While Gregory arrived in Cape Town word got through that The Trek, the website dedicated to his quest, won the category "Best Personal Website Built With Drupal" at the inaugural Blue Drop Awards. That's what we call perfect timing!
The honours, which were voted by the Drupal community, didn't stop there. Fotobout, the pet project of Andrew and Michael, claimed third place in "Best Interesting Website Built With Drupal".
At the inaugural Blue Drop Awards 200 nominees in nine categories fought for the honours. We are thankful for the votes we received by the community and the awards we gained by it's help.
You might have heard that Drupal community has initiated the Blue Drop Awards to celebrate it's innovation. In nine different categories the Drupalistas can vote for their favorites and give credit where it is due.
Of course we also nominated some of our own sites.
Our entires:
- Best Business Site: Amazee Labs and KMU Businesspartner
- Best Marketplace Site: Immogoms
- Best Nonprofit / Education: Sosense and Institute for Entrepreneurship
- Most Interesting Site: The Trek and Fotobout
- Best Personal Site: The Trek
Additionally every site, regardless of the category it is in, can be nominated as Best Drupal Website of 2012.
You can vote, if you have an account on Drupal.org, until April 6th at midnight and the winner of each category will be announced on April 10th.
If you experience any issues with voting or signing up, then this page might help.
If you missed Michael and Kathryn's Birds of a Feather session on Responsive Web Design at DrupalCon here is your second chance to benefit from their knowledge. Tomorrow Wednesday 28th March our Responsive Design experts will be talking in a Acquia webinar, together with Jake Strawn, creator of the awesome Omega base theme, about:
- What Responsive Web Design means and which technologies are behind it
- How Omega helps developers implement a Responsive Web Design website
- How Responsive Web Design affects planning and implementing a site
- How to plan a responsive theme that can be implemented across environments with hundreds of sub-sites or a whole Drupal distribution
- Tips and tricks on how to implement a Responsive Web Design with Drupal
There will be two separate one hour long installments one at 3:00 pm (Zurich Time / GMT+02:00) and the other at 7:00 pm (Zurich Time / GMT+02:00).
Please note that a registration on Acquia's website is required to join these webinars.
Update: If you missed the webinar, here is you change to view the recorded session:
March has been an exciting month for Amazee Labs. In the last couple of weeks we attended two photo-worthy Drupal events: the SXSW spinoff, Austin Drupal Bash, and DrupalCon Denver.
Austin Drupal Bash 2012
On Monday, March 12th we headed to Austin, TX for the first annual "Ask an Expert" Drupal Bash session. Drupalistas from Four Kitchens, Phase 2, Zivtech, and other hard-hitting Drupal agencies were in attendance.
After the meetup, we took to the streets of downtown Austin to experience the lively vibe of SXSW. Major streets were shutdown to accommodate the mass volume of "techy" pedestrian traffic. :)
DrupalCon Denver 2012
The following week we headed north from Texas to the mile-high city of Denver, Colorado for the annual North American DrupalCon.
For five days, we congregated with other Drupal fanatics for presentations and info-sharing meetups focused around our beloved, open-source CMS.
We networked, listened, shared ideas, and coded like crazy:
The recent release of our responsive Drupal 7 website was even featured in a session on our favorite contrib theme, Omega. (Thanks again, Jake!)
And as always, we'd like to extend a big "thank you" to the Drupal Community for infecting us (yet again) with a severe case of the "Drupal Flu."
Some of the photos above were kindly shared via the DrupalCon Denver Flickr group. You can visit the Flickr group here.
On Wednesday, March 21st at 3:45pm Michael and Kathryn will be hosting a Birds of a Feather session at DrupalCon Denver. The BoF will be in Room 501 and the main topic of discussion will be our experiences at Amazee Labs with Drupal & Responsive Web Design. See an overview of topics in the BoF here, and please join us for some serious RWD love.
Hope to see you there, Drupal friends.
With pride we refer to the latest (german) podcast from the great DrupalCenter.de podcast crew. Miro Dietiker and our Head Technology Michael Schmid (aka Schnitzel) answer Caseledde and SirFiChi's questions regarding the latest module sprint. It yielded 100 man days of joint programming effort, uniting Drupalistas from Switzerland, Germany and Austria. What the module's about, how the weather was, why sprinting make sense... listen in right here.
As mentioned in the initial post of our "Essence of a Web week" series, multilingual solutions are at the core of all of our projects. Despite lots of great improvements in Drupal 7, we are still losing valuable time on the rough edges of the multilingual system. To sort these issues out, the multilingual system's (i18n) co-maintainer Miro Dietiker, together with Jos Doekbrijder and our own Michael Schmid, organised a code sprint with the goal to create a module that simplifies the translation management for Drupal 7 and additionally integrates a possibility to work with 3rd party translation services such as Supertext, mygengo or Bing.
Just to give you a feeling of how big this event is: Based on the 100 pledged man days by the attendees for this week (16 - 22 January), we can estimate that the Drupal Community Switzerland, supported by our dear friends from Germany and Austria, will offer a module worth 200'000 Swiss Franc by Sunday night. (Well that’s the plan.)
