Wopular is a news aggregation site. I wanted to create an online newspaper rack, showing the top 5 headlines from the top 30 newspapers. I also wanted the ability to highlight interesting and/or important stories and insert corresponding pictures with them. I've always wondered what being a newspaper editor would be like, and this allows me to play that role in spite of my poor writing skills.

By listing five stories from the top circulated newspapers in the country, I'm hoping that this will give a more comprehensive view of what's happening across the United States. Even if most papers cover the same story, it's good to have multiple perspectives. Think of this as Drudge Report meets Rotten Tomatoes.

Moblin is a global open source project to develop a Linux-based stack for embedded devices ranging from mobile phones to netbooks to in-vehicle entertainment/navigation systems. With support from Intel and other embedded systems engineering companies, there are hundreds of engineers around the world helping to create an open tool set for the next generation of smart devices.

Intel announced the 2.0 iteration of Moblin to the public at OSCON 2008. Moblin is already being used to build Ubuntu's Mobile Internet Device (MID) distribution, and the first Moblin-based devices will be hitting shelves this holiday season. In short: very cool.

Naturally, a good open source project needs a good home for its developers, and that means Drupal!

Eight years ago today Drupal 1.0.0 was released. It's been a big year for Drupal, another big release with Drupal 6, a lot of awards, and a lot of recognition. The project has had some notable departures, promotions, and the addition of many great contributors and users. Happy Birthday to the Drupal project and its amazing community.

Drupal 6.9 and Drupal 5.15, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities, are now available for download.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in Drupal 5.0 release announcement.

Recently the Christian Assemblies International website was launched on Drupal 6. With much of the site’s content translated into 10 languages, it’s a perfect example of the excellent Drupal 6 i18n advances put to good use.

Build Story

The Need for Change

Christian Assemblies International is a largely volunteer-run Christian church, based in house groups throughout about 15 countries worldwide. The church’s original website was being manually maintained in 7 languages with Dreamweaver by a handful of very dedicated volunteers. Besides the obvious challenge of replicating changes 7 times throughout all pages, the workers had to struggle with making changes to languages that they couldn’t even half understand, like Russian and Polish. Many would have been keen to help in the work and share the load, but each new maintainer/helper required expensive software along with quite a bit of training, making the barriers to entry quite high. Adobe Contribute was used with some success to integrate non-technical users in a limited way, but slowly the site was becoming unmaintainable and a total rethink was needed.

The challenge

The main challenge for this project was to build from scratch an online store that originally was running on OsCommerce. Our proposal to the client was to use Drupal for managing his online shop, which would mean a big quality improve, as we included some social functionalities to the project.