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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Sponsoring DrupalCon San Francisco 2010

DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 is just around the corner. DrupalCon is the most important event for the Drupal community around the world, bringing Drupal users, developers, designers and decision makers altogether. Until now there are almost 1300 confirmed attendees, but the organizers expect 2000; over 400 submitted sessions that you can vote for right now; 3 conference days, 2 code sprint days and a day of unconference, Drupal trainings and Core Developer Summit.

DrupalCon San Francisco is the premier conference for learning about all things Drupal. Come and learn how the leading open source CMS is changing the way we build and interact on the web. DrupalCon SF conference

As an Acquia Drupal Platinum Partner, Propeople is committed to support the Drupal community, therefore becoming a Silver sponsor for DrupalCon SF 2010.

"As the leading Drupal development company in Denmark and an Acquia Drupal Platinum Partner, the only one in North Europe and one of the seven worldwide, Propeople has the responsibility to be a part of the Drupal community and to support it. Sponsoring for DrupalCon SF 2010 is a great privilege to support the Drupal community." says Michael Drejer, Propeople CEO.

Propeople will actively participate at the event with six leading representatives: CEO Michael Drejer, Creative Director Michel Samucha, Production Manager Welin Welchev, Technical Manager Jens Beltofte Sørensen, Manager PHP Department Rumen Yordanov, and Marketing Manager Mihai Moscovici. Furthermore, Propeople is preparing mind-blowing surprises for DrupalCon SF attendees throughout the event.

See you soon at DrupalConSF 2010!

P.S. Vote for Propeople sessions for DrupalCon San Francisco 2010.

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Propeople sessions for DrupalCon San Francisco 2010

Session voting for DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 is opened and will last until Monday, March 1st, 2010. There is little less than two weeks to vote for the sessions you want to attend at DrupalCon SF 2010.

Propeople has three sessions containing unique inside information about most important and needed Drupal elements such as alternative to Panels module, tips and tricks to ensure scalability and stability, and we're even ready to reveal our inhouse secrets for performance boost.

A Refined Alternative to Panels Module
Have you ever tried Panels module? It is A-W-E-S-O-M-E! Yet, it gets difficult when not-so-technical people try to use it. It's like managing a Boeing 747 dashboard. There are so many options, features, and possibilities that users are simply afraid to click on them.

At Propeople we have been developing a refined alternative to Panels module that (1) is more friendly to the end-user, (2) defines the page structure in a little different way, and (3) provides, through hooks, broad extension possibilities to fit almost any site.

We have been working hard on this concept/module and now it's well-tested, stable and ready to be shared with the Drupal community. Vote for this session.

Tips and Tricks for Scalable and Stable Drupal Websites
Having the experience on more than 250 developed projects and always exceeding our clients' highest expectations, we have identified absolutely-must-have modules fitted for different types of sites, and to benefit your customer with the full extent of this great CMS. Also, our in-house research has shown there are many small enhancements that can make a big difference.

In this session we plan to share our most valuable tips and tricks, to help you build exceptionally scalable and remarkable stable Drupal websites. Vote for this session.

Drupal Performance Boost: Secrets Revealed
Based on our vast experience we pledge that Drupal performance can be vastly improved according to your website's goals. Indeed, using the right tools we always achieve the results of the Powerful CMS + Amazing Performance.

In this session we plan to share our best practices and explain our approach in building one of the biggest Drupal sites in Denmark, and probably worldwide. Also, we will share the secrets we teach our developers about how to identify the right way to build scalable solutions according to a particular site goals. Vote for this session.

Remember, every vote counts! Browse the DrupalCon SF session list and select other sessions you want to attend. The final session schedule will be posted on March 15th, 2010.

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Propeople 2009 retrospective

Amazing! This is the word to describe Propeople in 2009. It has been a tremendous year. In just a year Propeople (1) expanded by establishing a new office in Moldova, (2) gained the higher status by becoming an Acquia Drupal Platinum Partner and a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, (3) supported and actively participated at the most important events in the Drupal and Microsoft communities, (4) as well as developed unique and outstanding projects for distinguished clients.

It’s hard to explain all this great stuff in just few words, so we made a 2009 timeline of the major events at Propeople. Take a closer look, as you may find yourself in there too.

February
First trip to Moldova to establish the Propeople office in Chisinau, Moldova.
Michael Drejer, Welin Welchev and Michel Samucha came to Moldova for headhunting. In just three days they met most of the leading Moldovan web designers and web developers. One month later, Propeople had its first five designers and developers starting the work in Moldova.

