OpenBand

I've submitted my session Proposal for Drupalcon Paris 2009. After some consternation about the title, I went with 'Replacing your Internal Apps with Drupal'. I think that's where this hits home--we're replacing an entire backoffice of work-process and communications tools with Drupal, and we think it's great.

I'm the current owner of a pair of Drupal modules which help integrate the Drupal content management framework with the Moodle learning management system. Drupal and Moodle are among the best open-source packages in their respective spaces, and are likewise both very popular.

We needed to display help content on different pages of a Drupal instance, and available solutions did not meet our needs for content management and node association. From this need, Context Help module was born. We originally had a Drupal 4.7 version, but it was not very scalable and became annoying to the users who did not like the “tooltip pop-up” format we had used.

After a lot of time working on another program, I’ve finally been able to devote some energy to the Draft Module that I created and currently maintain on the Drupal Web framework.

The main feature requested for Draft module was a PHP page view instead of forcing the use of Views module. While on my hiatus from Drupal, I brainstormed how to make the PHP version of the page as functional and easy to use as the Views version of the module, as well as allowing the administrator to alter columns.

My food poisoning at DCDC (don't eat rare meat in DC!) abated just long enough for me to attend an excellent BoF towards the end of Friday at Drupalcon DC 2009. The goal was workable configuration management in Drupal, and in no particular order, attending were:

XMPPFramework version 1 was a cluster of modules designed to provide XMPP functionality to the Drupal platform. The module cluster was originally designed as just one module: XMPPClient. This module was designed to provide a Thin Web Client tightly associated with Drupal so that users could launch it from their Drupal instance without having to enter their password or install any third-party applications onto their machine/device.

Drupal is a collaboration framework. It started as a simple system for managing conversations and files between friends in school, and has maintained that spirit through its many evolutions. But, as most things do, Drupal reached an age of maturity—it was time for the CMS to graduate and expand.

I feel confident declaring that everyone reading this post has at least seen an instant messaging client. From the early days of talking between terminals in command-line operating systems to the explosion of IM communication on services like AOL Instant Messenger, computer users have discovered and embraced the convenience and power of this electronic communication powerhouse.

It’s DruaplCon time, and this year, Openband team members are presenting two discussions. Darren Ferguson is talking about his XMPP Framework, the suite of modules that enables Drupal-hosted user-to-user chatting, multi-user chatting and real-time chat translation. Ben Lavender, Chris Johnson and Dan Karran are discussing our solutions for the unique challenges posed by enterprise-size systems and the hurdles still needing jumping.