Blog: CivicSpace

Adding content to Google Base and thinking about Drupal

A couple weeks ago when the not-yet-released Google Base briefly
popped up online, a bunch of tech bloggers became really excited by
this mysterious, new service to organize classifieds and other
listings, possibly similar to eBay or Craigslist. Honestly I looked at
a couple of screenshots, went back to playing with a new ringtone, and
totally forgot about it.

But as I was looking back over
some news, I finally had the time to see what all the hype was about
and wondered why I hadn’t heard anything about it lately. Well, to be
fair, the reason there hasn’t been more hype is because there isn’t
anything new to report.

What really strikes me about all this chatter is the lack of discussion on how to communicate with gbase.

For
example, this screen shot looks like a step by step guide to uploading ‘an item.’

Yet the description on the main page of gbase reads:

I am always telling clients how big the Drupal developer community and how responsive everyone is and why that is the real reason we use the great software. So how big is the Drupal community?

Here are some stats I just got yesterday from Zack Rosen at CivicSpace.

Eric and Ian have been looking for a better “email this page to a friend" module for a while. Drupal currently has two modules with this kind of functionality, but for various reason neither really did what we wanted. A few months back Ian swapped out the emailthispage module for the forward module, and so what I’ve done is take the forward module a little bit further.

We want our sites to send emails with a crisp and clean look and
really were not happy with the plain text emails which the forward module currently produces. We had the plain text vs. html discussion internally and decided that for what we needed html emails were the way to go. Using html really lets us really produce a clean and organized looking email, and one that can include an image or two as well.

This morning we launched www.dcpak.org, just a week following the devastating earthquake in South Asia that has left upwards of 40,00 people dead in Pakistan. We built the site for the local Washington DC based NGO, ImPak, to help keep people informed of the relief effort. The goal of the site is to provide timely information on how people can help existing relief organizations that are already on the ground.

It has a great list of places to donate and probably one of the best resource libraries listing other sites focused on the relief work and writing about the devistation.

Development Seed announces the release of our modifications to the Letter to the Editor tool originally created by Downhill Battle Labs. Changes to the module include several functions which make management easier for the admin of the Letter to the Editor.

"It looks boxy..." "Drupal sites look boxy..." "They all have three columns..." "They all look the same..." You hear it a lot about CMS and no more in particular about Drupal or CivicSpace sites. What do you want it to look like? Some organization is necessary for both humans and machines to produce a website that is readable and functional for the maintainers. The developers must keep this in mind. Would it be a bad thing if your corporate website looked like a Jackson Pollock painting?