I was recently work­ing on a site project that com­bines the power of both Drupal and CiviCRM. The site con­sists of a cus­tom theme (based on Fusion Core) that uses a lit­tle bit of jQuery good­ness to enhance the user inter­face. The site is designed to allow users to cre­ate their own user accounts and set up pro­files, and I keep that in mind as I theme the site. Everything was fine until I upgraded to CiviCRM 3.1.3.
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A friend of mine on the east coast recently posted on Facebook about how he attended this event called SQLSaturday. I had never heard of this, but after look­ing it up, I thought it was a good idea to write a post about it. SQLSaturday is a entrance-free, one-day con­ven­tion (held on Saturdays) for the dis­cus­sion and knowl­edge of all things SQL Server. The event is designed to bring together pro­fes­sion­als who work with SQL Server and those who belong to any user group meet­ings. After read­ing up on the event, there is one sched­uled for my loca­tion in April.

For more infor­ma­tion, check out SQL Saturday.

I’ve been busy for quite a while now work­ing on a cur­rent project. Just last night, I was try­ing to do a series of updates to my port­fo­lio site, which uses Drupal. I needed to update to the lat­est 6.16 release in addi­tion to updat­ing a count of 10 mod­ules or so. However, I goofed, and now have a bunch of prob­lems with Drupal, the data­base, and all of these con­tributed mod­ules. For now, the port­fo­lio site is out of ser­vice until I fix it. I will be adding more con­tent to this blog soon though.

On January 23rd and 24th, San Diego will have its own Drupal Camp. I have attended the Drupal Camp LA last August, and the turn out was good. I expect the turnout for Sandcamp to be sim­i­lar. The event is free and reg­is­tra­tion is now open.

SandCamp 2010 Signup

Drupal’s Aggregator mod­ule is respon­si­ble for pars­ing and updat­ing news con­tent col­lected from sites in var­i­ous XML-based for­mats. Such for­mats include RSS, Atom, and RDF feeds. Drupal is awe­some for cre­at­ing and man­ag­ing con­tent and even has sup­port for blog­ging, forums, and user pro­files. Although the later fea­tures are not as feature-rich as a third-party solu­tion and the Aggregator mod­ule is not an excep­tion to this. In fact, I find Aggregator to be prob­lem­atic to the point to where it is a dis­ap­point­ment. I have found a solu­tion that works well for me.

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I have cre­ated a Drupal 6 test site on my server. This test site is to be used to try out new mod­ules that I have dis­cov­ered and to pro­vide a demo site for anony­mous users to tin­ker in.

The test site can be accessed here or through my port­fo­lio.

More mod­ules and info to come.

Also look for­ward to a Drupal 7 test site.

WordPress 2.9 has been offi­cially released and can be down­load from WordPress.org. I have already updated my WordPress install to the lat­est release within the Dashboard. The upgrade itself was auto­matic with the need for me to update and re-enable plu­g­ins to get the lat­est ver­sion of every­thing. The entire process took about two min­utes. The upgrade process for WordPress is suburb.

For a under­stand­ing of what is new in WordPress…

For many months now, I have been hear­ing a lot about this new, upcom­ing Google prod­uct called Google Wave. Throughout my daily rou­tine of scroung­ing the Internet for use­ful infor­ma­tion, I found RSS feeds that gave some insight into what Google Wave is and what it is all about. However, I never really paid much atten­tion to it sim­ply because I knew that it was by invite only, and I fig­ured that I would wait until I could actu­ally get my hands on it to under­stand its full scope. So the other day a col­league sent me an invi­ta­tion to join Google Wave. Here is my review.

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I am always on the look­out for billing/invoicing soft­ware, whether it is stand­alone soft­ware or web-based soft­ware, because such soft­ware eases the pain of keep­ing track of projects. I am a spread­sheet kind of per­son, but find it too painful to keep track of projects, tasks, and clients within Excel. There are count­less online choices avail­able but for this month I am tak­ing a look at FreshBooks.

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I have recently com­mit­ted to a project where the client is in need for a site that allows the man­age­ment of its mem­bers. The needed func­tion­al­ity includes the abil­ity to send mass emails, cre­ate events, and main­tain con­tacts for the site’s mem­bers. This in con­junc­tion with stan­dard fea­tures such as main­tain­ing mes­sage boards, blogs, and mem­ber pro­files. After some research and plan­ning, I have decided that a Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) sys­tem is a good fit to han­dle the bulk of this required functionality.

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