We use Drupal to power all of our in-house websites but these methods could be applied to any CMS (content management systems) that are out there. Our sites are visually rich as we have an in-house creative services department that generates a large number of videos and photos. We post these videos to our YouTube channel as well as our website. The workflow to get them on our website would normally take several steps of sending the request along with details which then get published through our CMS and eventually added to the site. This is just one example. We are a pretty small group and I wanted to find ways to reduce the timeframe, people, and steps involved to accomplish publishing content to our site.

So I looked at all the web services we were currently using to determine how we could leverage them in a home page redesign. The plan was to make it so the content could be dynamically updated by my co-workers by utilizing the services they were publishing content to already or in some cases create new ones. Below is an image with numbered areas that I will break down explaining how we accomplished this.

1. For our latest videos section we created a YouTube Playlist and pull the first four videos from there to populate this section. We’re utilizing the YouTube API to pull the thumbnail and video title to be displayed here. We also then utilize ThickBox to display the video and keep the user on our site. Our YouTube channel is managed by someone on our creative services team so they can easily control which videos appear here without having to request any changes to my team.

2. Our photos section is powered by a Flickr Set. A member of our creative services team who has full control to easily add or remove images to appear in this section. We are utilizing the Flickr API and also display the photos using ThickBox and allow you to scroll through them. To keep it fresh we randomly pull images from this set upon every page load.

3. For our top stories section we created an account on Delicious. A member of our communications team then bookmarks stories they want to appear here using a specific tag. The reason for the tag is that we have several that we use to publish to various areas of our websites. We then take the RSS feed generated by this tag and process it using the Simplepie script to display here.

4. For this section we took all the RSS feeds from the blogs of the teams that were competing and processed them through Simplepie to display here. The output was displayed in reverse chronological order and we limited it to only show a single post per team so that nobody could flood the feed. We also renamed several of the blog feed titles as necessary along with formatting the output and date.

Having distributed these publishing responsibilities to additional people in the company and utilizing externals services gives us many advantages. It removes web production involvement, it puts the publishing power in the hands of the department, and it speeds up the time to publish. It’s a win, win, win. Of course there are many considerations before this can be implemented. You need to make sure that your organization has the approval processes and ability to support it. You also need to have steps in place to deal with the reliance of external services which may include utilizing caching and local asset backups.

I’ve been very happy with the outcome thus far and  These are just some examples that I hope you find helpful. There are so many ways that web services can be utilized both for publishing content and streamlining workflow and I continue to look at ways to expand on these methods in other areas of our sites.

Lastly, I want to give a shout out to Blake Lucchesi who developed the functionality described in this post within Drupal for us.

see more Funny Graphs

My idea would be to throw up a site where people could come up with ideas for a topic that is voted on a weekly basis and then executed on a given day. Perhaps it could be known as #trendingtuesday.  The website would also provide an archive of #trendingtuesday’s past. I could probably throw up the site fairly easily using a CMS platform like Pligg or cobble one together with Drupal to get things started. It would also be cool to have a real-time feed of the topic on the site during the day it runs. Perhaps this is just my brain acting up since I may be over caffeinated but I thought it might be fun to do.

I’ll start it off today with the idea that got me thinking about this in the first place. I thought it would be fun to reveal things that we may be embarrassed to admit in the form of #geekconfessions. (Note: Guess I’m not the innovator here. I just searched Twitter and it appears that @direflail came up with this idea as well).  So I plan on shooting out a few tweets today using the hashtag and see where it goes.

So if this doesn’t take off, how about using a similar plan to create a trending topic calling out the actions of #douchebags? Now that sounds like a very necessary public service.

In February of this year I discovered the LA Drupal User Group. It’s true what they say, Drupal is all about its community which I’ve now directly experienced the benefits of having attended several meetings and becoming friends with some great people. In my attempt to contribute I did a case study presentation describing the detailed Drupal work I’ve done for X PRIZE.

This great Drupal community in LA provided me with exciteful anticipation to attend my first DrupalCamp LA. Also knowing it was being managed by Chris Charlton and Crystal Williams from the LA User Group only re-assured in my mind that it would be great.

