Rachel's blog

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.

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.

Basic Integration

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.

Drupal, and its contributed social modules, is the perfect system to create a powerful, feature-rich, online social community or networking website, while limiting development expenses and time to get up and running. Here are the best Drupal modules, default and contributed, for social networking that LevelTen has utilized on our community websites:

I just installed the Drupal module GCal Events, which pulls in a specified Google Calendar, and it's working pretty well besides a few "gotchas." First things first, read the documentation on this one. It's very important to know the extra steps needed to get this working and displaying in a format that works. The most important thing to note in the documentation is that you will need to download and upload "SimplePie" in order for the module to parse the XML feed it obtains from Google. Once the module and Simple Pie are installed, you might experience a fatal error message for memory. Version 6.x-1.4 of the module loads 2500 calendar entries, so this may cause some problems. If you experience this error, try installing the development