Alexander on Web Development

The first Drupal 7 alpha release was released in December 2009. Drupal 7.0 Alpha 2 released recently got released. Once Drupalistas are able to upgrade their Drupal 6 installation to Drupal 7 successfully the community is switching to Beta releases, but at the moment there are a number of open issues regarding the upgrade that must be fixed first.

These are my recommended readings for people that want to learn Drupal or further enhance their knowledge of this content management system.

• Beighley, Lynn (2009). Drupal for Dummies. New York: For Dummies. Amazon link
• VanDyk, John K. (2008). Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition. New York: Springer Verlag/Apress. Amazon link
• Peacock, Michael (2008).

One of the newspapers I most admire both in content and design, souitu.es, announced recently that they closed shop. According to their farewell message their Spain-based crew of 22 writers, media editors and programmers could not resist the economic downturn. I thank Souitu for the inspiration they brought to me and the Diálogo Digital team since 2008. They will be missed.

The Interaction Design Association or IXDA for short, is a professional network of more than 15,000 members and 80 local groups around the world. IXDA was founded in 2003 and provides an online forum for the discussion of interaction design issues. Their redesign was performed by Growing Venture Solutions, one of United States most respected Drupal consulting firms.

I am tweaking and improving the user interface of the user registration interface of the Bibliotesis proyect. Drupal's extensive dense documentation is the amazon of links and content. Although this is actually a very good thing, if you happen to get lost in it then you may have to resort to Google to find your way through it. In today's fancy asynchronous multistep Drupal form research spike I found some treasures hidden inside the docs so good that I had to feature them in my blog:

The Forms API Quickstart Guide:

I found this video on http://www.nicklewis.org/

After a more than a couple 24 hour coding marathons today I am very proud to announce that Dialogo Digital (http://dialogodigital.com, #EditoresDialogo) launched it's redesign to the public. The modern design was conceived and created by web designer Joel Martínez of String Puerto Rico (http://stringpr.com/) in late September 2009. It took me around 8 weeks to convert Joel's standards compliant XHTML into a full Drupal theme.

Three main templates were developed: one for the front page, one for the news sections, and one for the news articles.

PG Engineering Solutions (http://pges.net), a Puerto Rico based Engineering firm in charge of developing projects such as the San Juan, Puerto Rico Urban Train is now using Drupal for it's web site.

I built this site in only one week using a vanilla Drupal 6 distribution (http://drupal.org/drupal-6.15). A premium theme from TopNotchThemes (http://www.topnotchthemes.com) was used in order to reduce both development time and cost.

I just enabled the Update module in one of my Drupal installations, already knowing that it was going to notify me and my users to death about security updates. I had heard before of a command line utility called Drush that allows you to download, and update modules with simple commands a la apt-get install xyz, apt-get update xyz.

According to 3i/PricewaterhouseCoopers, in the first three months of the 2000, a record US $22 billion of venture capital was pumped into a record 1330 Internet start up deals in the US alone - the same number of deals and more than twice as much money as in the whole of 1998.* Worldwide in 2000, business plans raised nearly $200 billion of external function for start ups, management buyouts and expansion - two-thirds of tit for technology businesses.