This second year saw nice growth. There were over 430 registered users for the event. I was only able to attend for Day 1 but I can definitely say that in just the time I was there, the information I learned, and people I met was fantastic. I also got to have discussions with several Drupalers throughout the day. Below are some of the highlights for me and other details from the event.

Keynote

Opening session included presentations from Jonathan Lambert of Workhabit and Kieran Lal of Acquia. They discussed the current state of Drupal and plans for growth into the future while evangelizing and showing their passion for this great open source platform we love. You can see a few notes taken from Viktor Kane here.

Kieran also discussed the Drupal.org redesign project and urged users to visit the Flickr group to submit their design ideas. He also mentioned Leisa Reichelt’s involvement.

Building APIs for Modules

I was able to catch some of this presentation where Adam Kalsey of Workhabit walked us through how he created the Activity Stream module. I didn’t know Adam had written this and was a bit floored as I’ve become pretty passionate about Lifestreaming and have dedicated a site to it at the Lifestream Blog. Adam’s module adds Lifestreaming functionality to Drupal by pulling data via API calls from several web services like Twitter, Delicious, and Last.fm

This was actually the second time I had seen Adam give a presentation as he provided a Scaling Drupal presentation at the LA Drupal User Group a few months prior to this. He’s a top notch speaker who exudes knowledge and enthusiasm and I’m already greatful having learned plenty from him. I highly recommend you catch him speak if you get a chance.

Slideshow for the session is available here.

Using Open Source tools for Open Source Development

This session was run by Mike Stewart whom I often see at the LA Drupal User Group. He provided demos of several open source tools he uses for Drupal development. This included using Ubuntu for his OS, and several other tools including Geany and Scribes. But the coolest thing for me was that he had wrapped all of these into an image using the open source virtualization package VirtualBox. I have used VMWare but wasn’t familiar with VirtualBox and was very happy to learn about it.

Mike was planning on providing a Virtualbox Ubuntu image that included all the tools he showed but I haven’t seen it yet. I will add a link if I do come across it.

Tuning for Scale and Performance

The presentation so good the first time I saw it I figured I’d watch it again and see if I absorb anything more. This was led by Adam Kalsey but also on the panel was Jonathan Lambert and Aaron Stewart of Workhabit. For the most part I had paid attention the first time but got some additional recommendations such as:

• Using XCache for Opcode caching
• Jmeter for load testing
• Xdebug for testing code performance
• Using the Boost & Block Cache Modules

Scaling Drupal: Drupal on the Cloud

Also hosted by Adam Kalsey (ok starting to feel like I’m a groupie) where he discussed Cloud computing and how to host Drupal in the cloud. Coming into this I had very little knowledge in this area and was just vaguely familiar with Amazon Web Services but once again Adam provided a good intro whiched helped me get a better understanding of how it works. I was pretty intrigued by the setup and how it works but I’m not so sure most IT departments are ready to start adopting it on a large scale. I do see it as the future and it’s just a matter of time before more companies start moving to this model instead of investing in large hardware deployments and the management that goes with them. I’m hoping I can learn more about Cloud computing and dip my toe in soon.

Here’s the slideshow presentation from this session. Workhabit also has a good post on Drupal running on Amazon’s EC2 here. In that post Workhabit provides us with a test image we can play with Drupal on in EC2 as well.

Along with VirtualBox and Amazon’s EC2, virtualization was definitely a theme I see making big strides in the years to come.

Other Sessions

I didn’t go to any of the Designer/Theming sessions but I heard great things about those presentations. There were also many new and curious users that came which were treated to some good intro sessions which showed them the power and flexibility of the system for several niche sites. I’m also bummed I didn’t see Ethan Kaplan’s case study on the Metallica site.

Other Related Stuff from DrupalCamp LA

• Amazon AWS & Drupal at DrupalCampLA Video Presentation
• Post from Blake Lucchesi of BoldSource about his presentations
• I wish I could have seen the Designing social networking sites with Drupal session
  
• The Stand Up to Cancer site was built in Drupal and they had a representative
• Slideshows from many of the sessions
  
• Twitter chatter from the event
• Photos of event on Flickr

Well that’s it folks. I really look forward to next year! In the meantime you can catch me often hanging out on IRC at #drupal-la on irc.freenode.net or just go to Drupalchat.net