It really feels like Drupal is accelerating in the marketplace lately. You can help keep it keep it going by voting for / nominating Drupal in important industry awards. Here are a couple that need action from you today.

Drupal is running as a finalist in five categories for the Sourceforge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards. VOTING ENDS TOMORROW!

Drupal is also in the nomination stage for the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Awards, an award Drupal won last year. You can nominate Drupal in several categories here. Nomination is the first step to winning. Do it now.

It really feels like Drupal is accelerating in the marketplace lately. You can help keep it keep it going by voting for / nominating Drupal in important industry awards. Here are a couple that need action from you today.

Drupal is running as a finalist in five categories for the Sourceforge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards. VOTING ENDS TOMORROW!

Drupal is also in the nomination stage for the Packt Publishing Open Source Content Management System Awards, an award Drupal won last year. You can nominate Drupal in several categories here. Nomination is the first step to winning. Do it now.

Oleg Terenchuk (litwol) is now developing the JavaScript Theming module. The five second elevator spiel: this will move theming from the server to the client.

The longer explanation is a bit more exciting. This module plans to abstract the core of Drupal theming into a javascript layer. This will allow a JSON feed to pass raw data to a browser to be formatted on the fly for display.

The implications are astounding, and I'm still wrapping my brain around the possibilities. For one, it could mean super fast in place load times, because Drupal doesn't have to mess around with passing everything around the theming system. An AJAX request could just ask for the data, Drupal sends it, and jQuery will format your list, table, teaser, or what have you. In its second day of life, it already works with messages (and item lists, I believe).

A potential problem I see might be that slower computers would see slower rendering times. But this is already happening with some jQuery-heavy sites anyway. The benefit would be most seen with faster hardware, but this is always true with cutting-edge technology. Everyone else will catch up soon enough.

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Oleg Terenchuk (litwol) is now developing the JavaScript Theming module. The five second elevator spiel: this will move theming from the server to the client.

The longer explanation is a bit more exciting. This module plans to abstract the core of Drupal theming into a javascript layer. This will allow a JSON feed to pass raw data to a browser to be formatted on the fly for display.

The implications are astounding, and I'm still wrapping my brain around the possibilities. For one, it could mean super fast in place load times, because Drupal doesn't have to mess around with passing everything around the theming system. An AJAX request could just ask for the data, Drupal sends it, and jQuery will format your list, table, teaser, or what have you. In its second day of life, it already works with messages (and item lists, I believe).

A potential problem I see might be that slower computers would see slower rendering times. But this is already happening with some jQuery-heavy sites anyway. The benefit would be most seen with faster hardware, but this is always true with cutting-edge technology. Everyone else will catch up soon enough.

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Last Friday, the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), onde of the biggest universities in South America and responsible for 15% of all research done in Brazilian universities, released its new website in our beloved CMS.

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Steph & Chris from TopNotchThemes will be giving a session at the Berkeley Drupal Users Group meeting on Thursday, July 24th from 12-1:30pm. We’ll be covering the process of finding, reviewing, and selecting the right theme for your Drupal site.

Should you hire a design firm to create a fully custom theme? Do you have mockups already? Are you working on a low-budget project and need to know the best way to modify what’s out there? How can you tell if a theme is any good? We’ll answer this and more!

Get more info and directions here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/12774

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motionblur posted a photo:

After one of the Drupal workshop sessions, some of the attendees participated in a historical walkabout hosted by the Providence Historical Society.

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This image is licensed under a "Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial Share Alike" license. If you use this image within the terms of the license or make special arrangements to use the image, please list the photo credit as "motionblur studios" and link the credit to www.motionblurstudios.com.

motionblur posted a photo:

After one of the Drupal workshop sessions, some of the attendees participated in a historical walkabout hosted by the Providence Historical Society. Tim Hortons is a Canadian fixture (Canada's version of Starbucks) and I was surprised to see one this deep into the US.

~~~

This image is licensed under a "Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial Share Alike" license. If you use this image within the terms of the license or make special arrangements to use the image, please list the photo credit as "motionblur studios" and link the credit to www.motionblurstudios.com.

motionblur posted a photo:

After one of the Drupal workshop sessions, some of the attendees participated in a historical walkabout hosted by the Providence Historical Society.

~~~

This image is licensed under a "Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial Share Alike" license. If you use this image within the terms of the license or make special arrangements to use the image, please list the photo credit as "motionblur studios" and link the credit to www.motionblurstudios.com.

DevelopmentSeed posted a photo:

Blog post comign soon, but here is the module: drupal.org/project/spaces

DevelopmentSeed posted a photo:

here is an example of Drupal's Spaces moudle in action. Check out drupal.org/project/spaces... blog post coming soon.

We do a lot of work building portals and intranets that provide collaborative online spaces for professional communities. Some of these projects are completely private sites, and some are open to larger user groups. In each case we need to provide a toolset that could be configured differently for each site and frequently tweaked in particular groups. To do this we've built Spaces. It's a module that leverages Organic Groups to relate users and content to groups, and it extends context_ui to define 'features' that can be control individually in each group.  Spaces also makes assumptions about how you want groups to work and so is able to reduce the options available when creating groups and posts in groups, making the group creation and content posting processes more intuitive.

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So the past couple months have been completely nuts trying to get Drupal Jumpstart out the door (one month left! eek!), I haven't had the chance to write about this.

Tomorrow, I'm headed to San Francisco, California for BlogHer '08, and will be co-presenting with Marianne Masculino from WordPress on Saturday about how to participate in an open source community; I of course will be talking about the Drupal community. :)

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