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Lullabot is pleased to announce the second annual Do It With Drupal Seminar. This 3-day event is focused on the configuration, architecture, and processes behind building successful Drupal websites and communities.

The event is geared at attendees with a wide range of Drupal experience. For new site-builders and decision-makers, DIWD will offer a great introduction to Drupal and the Drupal community. For more experienced Drupalers, DIWD will offer a great chance to pick up tips and tricks straight from the module developers themselves and a chance to connect and socialize with other Drupal professionals.

The Do It With Drupal Seminar will feature the following highlights:

• Examine and dissect successful Drupal sites
• Discover new site-building strategies
• Learn from Drupal's top developers
• Hear from social media and social networking experts
• Connect with other Drupal professionals
• Expand your Drupal knowledge

This commercially produced event takes place at the Marriott Hotel in New Orleans' French Quarter, December 9, 10, 11, 2009 and features sessions by many "big names" from both inside and outside of the Drupal community (see list of current speaker list below).

The current list of speakers includes...

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Whether it's for pleasure or business, or both, Twitter automation is a must for anyone who wants to use Twitter effectively. GoTwitr is a new site whose primary goal is to make it easy for people to grow and manage their Twitter communities.

It’s also a tool to help new Twitter users get started quickly and easily. GoTwitr’s unique invitation model makes it extremely easy for any Twitter user to get his friends and family connected to Twitter. GoTwitr uses a unique new concept to deliver quality followers, and promote you to other twitter users that share common interests and passions.

GoTwitr was built in Drupal 6. Drupal’s external site integration tools made it easy to bypass the normal Drupal registration and login and use the “Login with Twitter” service.

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Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization is a new Drupal book authored by Ben Finklea and published by Packt Publishing. It’s a practical, step-by-step guide that takes the mystery out of Drupal search engine optimization (SEO) by showing you the tricks of today's top marketing pros to achieve top ranking in the search engines.

Packt Publishing is generously offering a 15% discount to any Drupal.org readers. To purchase Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization with this discount, visit www.packtpub.com/drupal-6-search-engine-optimization-seo/book and provide the code DrupalSEO15 (case sensitive) at check out. Also, keep in mind that Packt contributes a portion of every book sale right back to Drupal!

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Packt Publishing, the company behind many well-known Drupal books, holds an annual Open Source CMS Award that recognizes open source content management platforms and their communities. In addition to bragging rights, winners also receive financial support for their projects in the form of cash prizes. Drupal has historically done very well in this competition, winning the overall award for the last two years running, as well as Best PHP Open Source Content Management System in last year's competition. This record of success is a tribute to the strength and passion of the Drupal community, as the awards are partially decided by popular vote.

In fact, Drupal has done so well in past years that the organizers of this year's award have retired it from eligibility for the overall award, instead pitting it against Joomla! in an all-new Hall of Fame category. In addition, they've created a Drupal Award to allow community members to vote fortheir favorite modules and themes. And if that wasn't enough, Drupal is also eligible for the Best Open Source PHP CMS award. All told, around $6,000 in prize money is at stake.

How can you help Drupal win again this year? Just go to Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Award Web site before October 30 and cast your vote in the following categories:

• Hall of Fame
• Best Open Source PHP CMS
• Drupal Award

And to provide a little extra incentive, three voters who go to the site and fill out a brief survey will also win a free iPod Touch.

Show your support for Drupal and vote today!

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Trócaire is a leading Irish overseas development agency that works with amazing people to bring about positive and lasting changes in some of the world’s poorest places. Last year, Trócaire spent over €60 million on 124 programmes across 38 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Their programmes are carried out with partner organisations so local people drive the whole process and, in turn, their own development.

The programmes aim to:

• Build a reliable way of life and help people cope with climate change
• Respond to emergencies and disasters
• Tackle injustice and defend human rights
• Address the HIV and AIDS crisis
• Support gender equality

Trócaire's annual 'Lent campaign' is the single largest fundraising campaign in Ireland and enjoys huge support from the Irish public each year. Trócaire's website www.trocaire.org has become a key fundraising tool for the organisation and an essential way to show supporters the impact of its work and increase awareness.

Annertech built the Trócaire site using Drupal 6 and many contributed modules. In general, we used Migrate to pull in the data from the existing CMS, CCK to build the content, Views to list it, and Panels to arrange the items on a page. For example, the home page is a panel page containing several mini-panels, views and other blocks.

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Since the 5.0 release, Drupal core has included an installer that supports installation profiles to setup and configure a site for a certain use-case. In theory this allows for people to create a better "out of the box" solution by configuring Drupal like a wiki, a conference, or a publishing site. If done right, installation profiles have the potential to help end-users get sites done faster and accelerate the adoption of Drupal. However, this promise has yet to be realized, and this core Drupal feature is currently being vastly underutilized.

