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Freelance Drupal services coming in 2009
From the start of 2009 I am going to be self-employed, and while I will still be working much of my time on the projects I've been working on for the past three years at OpenBand/M.C. Dean, I would also like to start taking on some small Drupal-based projects to go side-by-side with that.
Some of the services I am planning to offer in the New Year include:
- Drupal site creation
If you are looking to get a site set up for your small business or organisation, and you like the power that Drupal can give to your site, then I can set a site up for you to meet your needs. I'm particularly interested in creating sites based around geographic information or related to the tourism industry, but I will happily consider any project. - Drupal site setup support
If you need advice on how best to achieve your requirements with existing Drupal modules, I can help point you in the right direction and get you started with your Drupal site setup. This can either be on a remote basis, or on a face-to-face basis in the London area if needed. - Drupal module development
If there isn't already a module in the Drupal community to do what you need, I can help you by building a module to meet your requirements.
If you're interested in taking advantage of these freelance Drupal services for your project, please contact me to discuss your needs.
dankarran.com goes Drupal
According to my drupal.org user profile, it's been three years now since I joined the Drupal community, and in that time I've been involved with building a large Drupal-based collaborative platform at work, helped friends create Drupal sites and developed a number of small Drupal sites in a freelance capacity, as well as contributing a number of modules back to the community, but had not managed to get around to actually migrating my own website to Drupal. Until today, that is.
Today marks the soft launch of my new Drupal website, an initial version that has most of the content from the old site but still needs some user interface improvements and the like.
The blog is up and running, now also with RSS feeds for each of the main categories and also each of the tags. The photos are all in there, though I'm missing any gallery functionality at the moment, so they're going to be a little difficult to find for now.
Watch out for more over the coming weeks and months as I find time to make improvements, expand what's here and tie in with other services on the web like Twitter, Flickr and delicious.
Holiday cottages on Drupal
Last night saw the launch of the new Smeale Farm Cottages website (first launched back in 2000), helping market a new holiday cottage that they recently opened.
The new site features an improved availability calendar that makes it both easier to maintain and easier for visitors to understand as well as the ability for the customer to edit any of the pages themselves whenever they want to change any of the information.
Also featured is a location map thanks to data from the OpenStreetMap project.
As you might expect, the website is built using the Drupal open source content management system with the addition of the image module, a customised version of the zen theme and a heavily customised availability module to drive the calendars.
I'm hoping to release this availability calendar module back to the community as a new module in the near future.
How the GeoCMSs compare
At the State of the Map conference it was great to be able to meet up with two guys who also have interests in creating geographically able content management systems (GeoCMS), Andrew Turner who created the GeoPress plugin for MovableType and WordPress and Henri Bergius who is one of the founders of the Midgard CMS.
Before their talk on GeoClue we had a good opportunity to sit down and talk through some of the current functionality of the different systems, see where they differ, and try to agree on some common base functionality that we felt should be present across the different platforms.
The features included things like ability to save a location (obviously), how many locations could be used to reference each post, the presence of maps and which providers they used, the ability to post location information through the blogging API, the inclusion of Microformats (hCard), syndication formats (GeoRSS, KML, etc.), OpenSearch capabilities, reverse geocoding of coordinates to give place information, posting by email, and a couple of others.
When I get a chance I'm going to build up a table over on the Geospatial Content Management System Wikipedia page to compare the systems we talked about (WordPress, Midgard and Drupal) but also others such as Joomla, TikiWiki and Plone. Any input on those would be much appreciated as I haven't done much with them to date.
Update: I didn't notice that Henri had already blogged a little about this, and after the conference went off and added maps to Midgard using Mapstraction... cool!
Track OpenStreetMap diaries through RSS
A year ago I was really interested in seeing the community aspect of the OpenStreetMap website improve, and the recent update to Rails brought a lot of the functionality that I was looking for, with space to be tweaked and improved upon. Since I started to learn Ruby on Rails recently, what better way was there to help, but build on the functionality that others have put in already.
I outlined some ideas on the wiki and decided that some of my first priorities would be adding RSS to the diaries, making them easier to post to, improving the user profiles and also the messaging interface. I've added a few small changes over the past few days, but today saw the release of the biggest one so far: an RSS feed for all diary entries, so you can now subscribe to updates of everyone mapping on OpenStreetMap. Over time I'm also hoping to add other feeds for individual diaries, for your friends and also for those mapping nearby.
If you haven't used OpenStreetMap's diary feature, now is the time to give it a try and let people know what you're working on mapping at the moment. Right now, you can post to it by viewing your own diary (through your account page) and clicking on 'new post', but I'll be looking to make it easier for users to post as well.
Update: looks like it needs a little tweaking still, but the basics are there.
