Recently, I have been working with quite a few Drupal sites, and one of my favorite tools to use has become drush. For those of you who are not aware of it, drush is a command line utility (drush = DRUpal SHell) that makes management of a Drupal site much more bearable. Drush is a great tool to use and is quite simple to install on your system when you have admin rights to the box. However, what about those of us on shared hosting system? read more »

Over the last year, Mediacurrent has been intensively collaborating with Ad Giants, an innovative marketing company based in Dallas, Texas. Ad Giants boasts an impressive list of clients and strategic partners like T. Boone Pickens, the legendary oil and business man, who has been featured on national television ads advocating an energy plan overhaul.

Ad Giants came to Mediacurrent as open-source advocates. They wanted to understand how they could better leverage Drupal to accomplish a revolutionary marketing idea called MODsocket. We had already joined forces to redesign their corporate and two subsidiary sites (Pitchrocket and the Ad Giants ONE System). read more »

San Francisco here we come! Mediacurrent has submitted a cross-section of sessions for Drupalcon that we are looking forward to sharing with the Drupal community. This is always a special time to network, swap stories with our partners, and get educated.

Here is a brief synopsis of what we would like to present – please vote if any of these 5 sessions are of particular interest: read more »

We had an action packed Atlanta Drupal User Group (ADUG) meetup last week with two awesome demonstrations of emerging Drupal distributions - Open Publish, which was created by our friends at Phase2 Technology and Drupal Gardens from our partner, Acquia. We had a last minute change of plans since Phase2, who was originally going to co-present with Kent Lester, was neck deep in the Snowmageddon taking place in Washington D.C. However, it happened to work out well, and we allocated the extra time to Chuck D’Antonio, Director of Professional Services at Acquia, who was in Atlanta. read more »

On Tuesday, February 9th at 6:30pm the Atlanta Drupal User Group (ADUG) will be hosting a very special event at our location sponsor, Matrix Resources. Our discussion will be predicated around the Drupal distribution called Open Publish (OP) that was created by Washington DC based consultancy, Phase2 Technology. Most notably, Phase2 was one of the lead development firms for the high profile launch of WhiteHouse.gov. Jeff Walpole and Frank Febbraro, Partners at Phase2, will be flying to Atlanta to talk about late breaking developments (including the new release of Open Publish v1.7), the vision of OP, and showcase how OP is helping a myriad of publishing-based websites. read more »

As more organizations continue to build sites on Drupal, an estimated 400,000+ at last count, the issue of search engine optimization (SEO) becomes even more paramount. Not only do customers demand an amazingly built site, but they need to employ techniques that drive higher conversions and overall traffic. At the Drupalcamp Atlanta event last Fall, I had the pleasure of spending some time with Ben Finklea. Ben is the founder of Volacci, a highly specialized consulting firm that is building a practice around helping Drupal businesses gain maximum site visibility. Ben has been busy speaking at regional Drupal events, conducting webinars, blogging, etc. and as a result become the leading voice on the Drupal SEO front. Most notably, he just released the only book on the subject called Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization. read more »

Eclipse is a powerful open source IDE built on Java that has been around since 2001 and has become quite useful tool for PHP development, including Drupal. This post is meant to give some rationale on why to use this platform for Drupal development and get you oriented as soon as possible. With Eclipse, there is definitely a learning curve, but if you give it a chance I’ll think you’ll find it an indispensable resource for your toolbox. read more »

There was a new white paper titled "TCO for Open Source Social Publishing: Going Beyond Social Business Software" just released from our partner, Acquia, that deserves spotlight recognition. The document is a must-read for anyone on the front-lines of selling Drupal services. Open-source software (OSS) evangelists have rightfully asserted that platforms like Drupal save organizations the two success factors they crave the most: money and time. However, a quantifiable, written analysis to back these claims was significantly lacking. This paper helps fill that void. read more »

We recently completed a 2010 long-range planning meeting for our Atlanta Drupal User Group (ADUG) meetup. Our pseudo-committee consists of five to seven key organizers, and we have intentionally kept the structure fairly informal. We conduct presentations on the third Tuesday of every month in a training center that is provided by Matrix Resources (large staffing agency). In addition, we have more hands-on workshops that meet on the second Tuesdays of each month that will be moving to a co-working space (Ignition Alley) conference room next year. read more »