Drupal.lu

Some ideas recapped from the SXSW presentation on open source business modules

The first quarterly (hopefully ) Drupal meetup for the Albany, NY group took place last Saturday. Seven people from the upstate New York area attended and there was a lot of really good discussion about Drupal. Here's a summary of some of the things that we discussed.
Drupal for Educators

Museums and cultural institutions make up a large part of Palantir's business. We like working with them because we support their mission and they tend to have fun, twisted problems to solve. They like working with us because we tend to have fun solving twisted problems.

I use Apache Solr for search on several projects, including a few using Drupal. Solr has built in support for replication and load balancing, unfortunately the load balancing is done on the client side and works best when using a persistent connection, which doesn't make a lot of sense for php based webapps. In the case of Drupal, there has been a long discussion on a patch in the issue queue to enable Solr's native load balancing, but things seem to have stalled.

The Drupal.org redesign continues to progress. This is great news and a morale boost for everyone involved.
Since our front page post on February 3...

Looking at Open Atrium in the light of open source business models

This afternoon I am speaking on the SXSW panel Selling Your Milk When the Cow is Free about what it has been like to make the transition to selling products with Open Atrium.

And the answer to yesterday's "Eye grow Drupal" question is: Druplipets. Hundreds of cute little Druplipets, your friendly Druplicon chia pet. Druplipet is the newest member of the Acquia and Drupal Gardens family and will be making appearances at industry events this year.

So you create your beautiful Drupal theme, tweak it to perfection using Firefox and Firebug, send the url to the client, confident of praise and adulation.

Grid-based web development has evolved over the past few years from being the stuff of a few fringe enthusiasts to a fundamental concept for designing and building web sites. While grids aren’t the answer to everything, there are a number of ways they make your life a lot easier.