LevelTen has been practicing Scrum, mixed with other agile practices, for about a year and a half now. While we have solved plenty of challenges this past year on figuring out how to use the Scrum framework to fit our company, we still have a lot to learn on how to be truly agile. The challenges we face were really brought to light during Mike Cohn's ScrumMaster Certification course I took early this week.
There are a myriad of ways to improve Drupal site performance by tweaking your website's server settings, but what about websites hosted in a shared environment? The contributed module, named "Boost," may be the answer for performance improvements for Drupal websites hosted on shared servers.
Besides the obvious possibilities for a Drupal boom in 2010 (launch of Drupal 7), there are several other reasons that may spark an increase in popularity.
The fact that whitehouse.gov launched on Drupal was huge news in 2009, but with the recently published "Open Government Directive," the whitehouse site may be just the tip of the iceberg for Drupal.
One of our clients was looking for a solution for their user base to purchase yearly memberships with Drupal. Members would be able to access additional sections of the website. After searches on the Ubercart website and Drupal.org forums, I found a pretty good solution. Ubercart is an extremely powerful e-commerce system and their support for "buy a role" makes memberships a breeze (once you know how to set it up of course!). Here is the step-by-step solution I set up for our client:
Our species thrives on speed and efficiency. As James Gleick's book, "Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything," implies, we are "instant" addicts of the manic 20th century. The need for instantaneous transfer of information is in our veins and it translates to our creation of technology and the web.
Campaign Monitor newsletter service is, in my opinion, top of its class, so I became excited when I found two Drupal modules that use the Campaign Monitor API. One module gives you the basics for users to sign-up on your website, and the more advanced module allows you to map website fields to existing ones set up on the Campaign Monitor website. I would recommend only enabling one at a time.
As web browsing on mobile devices is increasing in frequency and ease of use, the need for mobile optimized websites is pressing. The Drupal community has picked up on this need and have developed modules specific to the display of mobile websites.
Drupal and its contributed modules have proved to be a useful system for website SEO, making it clear cut and simple to configure and/or automate URLs, page titles, and meta data. Below are several contributed Drupal modules in order to jump on the Drupal SEO bandwagon.
Activity Stream is a Drupal module that allows you and your users to aggregate social media feeds into one place. The default modules supports feeds from Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Last.fm, as well as allowing users to enter a Feed URL for import.
Drupal 7 will bring about a new way of implementing user profiles with the integration of CCK in core & support for CCK fields for users. In Drupal 6, site builders rely on a core module called "Profile" or contributed module called "Content Profile" to create user profiles.
