Mediacurrent

If you have been following Mediacurrent at all this year, you know that we have been keeping busy. In January, we introduced several internal initiatives to reinforce our position in the Drupal community including the Mediacurrent Contrib committee and the Mediacurrent Dropcast.

There was an article by David Baker that caught my attention. David is a long-time consultant for the web agency marketplace who offers blunt, but sage advice that comes from maintaining a strong pulse on what is happening in our industry.Essentially, he challenged Principals to think about what success really looks like at your agency.

Today, Mediacurrent and Acquia are proud to announce that one of the highest profile websites in the world, Weather.com, based in Atlanta, will be joining the Drupal community!  To my knowledge, Weather.com will be the highest traffic Drupal site in existence. Over the last six months, Mediacurrent and Acquia have been shepherding Weather.com’s on-ramping of Drupal via a proof-of-concept and discovery engagement. 

A drush site alias file allows you to streamline advanced drush commands and make running them against both local and remote sites a breeze. With a properly configured alias file and an SSH key you can run frequently used commands that have complex options, with a concise easily remembered "alias" on any site. This will help you be far more productive and you will find yourself using drush itself far more often.

Mediacurrent would like to congratulate the Alaska Dispatch for their win of the "2012 Best News/Media Website in Alaska." The Alaska Dispatch has won awards both locally and nationally for their outstanding work completed in 2011. In fact, they have been recognized two years in a row in the Alaska Press Club Awards and The Best of the West Competition.

Quality Assurance is usually a scary term but it doesn't have to be. In this previously recorded webinar, I'll walk you through five easy steps you can do (and tools you can use) to turn out a better product (web site).

This talk does tie in with Drupal but you don't have to be a Drupal expert. This session should be useful for content admins, themers, developers and just about anybody who has to work on a web site.

[video:https://player.vimeo.com/video/41075424]

Hundreds of Drupal enthusiasts from across the nation will be coming to Atlanta's Cobb Galleria on October 26th and 27th for the 2012 Atlanta Drupal Business Summit and Drupalcamp Atlanta. Having the event at the Cobb Galleria will allow for more registrants—last year there were over 100 names on the waiting list. Help us spread the word about one of the Southeast's largest Drupalcamps!

In Part 1 of my article on The Drupal Maintenance Challenge & How to Manage It, I raised some interesting problems inherent to planning out and executing a Drupal website project. Now in Part 2, I will give some advice on how to address these challenges based on what I’ve learned in my time as a web developer.

Part of being successful with any system is knowing the strengths and weaknesses surrounding its use. As Drupal developers, we frequently immerse ourselves with the strengths; after all, the size of the community and the code it unselfishly provides to others is monumental in of itself. But with as much zeal as we throw toward the things Drupal does well, we should be providing equal focus to the areas where it needs improvement.

Especially those areas which don't involve code.

One of Drupal’s greatest strengths is it’s huge catalog of modules and themes. At the time of this writing, Drupal boasts over 15,000 modules and almost 1,500 themes on Drupal.org. The challenge is knowing which modules, themes to use and how to maintain them with custom code and other customizations throughout the life-cycle of a website.