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I receive a fair amount of inquiries from people who are in the process of building out video based communities on top of the Drupal platform. The most important questions center around the functionality related to uploading, transcoding and storing video. What modules or techniques can be used to fully integrate community submitted video to a Drupal site?

The Basics 

It's important to note that there are three basic functions that need to take place in order to have a fully integrated video community built on Drupal. Users will need to upload videos. Those videos usually get transcoded to Adobe Flash on the server so that they can be presented in a web based player. The video then needs to be stored and delivered on demand from a server.

There's no one single way that Drupal supports the three functions required to power a video based community. So it's on the site developer to do some research and testing to figure out the method that will work best for them.

Budget Makes A Difference

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Part of my job is to help existing Drupal-users with their projects and sites. Sometimes this means upgrading, fixing some bug, or helping them get some new feature implemented.

What strikes me, is the amount of security hazards I encounter. I am not saying that I am the Perfect Developer, but I have a good knowledge of what makes a secure site secure, about what configuration break that security and so on The amount, and criticalness of the issues I encounter make me often think that we should really get some ranking or rating done in the Consultants-pool. Most of my clients are clueless themselves, so the ones who deliver or install a Drupal site for them, should really spend more time on educating the client, good configurations and considerations and overall on quality and security in general.

Five of the worst things I found recently:

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Lullabot announced today the formation of a new company -- a joint venture between Lullabot, Bond Art + Science, and Ed Sussman, former president of Mansueto Digital. The new company will be launching an easy-to-use platform for groups, individuals and businesses to create powerful dynamic social websites. Historically, these sites required huge time commitments and expert developers; this platform will allow users to harness the power of Drupal and its wealth of add-ons with a streamlined point-and-click, drag-and-drop interface. With these tools, even newcomers will be able to build feature-rich multi-user websites that go beyond the boundaries of simple blog sites.

Lullabot will continue to provide all of the same consulting and educational services that they currently offer. The new company will be separate and distinct from Lullabot.

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Sometimes you need to override more than a theme function: the entire page needs to be overridden. Drupal 6 makes it rather easy to do this.

In the example below, we call hook_menu_alter(&$callback) to override the display of every single node page view.

Instead of returning a node page, we return "[author's username] is great... for me to poop on.".

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Today, Drupal rockstar and the Raincity Studios super-developer and South African Emissary, Adrian announced the release of Ægir 0.1 Beta1. Named for the Norse God of the Seas, this evolution of Hostmaster is a critical part of Bryght's hosting environment.

The hardwork of Raincity Studios and Koumbit software engineers, and other contributors, is helping take mass Drupal hosting to the next level and you can join the fun - start at the Ægir hosting system group.

Added this release:

• Drupal install profiles - can be localized to provision sites in various languages
• Improvements to the comprehensive inline documentation
• Installation wizard to modify and/or simplify the user interface

User-interface refinements, non-critical ancillary features, and a Drupal 6 version are on the immediate roadmap.

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No matter which side of the USA/Canada border you live on, it's impossible to ignore the political campaigns in full swing. Regardless of your leanings, no doubt the campaigns with polished social media strategies are enjoying advantages. Indeed, this is the first election cycle which 'Web 2.0" tactics are mandatory rather than merely optional or an after-thought.

Because Google (and the other search engines) efficiently index mostly all the pages within a site, visitors can obviously enter a site via hundreds of different on ramps. While this means the visitor may easily find the information they seek, the organization's time-sensitive objectives might not receive enough attention.

To rise above the noise, the savvy campaigner needs to transmit their message in a method in which people will receive and react to it with a clear and easy call to action.

A new module developed by Raincity Studios' Makara Wang will help the many politico sites using Drupal to harness their Google-juice and funnel their visitors to a desired actionable task.

The module is called "Roadblock" - a term which usually denotes a unwanted traffic snarl, but in this case, the roadblock is designed to focus the visitor's participation and funnel them towards a specific action.

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It's finally here! BADCamp 2008 will happen this weekend in Berkeley, California, with 27 informative sessions, BOFs, a job fair, networking and good times. I'm really looking forward to it.

As mentioned earlier, I'm presenting two sessions, and have posted the slides in PDF documents. They are:

• First Drupal Steps: From Download to Launch (description, slides)
• Second Drupal Steps: Improving Your New Site (description, slides)

See you there!

I am speaking both Saturday and Sunday at BAD Camp. Saturday I will be talking about Drupal Development Tools and Resources with Matt Cheney. We will demo tools we help build, like Drupal’s API reference and Drupal for Firebug, and other great tools we use to help build sites smarter and faster.

