Drupal for Education and E-learning is a must-have for any teacher, school or education institution considering a new school website, or technology-centric project in the classroom. Whether the reader has heard of Drupal or not, the book provides valuable insights, empowering ideas and simple instructions to help get any teacher or school on their way to having a powerful, useful and valuable learning resource.

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I have never done much cooking in my life. I prepare the occasional spaghetti bolognese, but that is about it. And when I say "prepare", I mean that I heat up pre-cooked bolognese sauce. Well, sue me.

Either way, to start off the new year in style, I set out to make my first soup ever. From scratch. I decided on broccoli cream soup as that is one of my favorite soups, and it only involved vegetables.

Guess what? The soup was delicious. There might be a chef in me! ;-)

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During the past couple years I've had some brief but rewarding content management discussions with Deane Barker from Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive.  Dean has worked with quite a few Web content management systems over the years and appears to be most passionate to using eZ Publish.  Naturally, our discussions almost always involve Dean talking about ez Publish and me talking about Drupal.  Unfortunately, as I am more of a system administrator than a developer, the information I have been able to provide him about Drupal has always been limited.

Well, it looks as if Deane Barker has finally decided to get on the Drupal learning curve and find out more about this great CMS.

I’m working with Drupal for the first time on a hobby project I’m doing with Seth Gottlieb (about which you’ll hear much more later…). Adam Kalsey — Drupal ninja that he is — is advising us on the technical implementation, and he’s been a great help.

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In just one short month FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting, is coming to Brussels again. Just like last year Drupal has its own Developers Room. The Drupal track is far from filled though so we're still looking for talk proposals and requests. The final date for presentation proposal is Friday January 9 so be fast!

You can keep up to date with Drupal Digest's FOSDEM feed.

Some comments I received for my post about coming to terms with Drupal requested a list of Modules that I trust. I considered several approaches, including starting a database of modules with my reviews. I decided against that--I would hate to sound authoritative on which Drupal modules are good and which are bad because I haven't used so many of them, so I'm just going to discuss my experience with some common modules and hope that it helps. This is absolutely just my subjective opinion having run these modules for over a year on Observer.com and Politicker.com. I will vouch for these modules to the extent they will only ruin your life if you use them badly. Of course, your mileage may vary wildly, and if you're running or starting a site of any scale, please don't just take my word for it.

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Every time I have to do a presentation on Drupal, I have to go on the hunt for a list of Drupal Powered websites. So, rather than looking each time, I am compiling a list here. I am kicking off the list with most of those listed on Dries website. I have excluded some from Dries list as they are not US based sites, which is my audience.

DivX Labs
Oxfam International
French Ministry for Health, Youth and Sport
ASI - European Space Agency
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Pearl Jam

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The Main tab for a Drupal deployment script configuration.

The graphics card on my development machine died New Years Eve and thus I am without a development environment for the time being. I will order a new graphics card and a few other parts today or tomorrow so I should be back in business within the week.

Sorry for any delays in development.

Thanks for the support. (chx has graciously donated to my cause. :) )

Image via Wikipedia

If anyone missed that deal, here is another for $97 off any yearly plan, and $51 off a monthly plan (no known expiration date).  The coupon code is rm0 (are-emm-zero), and, since all the dicounts are set to the maximum possible, I don’t get any kickbacks from anyone using this (just like I didn’t get kickbacks from the link below).  I’m just trying to save people money on some good hosting.  Go to Dreamhost to use it.

Via lifehacker:

DreamHost is running a New Year’s promotion right now. 95% off a 2 year hosting agreement which works out to $10.47.

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On January 19 and 20, 2009, in Cologne Germany, Commerce Guys and AF83 will be joining forces to offer Drupal Ubercart training (registration link). Drupal is a leading web content management system, and Ubercart is a full e-Commerce solution and shopping cart that is built on top of Drupal.

In the training you will learn how to build a web site for a rock band that features blogs, audio and video content, tour dates and an event calendar, fan forums, and an Ubercart-based store where fans can buy t-shirts and music downloads. The website will be based on Acquia Drupal so you will also get a glimpse into the Acquia Network and learn about the advantages of building your site with the support of Acquia. Everybody who attends will get a free Acquia Network subscription and some Acquia schwag.

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I previously posted about my search for my ideal content access module. Since then I've done a lot of searching and digging through the source code of all the most popular content access modules. I've come to realize there was really no module currently out there that had the features I was looking for. A quick review of the feature wish list:

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Since Dries blog post about Contributing back to Drupal, there's been a bunch of discussion about how Drupal companies should best do this.

I've only recently started at Zivtech, and although I've done plenty of on-the-job Drupal work, this is my first job at a true Drupal company. Zivtech's policy of giving its developers 20% time to contribute to Drupal was a big incentive for me to take the job.

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Drupal's taxonomy system is one of its most powerful features and also one of the more tough things to wrap your head around.  Taxonomy can be used to categorize content -- tags that identify what the content is about -- and this can extend to showing only content that fits that category.  For example, you could identify books by subject matter and then on different landing pages only show that kind of book.  Taxonomy leverages the power of labeling and that power can then be let loose using merlinochaos' excellent Views module.

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