An update to David Mercer’s now two year old Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites, this version has been updated for the CMS’ latest revision and guides the user through from setting up a development environment and installing drupal through to building custom themes and deploying a fully built site.

The book is designed to be read sequentially and assumes very little prior Drupal knowledge, though a little familiarity with the interface would be helpful, and a lot of willingness to explore and experiment are going to be necessary for complete newcomers. The first few chapters–focussed on explaining the benefits of using drupal and guide the user through the initial setup–are a little clunky and may deter those not comfortable with installing databases and scripting languages. The style improves as the book progresses and Mercer covers his topics well, with a considerably better structure than several Packt publications I’ve seen lately. (sadly the book retains Packt’s )

Some of those topics are fairly complex and it might have been good to have a few more directions for exploring the power of taxonomies and getting to grip with best practices in designing them. Given the range of documentation (on blogs and elsewhere) available online, more references to resources outside the book would have been a useful addition. But the fact that Mercer takes users beyond the very basics is to his credit, and it’s very good to see coverage of jquery, CCK, caching, and other topics that are key to recent versions of drupal but which could easily have been glossed over.

This is not a book for the seasoned developer coming from another platform or for those who have already have ample drupal experience (others have that covered) and it’s not really the “user manual” I’d like to find to hand on to drupal-using clients. But for those with an itch to build their own site and a sense that drupal might be the right tool, this volume is well worth a look.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher. You can find it at packt, amazon US, amazon UK and all sorts of other places.

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Four years ago, give or take, a small group keen to see how their individual steps towards a more generous way of living added up, came up with the idea of A Year Of Living Generously. Through the web a group of people could signal their commitment to various steps that might help their communities inch closer to the way they’d like them to be. Drew built a website for the nascent group. That year became two, and then three, and the community grew. A few like-minded projects emerged, though mostly focussed on all things “green” without so much on Generous’ other concerns.

Last autumn, partially motivated by the impending launch of a book containing many of our actions, a group of us gathered to talk about refocussing Generous, and I was asked to pick up the technical lead as we implemented a new design (driven by the work of Wilf, Chantal and Paul), added a few features, and prepared a new business model.

Two weeks ago we quietly launched that new site, and today we announced it to our members. It only seemed appropriate to mention it here too. You can find it at generous.org.uk.

(For those who are wondering, I do hope to post something other than project announcements here some time soon but as you can imagine, shipping takes priority over writing.)

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One of the numerous projects I’ve been juggling over the past few months has been a redesign of the Greenbelt Festival website. That redesign went live late last night.

Working from Wilf’s designs I initially built new HTML and CSS templates and began to establish some rules for how we’d handle the new image management requirements for a site that is now very photo-heavy. When it came time to apply the new designs to the CMS, however, it became apparent that there was a much bigger job ahead.

That CMS (a bundle of custom PHP that I had inherited) has grown over time and within some quite onerous server configuration constraints to a point where it was due a significant overhaul. Sticking with PHP was a fixed requirement as we’re relying on various APIs and a server architecture that wouldn’t be happy with me shifting to, say, rails, but already having the problem domain mapped out and the opportunity to radically simplify a few things meant I got to enjoy the feeling of stripping out a lot of code without impairing functionality.

One note that Derek Sivers made in his controversial blog entry last year about switching from Rails to PHP was that working with Rails had made him a better PHP developer. I’ve found a similar effect. I have no intention of leaving the world of Rails (I still prefer it by orders of magnitude), but tackling projects like this in PHP are a reminder that working for a while with really good tools is likely to encourage you to seek out best practice in whatever environment you end up in.

Ruby developers who occasionally work on PHP projects as I do may be interested to note that we are using capistrano for deployment, and I intend to use rspec for some testing. I’ll try to write that up once it’s in place.

With a refreshed CMS, new templates, and some standardisation of our many javascript files on top of a jquery foundation, Paul, Greenbelt’s was able to manage the photos and copy to turn that new look into a vibrant and content-rich new site. You can see a few notes he wrote about the redesign on the site.

There’s still a fair way to go. I’ve got a lot of tests to write in order to make it easier for us to make further changes, and various aspects of the site are more than ready for a more fundamental rethink that will let the festival open up its archives better, but all concerned are very pleased to present the fruit of our labours.

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While my live blogging efforts focussed on the more formal sessions at ecampaigning forum, most of the event’s time and content was spent in groups following the Open Space methodology. The gatherings for people to suggest sessions were instructive in themselves as they gave considerable hints as to the key concerns of ecampaigning practitioners.

How to engage with the big social networking sites, whether to create your own, organising around big events (such as G8 summits and climate conferences) and ways of managing decentralised/coalition campaigns were some of the big themes, but the sessions covered a wide range beyond that such as engaging with young supporters, or older supporters, choosing content management systems, operating on a tight budget, pooling resources/tools and one hastily agreed discussion of twitter. What follows are a few notes on things that struck me.