March
Propeople become an official Acquia Drupal Platinum Partner, the company that provides products, services, and technical support for Drupal.
This partnership strengthens Propeople leadership position in cutting-edge trends and technologies, and forges Propeople as the leading Drupal company in Scandinavia, being the only Acquia Drupal Platinum Partner in the region (along with other 5 worldwide).

Michael Drejer, Welin Welchev, Jens Beltofte Sørensen, Denis Chakarov and Svilen Sabev attended DrupalCon in Washington DC.

Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) Award recipients from Propeople, Martin Kulov (VSTS MVP) and Coskun Sunali (ASP.NET MVP) have attended the MVP Global Summit, one of the largest multiday Microsoft MVP events. At the MVP Global Summit, MVPs receive access to exclusive technical content, participate in direct feedback sessions, and meet with Microsoft executives, product teams, and their peers from around the world. Microsoft executives and employees welcome MVPs to the Global Summit at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington and in Seattle.

April
Propeople got really serious about blogging and social media. Check out Propeople blog... (ah, you're actually reading it :) and follow Propeople on Twitter.

May
Propeople had the privilege to proudly support the Danish Drupal community by becoming a DrupalCamp Copenhagen 2.0 Platinum Sponsor.
"As the leading Drupal development company in Denmark and an Acquia Platinum partner, Propeople has the responsibility to be a part of the Drupal community and to support it. Sponsoring DrupalCamp Copenhagen 2.0 is a great privilege to support the Drupal community both in Denmark and around the world." said Michael Koefoed Steensborg Drejer.

June
Propeople Moldova is oficially registered and opens a fully functional office in Chisinau, Moldova. We're always glad to see you in Moldova.

July
Propeople representative, Martin Kulov, in the jury for Imagine Cup 2009.

Imagine Cup 2009, held in Cairo on July 02-08, is the world’s largest students contest on Microsoft technologies. Martin Kulov was invited to be part of the jury along with other very important and respected Microsoft professionals.

August
Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and Small Business Specialist
Propeople is officially a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. The MS Gold Certified Partner status represents the highest level of competence and expertise with Microsoft technologies, and the closest working relationship with Microsoft. Propeople was also assigned the special competency as a Small Business Specialist through proven competency in marketing, selling, planning, and building solutions for small businesses.

September
Live blogging from DrupalCon Paris
As an Acquia Drupal Platinum Partner, Propeople has actively participated at DrupalCon Paris and has provided live coverage from the conference on Propeople blog. Check out our live coverage on the DrupalCon Paris tag.

November
ProPeople is now a Microsoft BizSpark Network Partner
Being a BizSpark Network Partner, Propeople can now identify startup companies and individuals in the Scandinavian market and provide them with guidance on their future prospects, technological know-how and validate their eligibility for the BizSpark program. The program itself provides incredible value and the necessary tools to build highly innovative solutions using the latest Microsoft technologies.

December
One of the greatest news for the New Year is that DrupalCon is coming to Copenhagen in August 2010. Propeople will do all the best to make DrupalCon Copenhagen an awesome and unforgettable event for the global Drupal community.

We would like to say a big THANK YOU to all our friends and supporters for being with us in 2009. For the new 2010, we promise to exceed all your highest expectations through full commitment, genuine passion and hard work.

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Drupal for Governmental Websites

The tech world is buzzing around the news that WhiteHouse.gov is now running on Drupal, an open-source, free and totally accessible to the public Content Management System.

The hype is even higher because of the remarkably excellent reviews about Drupal coming from the White House administration. Macon Phillips, White House new media director told The Associated Press: "This (Drupal) is state-of-the-art technology and the government is a participant in it. We now have a technology platform to get more and more voices on the site."

In addition, Dries Buytaert, Drupal's founder, points out few crucial elements about WhiteHouse.gov, Drupal and open-source technology in general:

"Drupal is a perfect match for an open and transparent government. Drupal is a great fit to reduce cost and to act quickly. Drupal's flexibility and modularity enables organizations to build sites quickly at lower cost than most other systems.
Governments realize that Open Source does not pose additional risks compared to proprietary software they are not being locked into a particular technology... they can benefit from the innovation that is the result of thousands of developers collaborating on Drupal.
Drupal can help governments provide greater transparency, higher velocity, and more flexibility." source

However, there were concerns raised about the security level of the open-source technology. When it comes to security issues in Drupal, it is important to know that Drupal is made collaboratively by thousands exceptional developers that put all their best knowledge and skills into making Drupal the best CMS in the world.

