The Drupala Installation Profile is built on the Drupal 5.x Drigg Installation for social bookmarking and the Advanced Profile Kit for social networking. The site architecture makes extensive use of Views, Panels, and multiple content types to build a portal organized around taxonomy terms that includes blogs, articles, social bookmarks, and user profiles. The Drigg base theme has been redesigned to position featured categories in the primary links section and Drigg categories in the sidebar. This allows for an easy customization of the site structure to support virtually any topic. FCKeditor is pre-installed and configured for WYSIWYG blog & article publishing. The Drupala theme is two columns, optimized for APK & Drigg, and cross-browser tested in FF, IE6, IE7, Chrome, Safari, and Opera.

Advanced Profile Kit, drigg, Drupal, Drupala Installation Profile, Social Bookmarking, social networking, Web Development Hide

Acquia, the start-up company founded by Dries Buytaert, the lead developer & founder of Drupal, has announced that they are now providing paid search indexing for Drupal sites on a subscription basis aimed at enterprise sites. Similar to Mollom, Acquia’s anti-spam software for CMS platforms, Acquia Search will also work for those running other open source software like WordPress, Joomla, TYPO3, etc as well as sites with proprietary code. Acquia Search is based on the Lucene and Solr distributions of Apache, and essentially works by having Acquia index your site’s content on their computers and then send it with encryption on demand to supply user queries using an integrated Acquia Search module. According to the announcement, Acquia is using Solr server farms on Amazon EC2 to power this on cloud architecture.

Acquia, Acquia Search, Apache, Content Management Systems, Drupal, Lucene, Solr Hide

I have been using FrontPage SlideShow from JoomlaWorks on a number of sites, and would recommend it as a good CSS/PHP route to building a featured slide section that links to promoted content, articles, blog posts, groups, etc. One problem is that it is not free, the cost is around $35 for a license to use it on 5 to 10 domains. A second problem is highlighted by the example of releasing an installation profile for Drupal. We can release all of the code under GPL for the project except for FPSS. So, I began working on a conversion of our FPSS slides into Views Slideshow views.

Drupal, FPSS, Tips & Tricks, Views Slideshow, Web Development Hide