As part of their grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Deproduction and Quiddities want to help realize the benefit that install profiles have to offer. The Drupal Association, with the support of individual and corporate sponsors, has put forth a matching grant to help see that it meets its mission of supporting the Drupal project. The potential to help address the usability problems of people trying to get started with Drupal is truly enormous.

Read on for details on how installation profiles work, why they are important, how packaging them will help, and the technical decisions behind the way the packaging scripts will work. Now is the chance to provide feedback which might make it into the code before it goes live by the end of November.

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TckTckTck is a GCCA campaign calling for a new fair, strong, binding, and international climate change treaty. The Global Campaign for Climate Action recently formed to build a global groundswell for a strong climate deal in Copenhagen this December. GCCA is a collaboration of International NGOs inspired by the success of the Make Poverty History campaign. GCCA's brand is TckTckTck, to indicate that "time is running out" and the web is at the core of GCCA's strategy.

With over 50 diverse and established NGO partners driving the bus, their own unique mandate as a central unifying force, GCCA had to balance two competing yet interconnected elements. First, supporting partners, ensuring they fill a unique role; adding value and always supporting, not competing with partner interests. Second, direct public engagement: providing a strong, unifying global center-point for media and world leaders; organizing new supporters who aren't reached by an existing NGO partner, and supporting new partners who have low online organizing engagement capacity.

The partner organizations are all running their own independent campaigns but using the TckTckTck brand, pointing to the website, and together, in less than a week, they aggregated nearly 1,000,000 supporters to the cause!

Advomatic built the TckTckTck site with Drupal 6 and several staple contributed modules. In general, we used CCK to build the content, Views to list the content, and Panels to arrange the lists on a page. For instance, the home page is a panel page with several Views blocks pulling in content.

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It's nearly 6 months since the release of Cracking Drupal, which makes for a nice milestone to talk about the book and mention a few related developments. Cracking Drupal was written by me (Greg Knaddison - or "greggles") with reviews and assistance from various members of the community with the well-known Károly Négyesi (chx) as the main technical editor.

The book's target audience is broad: site admins who know a little coding, developers who are deep in module development and selection, and front end developers (aka themers) who modify their template.php and tpl.php files.

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The Saint Louis Review is a local Catholic diocesan newspaper serving the nearly 500,000 member Archdiocese of Saint Louis. The newspaper has had a website since the late 90s, which was ported to a custom-designed CMS in 2001. The PHP/MySQL-based site ran quite well throughout the first decade of this millennium, but was in need of either a serious overhaul or a redesign, to go along with the paper's new tabloid layout in April 2009.

The decision was made in 2007 to port the website to Joomla, but after a few months, a new editor, and more work, it was determined that, due to its extensibility, flexible out-of-the-box permissions, and standards/SEO-compliant codebase, Drupal would be a better fit for the site. Work was begun in January of 2009 to transfer the custom CMS' articles database (over 17,000 articles) to a Drupal site, create a new template based off the colors and design of the new tabloid-format paper, and integrate an easier-to-manage ad system and back-end.

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There's lots of exciting news about Groups.Drupal.org which was launched over three years ago as a

a glorious hub of worldwide drupal user groups.

Three years since and there are almost 650 groups on the site and over 51,000 subscriptions to those groups with over 700,000 page views each month. A glorious hub indeed.

Many users will now enjoy the magic "single sign on" from bakery, but some accounts couldn't be synched automatically. If you have problems logging in to the site please follow the instructions on the account synch request form.

Along with the redesign and upgrade happening for drupal.org, Groups.Drupal.org is being upgraded. Moshe Weitzman is leading the charge on this effort. Moshe has decided that this upgrade makes a good point to pass along some maintenance responsibilities for the site to Josh Koenig and Greg Knaddison.

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Web designers have taken to blogging platforms as a foundation for their portfolio websites. It has always bothered me since, as a web designer, I believe in user-centered design. Blogging systems are not ideal for showcasing a portfolio, as it’s coming at the project from the perspective of “what’s easy to build and how can we fit what we want into it?”

I think a lot of designers feel overwhelmed by Drupal, because of all the capability and power it has. But Drupal is capable of not just managing newspapers and portals – Drupal can easily and efficiently handle small-time operations, as well.

I knew I needed to redesign my own website, www.headlinercreative.com, and I was determined to use Drupal. I approached the project like any client’s website, starting from the very beginning: figuring out the goals and purpose of the website, figuring out what content I wanted to display and the best way to display it. I wanted something that would be easy for me to use and update, and that would be intuitive for visitors to view my work and participate in blog discussions. I knew that whatever I came up with, Drupal would handle it superbly.

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