"Security is fundamentally built into the development process because the community is made up of people from all across the world, and they look at the source code from the very start of the process until it's deployed and after," said Terri Molini of Open Source for America. source

Take a look at our Ultimate Drupal Showcase to see the multitude of governmental websites already running on Drupal from countries such as USA, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Canada, New Zealand, etc. Here are just some quick examples of governmental websites:

White House

French Government


Dutch State Service for Cultural Heritage


Belgium

More articles
Whitehouse.gov using Drupal
Thoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal
White House opens Web site programming to public
WhiteHouse.gov Goes Drupal
Obama elsker open source: Whitehouse.gov skifter til Drupal (Danish)

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Drupal for .edu

University websites are one of the most complex online systems: 1) hundred of thousands accounts, 2) wide variety of integrated components: class scheduler, financial calculator, school email, library, etc. 3) multiple sophisticated algorithms running simultaneously, 4) high degree of flexibility and customization, and many other smaller but vital components. Any .edu site requires a powerful and yet flexible Content Management System that would comply with all complex requirements, and it seems that Drupal is perfectly suited for university websites.

Many universities and colleges are already successful in using Drupal and we had presented some of them in our Ultimate Drupal Showcase. However, recently we had discovered that more universities and colleges are committing their .edu site to Drupal.

Rutgers University, the largest university in the state of New Jersey, is running rutgers.edu on Drupal.

Duke University is located in North Carolina and has about 13,000 undergraduate and graduate students. U.S. News & World Report ranked Duke's undergraduate program 10th among national universities, and the medical, law, and business schools among the top 12 in the USA. duke.edu is now on Drupal.

Strayer University, with more than 44,000 students and over 70 campuses, is also using Drupal as their primary CMS.

Portland State University (PSU), with more than 24,000 students, has recently switched to Drupal.

Stanford Humanities Center is also on Drupal.

In addition, you can watch Paul Albert of Cornell University making a case before administration to use Drupal and providing an excellent overview of how universities Drupal is perfectly suited for any .edu website.

More educational sites on Drupal are listed in the University & Research section of our Ultimate Drupal Showcase and on Drupal founder's, Dries Buytaert, personal blog, under the Education category.

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Vote for DrupalCon Copenhagen in 2010

It's time to choose the next location for DrupalCon 2010 in Europe. The voting is already open for the two candidates: Berlin and Copenhagen. It's a close tie right now (50/50), but the voting is open till October 13, and it's totally impossible to predict the final results.

The Danish DrupalCon Team has done a tremendous job and drafted an outstanding proposal to prove Copenhagen is the perfect place for the next DrupalCon. Among the many reasons, it would be worth to mention that the Danish Drupal community "has organized 3 DrupalCamps, some DrupalDay events, and a lot of meetups. The DrupalCamps have taken place in Copenhagen, each time with more than 100 attendees and a strong showing of international Drupal developers. At each camp, we have made a big effort to reach out to new users and businesses."

Denmark is quite unique in its approach for Drupal. Danish businesses, from small companies to large corporations, acknowledge Drupal as the best solution for their online needs. Just few stunning examples. The newly released fdm.dk is probably the biggest Drupal site ever built (and yes, it's made by Propeople). On the other hand, one of the biggest Danish media holding Berlingske Media is moving all their sites to Drupal. Drupal is hitting really hard in Denmark and the international Drupal community can show their support to accelerate this trend.

Having the DrupalCon in Copenhagen is an advantage for both the community and for the local business climate. The community can benefit from unique insights and case studies presented by Danish companies, while Danish businesses will feel rewarded to have the entire Drupal community focusing attention on them.

Denmark is the gateway to Scandinavia. Many Danish businesses have close connections in countries such as Sweden, Norway and Finland. DrupalCon Copenhagen will bring Drupal into focus in the entire Scandinavia and push Drupal beyond Denmark's border.

Finally, you know when in Denmark you'll probably drink the best beer in the world.

Vote now for DrupalCon Copenhagen!

P.S. DrupalCon Copenhagen proposal is both for 2010 and 2011, so make sure you vote for DrupalCon Copenhagen in 2011 also. Just to increase our chances.

P. P.S. You'll need to create a user account on Drupal.org to be able to vote.

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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DrupalCon Paris highlights

DrupalCon Paris was an awesome event, amazing speakers and presentations, outstanding participants, and super remarkable news.

Just before we get into all major news from DrupalCon Paris, note that videos and presentation materials will be available online by end of the week on DrupalCon Paris 2009. So here are the major news.