Here are some impressions of the event:
(Photos by Michael Schmid)
I want to end by thanking the event’s main sponsor Microsoft for enabling this code sprint.
One day a week our team members are free to drop client work, learn, improve their developer skills and contribute to the Drupal community. We call it Jamazee day.
How do we contribute to our companionship? We organize Drupal events, do Drupal consulting, give presentations at Drupal meetings, help in the IRC (live chat), offer our knowledge in the Drupal forums, write patches or maintain Drupal modules. And we bet a fiver that Drupal Santa will be happy with our latest efforts. We haven't just built some wonderful showcases, but also extended modules with new features, contributed one new module, and fixed an obnoxious platoon of module bugs. Here a short overview what we did in the last days:
Maxlength module
Some fields have a maximum length but the user is not informed about this restriction. That is where the Maxlength module jumps in. It informs the user of the remaining characters right below the input field while updating the remaining characters with JavaScript. During the last projects we used the Maxlength version 3 which was still Dev. It didn't quite fulfill our requirements, so we extended it and contributed these functionalities back. At the same time we did a lot of bugfixing and popped a beer: We can now call the Module Beta. We'll need some more testing to call it stable, feel free to help! More on the project page.
CampaignMonitor module
We use CampaignMonitor for our clients' and our own newsletter campaigns. So far there was one important feature missing: update the user email during account updating on Drupal. Vasi jumped in and implemented this feature, which is now committed to the dev version. During our work we found this monstrous bug that was of course instantly exterminated.
Entity External Rating module
One of our clients requires her users to vote for other user's contributions via Twitter or Facebook. Since we couldn't find an appropriate module we build an API called Entity External Rating. We haven't yet integrated it with VotingAPI. Let's see what the future brings.
Views Nodes Split module
Yet another client requirement we couldn't solve with the contributed modules. We had to show the first node of a view in another view mode, then the rest of the nodes. This works with DisplaySuite, but unfortunately not when you want to show more then 20 nodes. So we build a slick module which can handle this: Views nodes split. And this module was featured in the weekly Module Monday from Lullabot, cool.
Want to contribute too? Check this page and get involved in a great community.
Let's keep rocking!
If the mobile subject has kept your life in a hurry, no worries: PCs are not about to disappear. According to the Economist (4017/8754), forecasters expect another 350 to 360 million of them to be sold this year and they say that the market is likely to keep growing. However, Morgan Stanley believes that in 2011 combined shipments of smartphones and tablets will overtake those of Desktop and Notebook PCs. The same for the Economist's latest chart in their special report on personal technology:
Mobile browsing is expected to outdo desktop-browsing by 2013. Not long ago Google has presented some fascinating insight to the mobile access of their search engine:
Indeed, mobile design has become of central importance for Amazee Labs' daily development work. The first thing that we had to synchronize was our terminology: What does mobile access mean? What's a native app? What's a web app? What's the difference between a web app and responsive design? And guess what - there are only few experts that dare to come up with a clearcut definition for all the terms mobile, especially when it comes to the separation between web apps and responsive design. Let's clear things up a bit:
Native App: Native apps are coded for specific mobile platforms with a specific programming language (ObjectiveC for iOS, Java for Android). Native apps have to be downloaded to your device, e.g. an iPhone, and allow for a fast and responsive user experience. They can access all of the devices hardware (e.g. sensors, camera, GPS, etc.), serve the user with push-notifications, and don't necessarily require web access. That's why mostly all games are native apps. The problem: Every time you want to serve users on another mobile platform you have to start coding from scratch. The better usability will therefore go at the cost of time, money and control.
Web App (in the narrow sense of the word): The Financial Times has launched one, Amazon too. Why? Because they wanted to own and control their client data and become more independent of operating systems and their providers, especially Apple. Unlike a native app, a web app is platform agnostic. It can serve any device, operating system, or browser. This means that doesn't have to pass Apple's lengthy app approval process. No software-clients have to be downloaded, neither do the software updates have to. Just hit refresh and you're done. Careful: Web app in the extended and original sense of the word includes Web App (in the extended sense of the word): Includes all software applications that can be accessed via the Web, basically using a browser, even the ones that don't work properly on a mobile device.
Responsive Design: A website that has been developed with responsive design will ask the recipient's browser for its screen resolution and serve the content in "liquid" manner. In other words, the content will get rearranged according to the height and width of the screen (so called viewport, you can simulate that by changing the sizes of your browser window). Whereas Native and Web apps (in the narrow sense of the word) ask for the operating system, the device and the screen resolution, the responsive designed website will only as for the viewport.
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How to use Views Bulk Operations and view modes at the same time.
0Recently we experienced an inconvenience while creating a view with a Display Suited based short view and tried to implement Bulk Operations on top of it. You might know that VBO can only be implemented via "Views Format: Fields".
1) Go in to the edit mode of your view.
2) To be able to include "Bulk operations" in your view, you will have to select "Fields" as the way each row has to be styled.
3) Add the "Bulk operations" field you require.
4) Add the "Node: Rendered Node" field. (It is provided via the Entity API module).