Review: Drupal 6 Site Blueprints From Packt Publishing

A few weeks ago Packt Publishing sent me Drupal 6 Site Blueprints to review… and then things got kind of busy for me.  Over the holiday I’ve taken some time to read through it, and unfortunately, i would not feel comfortable recommending this book for reasons I will enumerate below. Reading chapters from this book I have moments that remind me of the scene in Spinal Tap when the Stone Henge props arrive and they are 21 inches tall instead of feet tall because of an imprecise documentation on a cocktail napkin.  You might get something built by following the instructions provided, but it is probably not going to be what you really want. First a note on the overall structure of the book: It would have served the audience better to have a chapter about some basic tasks that are repeatedly explained in each chapter, like creating and configuring vocabularies, modifying menus and creating new content types. Once explained in some more detail, the author could simply have referred back to those general instructions rather than repeating overly simplified instructions in each chapter, thus the reader would get more info, and the page count would not have gone up. Another missing piece is explanation — or justification — of module choice.  One of the biggest challenges facing novice and even intermediate Drupal site builders is how to decide which modules to use when two modules do similar things. Drupal 6 Site Blueprints barely even suggests that there might be another module you would want to use, let alone explain why the author chose the module he did. The...

/open, It Is Not Just A Web Page, It’s One Of Our Core Values

Last week, President Obama’s administration released the Open Government Directive, or OGD, directing all federal government agencies to publish information online in an open format that can be retrieved, downloaded, indexed, and searched by commonly used web search applications. The Open Government Directive outlines these three core values: Transparency. Government should provide citizens with information about what their government is doing so that government can be held accountable. Participation. Government should actively solicit expertise from outside Washington so that it makes policies with the benefit of the best information. Collaboration. Government officials should work together with one another and with citizens as part of doing their job of solving national problems We couldn’t be happier. CivicActions was founded on Openness. It is one of our three core values (the other two being Balance and Trust). Our value of openness is embodied in our commitment to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) including Drupal and CiviCRM, but also the Openwall (OWL) GNU/Linux operating system on our servers, and the applications that many of us use every day: Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, Ubuntu, Eclipse — and the list goes on. The licensing of our content — blog posts, proposal templates, estimating tools — are all also licensed under a Creative Commons license. CivicActions is delighted to learn and share about this new chapter in the United States government. We look forward to the impact that the Open Government Directive will have on our country and the world. And we are excited about how we will participate in this...