First, Drupal Gardens is "an easy on-ramp for people to experience the awesome power of Drupal without having to worry about installation, hosting and upgrading. Think of it as Wordpress.com or Ning for Drupal. Think of it as "Drupal as a service". The goal is to make the base service free of charge, and to introduce Drupal to hundreds of thousands of users. Drupal Gardens could play a key role in promoting the viral adoption of Drupal, and the name Drupal Gardens is key to that." source

If you are interested in taking part in the alpha program, or if you'd like to get notified about the progress of the product, sign up at drupalgardens.com. For more information please read the Drupal Gardens article. Also, see a video sneak peak of Drupal Gardens at the Propeople live blogging from DrupalCon Paris.

Second, Acquia Hosting is now available. "Acquia's hosting offering differs from generic hosting in at least two ways. First, the infrastructure will be carefully tuned and optimized for Drupal and deployment tools will be streamlined for Drupal development. Second, Acquia provided technical support for your Drupal site, the Drupal application, and all of the underlying infrastructure. Currently, the infrastructure is provided by Amazon AWS. The web nodes are load-balanced with Nginx and all content is replicated to two database servers that are configured in master-master configuration. Files are stored in a highly-available network filesystem on top of EBS volumes with frequent off-site backups. The shared cluster hosting is optimized for Drupal sites and backed by support from Acquia." source

For more information, please read the Acquia Hosting article and on Propeople live blogging from DrupalCon Paris.

Third, Drupal 7 code freeze and final preparation for the release. All major work on Drupal 7 should be done before November 15, 2009. In his presentation at DrupalCon Paris, Dries did not mention any release date for Drupal 7, but was pretty sure Drupal 7 will be released by the end of this year. See the entire process described by Drues' in the Drupal 7 Code Freeze slides from DrupalCon Paris.

Finally, the next DrupalCon will be in San Francisco, on April 18-20, 2010. Visit http://drupalconsf2010.org for more details about the event.

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Best Practice for getting started with Cloud Computing (EC2, Drupal & MySQL) - DrupalCon Paris live blogging

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Drupal ingredients - DrupalCon Paris live blogging

This is an interactive session that implies public participation.

How to choose good modules?
There are over 40000 modules on drupal.org
http://drupal.org/project/usage
http://groups.drupal.org/similar-module-review
http://drupaldashboard.com/node/43
issue queue - active, but not too active
maintainer - active for a long time
maintainers - more is better
ask personal friends
ask industry friends - http://groups.drupal.org/libraries
code style, use standard coding procedures - http://drupal.org/project/coder

Excellent modules you may need... find them here http://drupal.org/project/
Admin
Views
CCK
Webform
Wyslwyg + some external library/libraries
Token
Pathauto + Path Redirect + Global redirect
Panels
ImageField + ImageCache
Flag (or Nodequeue)
Views Bulk Operations (VBO)
Content Profile (profile.module performance?)
Profile module (Contenr Profile performance + future?)
monkey pants
...

Image Gallery
Views
ImageField (therefore CCK, Filefield)
ImageCache
Taxonomy (galleries)
configuration
Custom Breadcrumbs (therefore Token)

Social Networking Site
OG
Notifications
Flag + Flag Friend
Panels for user pages

Spam
Automated: Mollom, Spam, Akismet (no), Captcha + ReCaptcha
Manual/community: Flag + Flag Actions, VotingAPI + A slice of custom code, [either of those] + VBOwn your face with easy sauce!

E-commerce
Ubercart
Ubercart
Ubercart
Ubercart
Ubercart

Here is the session official presentation - http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dcv55663_82d9m66bdz

Please submit your favourite/useful modules.

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Drupal and Microsoft - DrupalCon Paris live blogging

PHP on Windows
around for a decade
most often used only as a development environment

What is needed? - 5 steps of enlightenment
streamline Windows Web Server Installation
improve PHP on Windows
ass Microsoft value to PHP
insert Microsoft values to existing PHP projects
web application installer

Microsoft started to deliver stuff to address issues
- MS Web Platform installer: free download, turn your PC into a virtual server
- application installer included

MS worked with the community do solve the issues
gain feedback from the community

PHP 5.3 is most significant update for Windows.
code is lighter and totally transparent for users
PHP on Windows was modified to run the Windows way, and not Linix

Future
Active Directory connectivity for PHP
Word & Excel reading and writing
more Windows Live services
Exchange connectivity
PDO Driver

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