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Over the past couple of weeks, a few friends and colleagues asked me to give a run-down of what modules and projects I created or contribute to in the Drupal world. I started picking my way through them, and it was pretty sobering. (I think I'm going to need an intervention if I release even one more module...) This list leaves out the work that I do on Drupal Core, and doesn't include patches or enhancements to other modules, but it's a nice birds-eye view of what kind of stuff I'm doing in my copious free time. Ahem.

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For the past few years the Drupal Documentation Team has been led by Steven Peck (sepeck). Steven was the second person to take on this role (Charlie Lowe was the first), and he has done a great job. Not only has he grown the documentation team to include a lot of talented and hard-working volunteer writers, he has overseen the restructuring and reorganization of Drupal.org's documentation handbooks, greatly improving their structure and accessibility. Thank you Steven for the great work!

Like so many Drupal contributors, Steven works on Drupal completely as a volunteer. His day job has been demanding a lot of time lately, and he has decided to step down from being the Documentation Team Leader. That means it is time to pass the torch to the next person who can then sprint with it for a while.

One great thing about the Drupal community is seeing people grow into new roles and take more responsibility upon themselves. This is certainly the case for Addison Berry (add1sun), who in her two years working with Drupal has become involved with virtually every aspect of the Drupal project. Lately Addi has been more and more active with the documentation team, making her a clear choice in my mind to carry on where Steven left off. I'm therefore very happy to announce that Addison Berry, aka add1sun, is the new documentation team leader, effective immediately.

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For the past few years the Drupal Documentation Team has been led by Steven Peck (sepeck). Steven was the first person to take on this role, and he has done a great job. Not only has he grown the documentation team to include a lot of talented and hard-working volunteer writers, he has overseen the restructuring and reorganization of Drupal.org's documentation handbooks, greatly improving their structure and accessibility. Thank you Steven for the great work!

Like so many Drupal contributers, Steven works on Drupal completely as a volunteer. His day job has been demanding a lot of time lately, and he has decided to step down from being the Documentation Team Leader. That means it is time to pass the torch to the next person who can then sprint with it for a while.

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As a Drupal developer and recent memcache convert, I now know the joy of speedy caching.

Memcache actually comes with 2 modules: the main memcache code as well as "memcache admin" which, as far as I can tell, is really only necessary during devlopment and testing of the site (sort of the same way the Views UI module can be disabled after a site goes live).

When using Memcache with Drupal 5.x (it hasn't been ported to 6.x yet, but there is some ongoing work), there's a big "gotcha" that has gotten me on more than one occasion - the "show memcache statistics at the bottom of each page" option on admin/settings/memcache.

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pingVision is now accepting applications for the position of PHP Developer for enterprise-level corporate and community websites and web applications.

We're looking for a talented, experienced, detail-oriented person with an understanding of user experience, user interface design and information architecture. Familiarity with the Drupal content management system is desired, but not required.

This is a full-time position. We're looking for people living in the Boulder/Denver area.

A YouTube clone? In Drupal? Of course!

I was asked by the organizers of the Do It With Drupal seminar if I would like the opportunity to create a YouTube clone in Drupal and talk about that process with the community. Of course!

Do It With Drupal will take place in New Orleans, from December 10-12, 2008. Besides my YouTube clone, other showcase fantasy sites will also be presented, including Flickr, Twitter, and FreshBooks.com clones. All built with Drupal! And that's just the first day. There are some really big name folks presenting at the seminar, like Earl Miles, Robert Douglass, Gábor Hojtsy, John Resig (who wrote jQuery), Matt Westgate, Moshe Weitzman, Angela Byron, James Walker, and more! Seriously, check out the speaker list if you haven't yet.

Now that I've agreed to that, it means up all this personal time I just freed up from finishing up Drupal Multimedia (which goes to the printers on Monday!) will now go to building this fun site...

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On December 12, 2008, I'll be in New Orleans to talk about the exciting world of Drupal Search. In a first-of-its-kind event, the Lullabots have organized a "large-scale, 3-day learning event" that will bring together some of Drupal's most sought after speakers, as well as a number of other prominent internet personalities and luminaries. I'm looking forward to meeting some of the speakers who aren't necessarily known as Drupal rockstars (meaning they did something else to get famous):

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Does anyone know anything about the Google Calendar API project? It looks like it was moving along, and then after February, just dropped. If anyone is ever able to finish this, I know I sure would like to give it a try.

Thanks for any info/suggestions.

There is one way to let drupal know about a theme function or template. There are two ways to send variables to a template, but one of them has a lot of disadvantages.

We'll use two theme functions, with an identical template setup to illustrate these methods:

There's only one way, hook_theme()

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