The 2011 Tiki Summer Tour

This summer promises to be jam-packed with Tiki Community events. With TikiFests planned for Brazil, France, United States, Israel, Germany and Pakistan, there's likely an event near you! Be sure to review the Tiki Community Calendar for full details.

Many of these code sprints ares organized to coincide with other open source conferences at which Tiki Community members will be attending. Be sure to join us at:

  • RMLL (Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre) in Strasbourg, France
  • OSCON 2011 in Portland, Oregon, USA
  • Wikimania in Haifa, Israel
  • WikiFest in Berlin, Germany

About Tiki

SubHub Launches World's First Drupal-Powered App Store

SubHub.com today launched its new Drupal 7-based Content Monetization Platform (CMP), featuring the world’s first Drupal-powered app store.

SubHub's new CMP enables anyone to design and launch a content website in under five minutes, and make money from their content by incorporating optional apps such as paid membership.

The app store -- the first of its kind for Drupal modules -- enables website owners to add functionality simply by selecting an app and adding it to their SubHub website. Initial apps include MailChimp, Google Analytics, content feeds and YouTube. Some of the apps are free (e.g. Google Analytics) and some of them will carry a small recurring charge (e.g. paid membership functionality).

Any developer can submit an app to the SubHub app store to be made available to SubHub’s growing network of website owners. New apps will be added regularly. SubHub will share revenues with the app developer.

“We have two core objectives. First we want to give non-technical people the opportunity to build an outstanding website using Drupal, one of the leading open-source content management solutions," said Evan Rudowski, co-founder of SubHub. "Second, we want to give Drupal developers the opportunity to make money from the modules they have spent hundreds of hours building.

"Our customers gain great functionality, and developers make money -- it's a win all around," Rudowski said.

ocPortal 7: A CMS for custom social websites

This week ocProducts released version 7 of the Open Source CMS, ocPortal, making rapid improvements based on feedback from user testing.

ocPortal 7 builds on the user-experience work that has also driven the previous three releases, with the aim of making it easier to build highly sophisticated social web-sites that can be fully customized by regular users.

In addition to implementing user feedback, the developers have enhanced ocPortal further by optimizing how long the simplest common administration tasks take. These have now made things even easier, and more manageable, than in the past.

Moodle 2.0.3 and Moodle 1.9.12 released

The folks over at Moodle have released versions 2.0.3 and 1.9.12 of their open source learning management system (LMS). Helen Foster writes in the Moodle announcement:

In addition to a number of bug fixes and small improvements, five security vulnerabilities (4 major, 1 minor) in 2.0.2 and two security vulnerabilities (both major) in 1.9.11 have been discovered and fixed. Thanks to the reporters and to all the team responsible for fixing these security issues.

Some of the new features and improvements in Moodle 2.0.3 include:

Quoting IT: Social Media in Government

"Nobody has come up with a blueprint that says this is how social media must and will be used in all disasters, because it changes fast. We're trying to figure out how to get into conversations with the public without getting into one-on-one transactions, which would be next to impossible."

-W. Craig Fugate, Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, The Grill: W. Craig Fugate, ComputerWorld, March 21, 2011.

CMS Expo: Social Drupal

CMS Expo in Chicago last week gave me a great opportunity to learn about a variety of content management systems. I spent most of my time at the conference getting out of my comfort zone by visiting with those companies and open source projects that I knew the least about their products and services. Unfortunately, this strategy also prevented me from visiting with my personal favorite CMS, Drupal. By the end of the conference, I felt I needed to treat myself by attending one of the final sessions in the Drupal track, "Social Drupal".

What key activities should you integrate? In what scenarios might you be smarter to leave the heavy lifting to an outsourced solution?  What elements are critically important right now when building your social relevance in the market?  Find this out and more at this practical advice session on how you can be using Drupal to capture the Social Media audience which awaits.

My hope for the session was that it would give me good pointers for how to connect my Drupal sites better to the social web. Lullabot's Blake Hall led this information packed session. Blake began the session by pushing his vision that this session should not just be called "Social Drupal" but also "Community Plumbing (without the crack)". The proposed rewriting of the title for this session is a reminder to the audience that Drupal has always been social.

Blake started the session reminding that one needs to take a look at the bigger picture by taking a look as your site's Social Media Strategy. This strategy would include the following elements:

  • Authentic Story
  • Honest Dialogue
  • Engage your audience
  • Activate the social media

While the big picture is always nice consider it's the details that help determine whether your site is going to succeed. From this point forward Blake focused on specifics and I feverishly did my best to keep up. Some of the notable remarks from Blake that caught my attention:

  • First step is to take a look at your business goals and the resources you have available when building/supporting your site. Blake of course sees Drupal as being able to address both ends of this equation.
  • Some of the social modules for Drupal he recommends include Feeds, Flag, Twitter, Dashboard, Fivestar, Messaging, Radioactivity (gotta check this one out!), and Organic Groups.
  • Speaking of organic groups, take a look at groups.drupal.org: especially Social Networking Sites group to tap into Drupal community's expertise on social publishing.