The Seattle Drupal Users Group met for a Drupal Camp yesterday. It was an all day affair, with Drupal developers hiding out in one room learning about such things as theming and jviews with Robin Barre and noobs like me in a larger room with Gregory Heller from CivicActions doing a so-called Barn Raising. Donald Lobo from CiviCRM also happened to be there and we took adantage of the opportunity to sign a contract and review the specs for the CiviCRM component of the Kabissa African Voices project. It feels good to be implementing CiviCRM at long last, after years of planning and false starts with other vendors, and I very much like the way we are doing it.
Back to the Drupal Camp: I found the Barn Raising to be very helpful - we basically learned all about Drupal, a leading open source content management system, by planning and implementing a Drupal site in a day. I was able to get alot of my questions answered which will help me a great deal in finalizing the migration of the Kabissa site from Joomla to Drupal (keep your eyes peeled on http://www.kabissa.org for a new site appearing shortly!). Roland Taglao from bryght.com came down from Vancouver. Roland took loads of photos which presumably he will upload to his DrupalCamp Seattle 2007 set on flickr and recorded video which is currently available, in rather raw form, at http://ustream.tv/roland. The Seattle DUG is a lively group, and I very much enjoyed and appreciated the open, friendly atmosphere. I hope to make sense of my notes here, but for the moment have just pasted them in below. Read on at your own risk!
Oh, and before you go: yes, I did go watch Candy Mountain on YouTube as strongly recommended by Gregory. 
What is it, a morality story teaching about the perils of peer pressure?
Continue reading ‘Camping out with the Drupallers in Seattle’
I was psyched to see my Casting a ballot for Africa blog post on the frontpage of the Netsquared.org website, and various blog postings about the Kabissa 2.0 proposal at WhiteAfrican.com, globalvoicesonline.org, and Meandering Passage - wow, thanks everyone for helping to get the word out. It would be stunning if plenty of projects oriented towards Africa and the global south were to be among the finalists for the Netsquared Innovation Award, which is being decided between now and Saturday, April 14th at noon. And I certainly hope Kabissa 2.0 is among them!
Netsquared.org is an initiative of Compumentor (the same folks who created Techsoup.org) and is creatively challenging advocacy groups and nonprofits to make good on the promises of the Internet for revolutionary change. According to http://www.netsquared.org/about:
Our mission is to spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations.There’s a whole new generation of online tools available – tools that make it easier than ever before to collaborate, share information and mobilize support. These tools include blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasting, and more. Some people describe them as “Web 2.0″; we call them the social web, because their power comes from the relationships they enable.
Last year I attended their first conference, which was a rather loosely organized event exploring the power of Web 2.0 for social change. I was interviewed then, in fact, about Kabissa 2.0. This year promises to be more “action oriented” - especially given the grandiose competition going on at netssquared.org right now. Last month they issued a call for proposals for innovative Web 2.0 for social change projects, and this week the Netsquared community is voting on the amazing 150 proposals submitted. The top 20 will be represented at the conference - all expenses paid - and duke it out for the top prize for the Netsquared Innovation Award. Of those even the losers are no doubt going to get plenty of attention.
All in one week, the Joomla Open Source Content Management System has, in in the awe inspiring hype enabled words of its developer team, “pimped its ride“, “shifted Forge’s Gears“, and marked a “defining moment in the Joomlasphere”.
Today marks a defining moment in the Joomlasphere, which sees the launch of our gForge. Yes, the new ‘V8 hot rod’ has arrived — and we believe it will provide the best development environment for a number of reasons but primarily to future-proof and cope with huge load.
All giggling aside, I’m very pleased by these developments. Joomla is not messing around, and I am hopeful that this effort to future proof their forge (where Joomla software and extensions live) means the much anticipated public release of Joomla version 1.5 is nigh. The Kabissa website is built using Joomla 1.0 and we actively promote it to our African civil society members, and 1.5 promises to be even more powerful and userfriendly. I know we are eagerly awaiting 1.5 because it has been more than two years now since we adoped Mambo, which became Joomla, and there has been no major new release in all that time.
This may be old hat to many, but I always have to go searching for reminders of how to do stuff like this. When I set up a new Joomla site I find it useful to put it behind a password while it is still a “work in progress”. Today while Googling “apache .htaccess” I found alot of very confusing guides and password generators - but at the end of the day it was the elated.com article How-To: Password protecting your pages with htaccess that saved me.
The elated.com instructions worked well for me because I have command line (SSH) access to my server - most people will be looking for a control panel feature for password protection. Usually on the Kabissa server I would use the Plesk control panel for this. The SSH instructions at elated.com took me about 15 seconds:
- navigate to httpdocs dir (or whatever dir will be password protected)
- htpasswd -c .htpasswd admin (then type in password when prompted, and repeat)
- copy htaccess contents from elate.com article to clip board:
AuthUserFile /full/path/to/.htpasswd
AuthType Basic
AuthName “My Secret Folder”
Require valid-user
- create .htaccess file and paste in contents (correcting AuthUserFile location)
- Test in browser.
The Plesk control panel is more user friendly but even with a good Internet connection it takes at least several minutes to log in via a web interface, browse to the domain, click on the “directory” icon and type in the username and password to create the password protection.
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