The twitter session drew a mixture of existing users, aware onlookers, and newcomers. A lot of time was spent exploring existing uses of the site with examples such as teamtibet’s usage to co-ordinate protests around the olympic flame and Downing Street’s account. Most people seemed taken with its potential for short term co-ordination, but many questions arose about its potential for long term campaigning beyond informing core supporters of news updates. Being seemingly the longest-serving twitter user there, it was interesting to hear responses to a tool I’ve quickly come to take for granted

A recurring theme was the adoption of drupal by a number of the big agencies. Most seem keen to contribute code back to the community, along the lines of AI and CivicActions‘ assets module. I’ve mentioned my mixed feelings about drupal before but am hopeful that through events like this we might be able to resolve some of the issues that frustrate me.

I brought up Russell Davies’ 2008 - the year of peak advertising in conversation over breakfast on the first day and that phrase recurred a few times. There’s a general awareness that the last few years have brought lots of opportunities to attract attention by simply being quick to adopt some new “web 2.0″ tool, but that won’t last. It didn’t seem like there was a sustained discussion or much sense of where to go next, but working hard to attain attention has been the life of campaigners for a long time and so perhaps this is just another step in that journey?

There’s clearly a growing sense of how hard it is to influence big summits where the final communique is often planned months in advance. Gatherings of world leaders are a great opportunity for media coverage and to present the “actionable moments” that Ben Brandzel spoke of, but they’re now when the real chance for change occur. It’s vital to find ways to turn the energy around these summits into sustained, directed action after the final communique is published, planning the next steps before the events themselves take place.

In the session on pooling resources and tools a number of questions came up about the ethics of collaborating with big players like google (who have just been on a big outreach programme for their new Google Earth offering for NGOs). The data provided and the tools offered by the likes of Google can be a great boon to charities operating on tight budgets, but at the expense of ceding a lot of control and a lot of attention data (and with providers like facebook there are concerns about things like this). It was obvious that there is some desire to develop open source tools that provide similar tools, but it’s not clear whether the resources are there. Mention was made of open street map and I brought up the theyworkforyou api, and it definitely would have been interesting to have had people who could present on the usage of that; some concerns remain as to how ready those tools are for non-geeky end-users, which would be easy to resolve if someone were to direct the right resources.

I’m looking forward to seeing what other people bring up in their notes on the event, and what themes come out in the ongoing discussion. You can see my photos on flickr, find some content on technorati and check out the conference wiki for more. All my posts on the topic are gathered under the ecf08 tag.

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For the next couple of days I’m at the ecampaigning forum in Oxford and am going to attempt to live blog the main sessions as far as possible. These notes are largely unedited, so they’re likely to be a bit sketchy. For context, feel free to post a comment and I’ll catch up with them when I can.

MyActionAid Launched about a year ago. Built on plone which let them use out of the box tricks like forums, photo sharing, RSS, plus is open source so actionaid can re-invest in community.

Why bother building own online community?

More project goes on, the clearer the reasons become.

• Build closer relationship with supporters. Not UK-based service delivery org, this helps us get closer to them and add value for them
• More control of features/development
• To make money! Double the giving rate compared to presence on other sites. Wonder if that’s because of sense of closeness/more qualified relationship
• Cut out middle man, reduce fees paid to other services

What trying to achieve?

• Not competition with other social networks. Want supporters to be wherever they want to be (and link back to myactionaid!)
• People are proud of their profiles and link back to them
• Build interest groups.
• Fundraising helped them bootstrap/make case, but it pays for itself and they can diversify focus
• Going forward - empower supporters, build event-related networks

Photo sharing very popular feature. Offer unlimited public photo sharing, wonder if that will be scalable. Status updates (”twitter-esque”)

500 active supporters, meaning they are raising money. Most activities raise ~£1000 but some up to £10,000.

Cons of setting up own network/Advice

Really they are risks. Haven’t solved them all, but they are mostly opportunities too. Make sure resource well.

Question about how deep it goes. How much content is put in? What is supporters’ journey?

First website ever launched empty! They put very little in: event listings, news from actionaid homepage RSS feed (low maintenance). People seem to gain from the experience. Some go and visit projects. Does work a little as recruitment, but haven’t really marketed site yet. Communication strategy about to kick in.

Cost?

Undisclosed! Most of the investment was time getting people on board, making sure infrastructure in place, developing response mechanisms for users’ contributions. Money it’s brought in made business case for more sophisticated hosting platform, so revolutionised their IT infrastructure.

How do staff interact with it?

Community Fundraising Group work very closely with site. Thrilled with deepening relationship with supporters.

How reached critical mass?

It is vital. Site doesn’t behave like normal website. (ed: not sure this answered the question…?)

Did it pay for itself?

Yes. Pretty quickly.

There’s a facebook logo on screen?

There’s a facebook app that shows info from your myactionaid profile. it’s just launching.

What’s the rate of growth like?

Went up at the beginning! Grew rapidly. Levelled out for a while. Now growing steadily.

Now wondering what other ecampaigning tools they can provide to members.

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