... now wouldn't that be a great blog post!? Actually, it would probably take a dissertation to cover the topic adequately. For now, I decided that I might as well share/re-use/build-on a comment I just submitted in the g.d.o forum.

The informal "5 à 7" format of the last Drupal meetup in Montreal was really nice. I met new people and got to follow-up on some really interesting conversations with people I already knew and respected. Personally, the discussion that stands out was related to the dynamics surrounding the current patch review and the lack of a prioritisation process. Topic such as this are, IMO, ultimately political in nature and will be increasingly unavoidable in the context of a growing community.

As I stated in my last post it has been a rediculously long time since I have written anything on my blog. This is particularly bothersome to me given the fact that there are many important issues that I feel I could contribute to. However, if I continue to wait until I have time to write up the whole shabang before I even start, I'll simply never do it. So I figured I should at least start by throwing together a list of things I would write about if I had the time. Who knows, perhaps you'll end up telling me what I should write about first.

This is rediculous; I upgrade more often than I post. My last post was over five months ago! Shame on me. I really need to tell people about all the amazing stuff that has been taking place with Koumbit... cause you can't even find out about this stuff on Koumbit's website.

Well, anyway, I should at least get *something* posted so I guess I'll take a few minutes to comment about the Drupal upgrading I have carried out... and all the stuff that is broken as a result. :-/

According to this thread it appears as though the Drupal's i18n, or "internationalisation", module will no longer require patching of the core in the upcoming 4.7 release. This is great news for the Drupal community!

While Drupal has long supported localisation (i.e. translation of the interface) it has always been a struggle to enable support for multi-lingual content. Until now, in order to have the engine keep track of the language of articles, thereby enabling functionality such as "view this article in [another language]" or "please help us translate this article into [another language]", one had to patch the core Drupal files.

Not only was this difficult (in fact, in Windows people often found themselves patching the files manually!) it resulted in incompatibility issues with other contributed modules.

I have been using Drupal since fall 2001 (for the cmaq.net) and the innaquate management of multi-lingual content has for a long time been the most prominently recognised limitation remaining with Drupal. Hopefully this will all be a thing of the past.

I can R.I.P. now. ;-)

So, apparently, I've been a little lazy with respect to my blog. It's not as though I haven't been busy though. Anyway, I'm about to go on a little vacation so I thought I'd bundle up a little news...

1) The Koumbit project is really picking up steam now even if the current website still really sucks. A whole series of contracts have come through and we have half a dozen geeks working near-fulltime at the moment. We are working on a new site too. It'll be a multilingual Drupal site using the internationalisation (i18n) module. It had been a long time since I had tried the i18n module... things are coming together nicely... except that it still requires patches to the core files. WTF!? I don't get why the Drupal community hasn't rallied around this module. In my circles, the innaquate management of multilingual content is the most prominently recognised limitation remaining with Drupal. Anyway, Koumbit is going strong and the contrats are pilling up. It is just a matter of time before we upgrade our infrastructure from a one-server to a four-server configuration and get in touch with the other principal players in the Drupal sphere to figure out how we can all collaborate more effectively.

2) We have started work on a voting module for Drupal that will enable groups to take decisions via the web and evaluate the representativity/validity of these decisions. I have been talking about this idea for years now and it is finally getting underway. While we are still at a very preliminary stage, i.e. we have almost no code to speak of, the idea has matured through a series of discussions and planning exercises. You can find out (a little) more about this project at voting.gnuvernment.org. The coolest thing is that Koumbit now has some $$ to reinvest into R&D and this project is likely to get a piece of the pie.

3) And finally I'll mention that I have been working on tons of Drupal sites even if I haven't yet listed any of the recent ones in the "websites section" of my blog. Probably the proudest moment recently was successfully upgrading a site from Drupal 4.2 to 4.6. This is pretty key as a whole bunch of my/our older clients are going to be needing this very soon... especially with the recent security holes found in Drupal and the fact that the older versions are no longer being supported.

Anyway, that's all for now... not because I don't have more news to share... I just need to get some real work done before I leave. :-)

Drupal 4.6 was released yesterday and anybody interested in "podcasting" will be happy to note that one of the new features that it provides is native support for RSS 2.0. In other words, the first file that is attached to nodes will be referenced in enclosures included in any/all relevant RSS feeds that are generated.

Another interesting development for the podcasting community is that there has also been a "CreativeCommons" module developed for Drupal recently. While this is still in the CVS tree, I have tried it out and it totally rocks.

Lastly, I'll mention that a new "media" module makes it easy to setup websites that allow users to build and then stream playlists based on uploaded content.

I can't help imagine some of the alternative broadcasting platforms that are made possible by these improvements alone, not to mention all of the other great community-building modules that already exist for Drupal.

Two of the original top three items on my "Drupal Wishlist" have already been tackled by the Drupal community. I can't believe it. Wow!

This time the big news is the release of a Creative Commons module for Drupal. Sure, there may be a few small issues to iron out but I love it! From the module page...

The Creative Commons module allows users to select and assign a Creative Commons license to a node and any attached content. Additionally, the site admin can select a license to assign to the entire site.


This module uses the Creative Commons api (api.creativecommons.org) and can update when new Creative Commons licenses are available (for example, the more recent sampling licenses). Admins can restrict the licenses available to users, as well as require specific metadata be included.

Thanks go out to digibike and whoever else may have helped with this.

This is a another Drupal theme that I developed. It is loosely based on some of the marketing material produced for the Fédération des centres d'action bénévoles du Québec by Kawabunga (i.e. the photos at top-right and the "l'action bénévole" logo).

Honestly, I don't find it nearly as nice as last years look/theme, but hey, you work with what you get.

Join some of the Drupal folks at FOSDEM 2005 to learn about Drupal, the open source content management framework that is gaining momentum worldwide. Top developers will speak about topics ranging from metadata management to scalability to module development best practices.