Open Scholar has been developed by Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University. This impressive piece of Drupal-based software provides a rich feature set for institutions wishing to drive collaboration among educators. While this is primarily intended for academics, the ability to maintain multiple scholar profiles and sites means that you can quickly build interconnections between autonomous users - you don't need to think of them as 'academics' only.
Setting up Drupal as an Apache Virtual Host is not much more complex than configuring any other website. But my goal today was to get rid of a few niggles. I wanted to force all traffic to a single URL - for example, always load 'www.example.co.uk' rather than 'example.co.uk' or anotherexample.co.uk.
A common theme you'll encounter with the Drupal community is openness. Sure, a lot of companies just use the great free software and don't put much if anything back. But active community members are passionate evangelists. The community takes the ideas of sharing, contribution and co-operation very seriously indeed. Community members tend to stick together and in some ways this reminds me of the mediaeval guilds, where a shared skill set and common interest bound groups of tradespeople tightly together.
Last weekend, a second major Drupal event in Brighton in 2012 showed once again just how much Drupal momentum and talent there is in Brighton. Friday's Drupal Open Studio day gave many of us the chance to meet friends old and new in New England House. On Saturday, the Skiff played host to an excellent weekend of informative Drupal sessions.
Right now I'm rethinking my approach to the use of Learning Management Systems (LMS). There has been much recent debate between those in the pro- and anti-LMS camps.
On a recent trip, I decided to see if it was possible to do some Drupal development using an iPad. Now it's obviously easy to administer your Drupal site through the iPad's native Safari web browser but if you want to do some serious development, you'll need to be able to access your web server in order to use Drush and probably your GIT versioning system.
Brighton Digital Festival has timed it just right for the lovely weather we're having at last in Brighton!
This is a great opportunity to see the diversity of the town's digital media creativity brought together under one banner. As usual, I'll be heading down to the Mini Maker Faire at the Corn Exchange - free and fun and great if your kids share your curious passion for this sort of mashup.
I learnt a lot at the recent Drupal & Education Camp and thought I'd share a few highlights here. Professor David Upton of the Saïd Business School delivered an excellent keynote. There's many years' experience here in analysing big project roll-outs - and what David had to say about the challenges of sensible, incremental software building (for success) against the backdrop of organisational pressures to deliver extravagant, big-bang roll-outs (which usually fail) was insightful as well as entertaining. Catch up on David's talk here.
I am really looking forward to attending the upcoming Drupal & Education Camp at Oxford next month. Drupal has a long-standing relationship with the education sector, especially in the US where it powers about 26% of all .edu sites. I've written before about Drupal LMS initiatives and similar Drupal distributions targeted specifically at schools and universities.
Brighton's first DrupalCamp took place 28-29 April and was a fantastic success for all those involved. The weekend gave delegates a great opportunity to meet and learn from peers. The wide range of sessions held something for everyone and I particularly enjoyed Richard Jones' talk on Commerce, Jonathan Brown's talk on Storage API (a revelation!), Kevin Elliot's clear and sensible talk on SEO, and Guy Schneerson's sage session on best practice when approaching Drupal projects.
Sereno Charity Websites & Intranets
Sereno builds bespoke websites & intranets for charities in Drupal & WordPress.
