonable when the content will be displayed on the Drupal site and e-shop on the Magento site. If a product has a blog post attached, you’ll have a link on the product page, clicking which open a Drupal page with the blog post.

A challenge here is to maintain two different themes so as not to harm user experience. When the customer clicks on the blog link inside the product page, the blog is displayed with the same look and feel as the shop. Another challenge would be the ability to mix content with product information on the same page.

It may make sense, however, to take this path when there are only some of the things to be shared between both components, say, users, and everything else is completely separate, say, when a company has an e-commerce site, a customer community site, and a corporate site.