The Alliance for Community Media Conference: "Connecting Communities"

Subject: ACM Conference and special Emerging Media Track (see below)
Location: Boston Park Plaza Hotel, Boston MA
Date: July 5-8, 2006

For the rest of this year I'm using Drupal's book module for a substantial collaborative research document (250,000 words, 50 authors, 130 peer reviewers). This is a useful project to test Drupal's ability as an academic authoring tool, and I will document some experiences as I go along, hopefully working towards a longer howto article for later publication (and perhaps a collaborative authoring branch of drupal-on-a-stick).

general comments
--> for those working in a windows environment, particularly when working with technophobe colleagues, the drupal-on-a-stick project is fantastic (http://www.ratatosk.net/software/onastick) and encourages people to try out drupal at home

--> for new users, it's worth buying one of the Drupal books as a desktop reference.

--> the process of choosing, installing and relevant modules takes time. While it makes sense to keep Drupal core simple and to encourage the plug-in process, Drupal.org should perhaps begin a series of 'use cases' or 'kickstart lists' to get users up-and-running quicker (e.g. 'drupal for academic authoring', 'drupal for media content', 'drupal for media screening', 'drupal for magazines')

drupal for academic authoring - kickstart list

For academic authoring, the list of relevant (non-core) modules is as follows:

To make better use of the Drupal.org servers we've set up PHP to utilize an opcode cache (APC). After a few tweaks, the cache is helping out by almost halving load and CPU usage. Drupal.org traffic has continued to grow over last year, nearly doubling. Additionally with sites such as themes.drupal.org, api.drupal.org, and groups.drupal.org, the two web nodes weren't too far from hitting their limits. APC ought to allow drupal.org and friends to run happily, longer, on the same hardware.

Attached is a graph showing the CPU usage before and after (about since 16:30) on drupal1.

Episode 16 of Lullabot's Drupal podcast has just gone online. This episode is an interview with Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert. We talk about Drupal's past, present, and future, and get some insight into the Drupal community process.

Update: the presentation

Subject: Voice over IP and Drupal (see below)
Location: Cambridge Center for Community Television. Map.
Time: 6:30 PM. Dinner at local restaurant afterwards for those that are interested.

To "signup" for the event visit the Drupal Groups announcement. If you are interested you can also just show up.

A description from Leo Burd (Doctoral student and MIT Media Lab)

In my presentation I will talk about how to integrate Drupal with telephony or voice-over-IP (VoIP) technologies. In particular, I would like to focus on the work that I'm doing with Asterisk, the open-source PBX (http://www.asterisk.org/), and on some new Drupal modules that provide audio blogging, voicemail and other features that help expand the outreach of traditional websites to people for whom computers are either inaccessible or too hard to use. As an example, I'll demo the current version of "What's Up", a telephone-based, neighborhood news system for and by kids. It will be great to get feedback from the Drupal community and discuss potential applications of these new tools!

We're proud to announce the release of a E-Commerce 4.7, which contains a large collection of new features and improvements. The E-Commerce project is a Drupal project containing over 30 modules, and 5 developer APIs.

We've been working hard to release the 4.7 version of E-Commerce. For example, the number of code changes per month is up from 45 in 2005 to 120 in 2006.

We hope you like the improvements, because there are plenty more on the way for E-Commerce 4.8.