TckTckTck is a GCCA campaign calling for a new fair, strong, binding, and international climate change treaty. The Global Campaign for Climate Action recently formed to build a global groundswell for a strong climate deal in Copenhagen this December. GCCA is a collaboration of International NGOs inspired by the success of the Make Poverty History campaign. GCCA's brand is TckTckTck, to indicate that "time is running out" and the web is at the core of GCCA's strategy.

With over 50 diverse and established NGO partners driving the bus, their own unique mandate as a central unifying force, GCCA had to balance two competing yet interconnected elements. First, supporting partners, ensuring they fill a unique role; adding value and always supporting, not competing with partner interests. Second, direct public engagement: providing a strong, unifying global center-point for media and world leaders; organizing new supporters who aren't reached by an existing NGO partner, and supporting new partners who have low online organizing engagement capacity.

The partner organizations are all running their own independent campaigns but using the TckTckTck brand, pointing to the website, and together, in less than a week, they aggregated nearly 1,000,000 supporters to the cause!

Advomatic built the TckTckTck site with Drupal 6 and several staple contributed modules. In general, we used CCK to build the content, Views to list the content, and Panels to arrange the lists on a page. For instance, the home page is a panel page with several Views blocks pulling in content.

It's nearly 6 months since the release of Cracking Drupal, which makes for a nice milestone to talk about the book and mention a few related developments. Cracking Drupal was written by me (Greg Knaddison - or "greggles") with reviews and assistance from various members of the community with the well-known Károly Négyesi (chx) as the main technical editor.

The book's target audience is broad: site admins who know a little coding, developers who are deep in module development and selection, and front end developers (aka themers) who modify their template.php and tpl.php files.

The Saint Louis Review is a local Catholic diocesan newspaper serving the nearly 500,000 member Archdiocese of Saint Louis. The newspaper has had a website since the late 90s, which was ported to a custom-designed CMS in 2001. The PHP/MySQL-based site ran quite well throughout the first decade of this millennium, but was in need of either a serious overhaul or a redesign, to go along with the paper's new tabloid layout in April 2009.

The decision was made in 2007 to port the website to Joomla, but after a few months, a new editor, and more work, it was determined that, due to its extensibility, flexible out-of-the-box permissions, and standards/SEO-compliant codebase, Drupal would be a better fit for the site. Work was begun in January of 2009 to transfer the custom CMS' articles database (over 17,000 articles) to a Drupal site, create a new template based off the colors and design of the new tabloid-format paper, and integrate an easier-to-manage ad system and back-end.

There's lots of exciting news about Groups.Drupal.org which was launched over three years ago as a

a glorious hub of worldwide drupal user groups.

Three years since and there are almost 650 groups on the site and over 51,000 subscriptions to those groups with over 700,000 page views each month. A glorious hub indeed.

Along with the redesign and upgrade happening for drupal.org, Groups.Drupal.org is being upgraded. Moshe Weitzman is leading the charge on this effort. Moshe has decided that this upgrade makes a good point to pass along some maintenance responsibilities for the site to Josh Koenig and Greg Knaddison.

Web designers have taken to blogging platforms as a foundation for their portfolio websites. It has always bothered me since, as a web designer, I believe in user-centered design. Blogging systems are not ideal for showcasing a portfolio, as it’s coming at the project from the perspective of “what’s easy to build and how can we fit what we want into it?”

I think a lot of designers feel overwhelmed by Drupal, because of all the capability and power it has. But Drupal is capable of not just managing newspapers and portals – Drupal can easily and efficiently handle small-time operations, as well.

I knew I needed to redesign my own website, www.headlinercreative.com, and I was determined to use Drupal. I approached the project like any client’s website, starting from the very beginning: figuring out the goals and purpose of the website, figuring out what content I wanted to display and the best way to display it. I wanted something that would be easy for me to use and update, and that would be intuitive for visitors to view my work and participate in blog discussions. I knew that whatever I came up with, Drupal would handle it superbly.

As you may have seen in the news, NowPublic.com, the first venture backed start-up to use Drupal, was acquired by the Clarity Digital Group which owns and operates Examiner.com a quantified top 100 web property for local news and information. Over the next ~6 months we'll be migrating Examiner.com to the NowPublic Drupal based platform, creating one of the largest public Drupal installs on the planet!

While we at NowPublic have been blessed with a loyal, dedicated, and amazing team that continues to impress me on a daily basis, and fortunate enough to have great advisers, the unsung hero of this story that I want to publicly thank is everyone who has contributed to Drupal, and the Drupal community - without you all this would not have been possible. Drupal the software, and the Drupal community have been critical to the success of NowPublic.com from the very beginning.