drupal

[Update: I've finished building a new theme for Life is a Prayer.com; it's a bit of the old, mixed in with a bit of the new. What do you think?]

I'm in the middle of upgrading Life is a Prayer.com to Drupal 7 (to the non-geeks out there: I'm changing up the structure of the site a little bit, and giving it a new coat of varnish).

So... for a while you'll probably see a few things here and there that are out of place (especially in sections like the Pictures area, where photo galleries are displayed). Please report any problems you have in the comments below, and wish me luck as I start redesigning the site to make it look even better than ever!

(This current look is only temporary - Things will be back to normal soon!).

A recent interview focusing on my involvement in open source development (mostly centering around my work with Make Web Not War website:

Interview - Jeff Geerling - Open Source Catholic

In the interview, I speak about my involvement in Drupal, and my appreciation for a variety of different open source projects. I'm glad Microsoft is putting some resources behind sites like 'Make Web Not War', and I hope they continue to reach out into different developer communities.

They still have a stigma of being closed and have tech that's hard to develop for (which, in some cases, is true), but that could change (it is changing, but very slowly)...

How do you know you've been thinking about work too much? When your wife relates a conversation she had with you in the morning, and you don't remember a word, but can definitely see how what you said relates to what you're working on:

Saith my wife: "Jeff, how do you set your alarm?"

My (groggy) reply: "Hit field, the arrow, then default."

Now, this could possibly have something to do with alarm clocks. There are often arrows on them, and you hit buttons... but I know better. I was referring to:

$this->addFieldMapping('field', 'source')->defaultValue(0);

...which I have probably typed about 100 times in the past week, and maybe 20 or so last night during a late-night debugging session with the Migration process of flockNote v2 to v3 (from a proprietary WAMP-based system to a new Drupal 7 LAMP-based system).

It's sad, I know, but I hope you'll like what myself, Matt, Barrett, and the rest of the flockNote team have come up with over the past few months. It's been a marathon, but expect some great news about flockNote very soon!

Today, January 5, Drupal version 7.0 was released (download Drupal here). Drupal 7 release parties will be held worldwide on January 7 (which also happens to be my birthday - yay!).

Congratulations to the team of almost 1,000 developers who helped make Drupal 7 a reality, and congratulations to Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, and webchick, the person who shepherded (and continues herding) the community as the Drupal 7 core maintainer!

This website is still running on Drupal 6, but I'm slowly beginning the process of redesigning and upgrading the rest of my sites (notably, so far, Midwestern Mac, LLC) to Drupal 7. The Archdiocesan website and St. Louis Review will take a bit longer, since there's a lot of custom code that needs to be refactored.

If you run a website, have you checked out Drupal before? It's a lot more extensible (in my experience) than Joomla or Wordpress, the two other top contenders. If it's good enough for large sites like the White House and Examiner.com, it's good enough for you ;-)