BADCamp: CivicActions Sponsors Bay Area DrupalCamp 2008

CiviActions is a proud sponsor of the upcoming BADCamp (Bay Area DrupalCamp) in Berkeley the weekend of October 10th and 11th. As I’ve said before, CivicActions is really excited to help make these events happen with our sponsorship and our team’s participation. DrupalCamps are a great opportunity for folks to learn more about Drupal, organize to work on projects and modules, and also to recruit. If you’re planning a DrupalCamp, get in touch with me, and we’ll see how we can be...

Tweeting the Debate With Current TV

Four years ago at Telephone Bar in NYC, Noel Hidalgo and I talked about an idea to run an IRC back channel during the presidential debates. This morning I saw a tweet from him about remixing the debates and reminded him of our idea. He has now blogged about something very cool. Current TV and Twitter have teamed up and will be aggregating debate related tweets and displaying them on Current TV. How to PARTICIPATE: 1.Tune in on September 26th at 8:30pm EST/ 5:30pm PST for our special Current Vanguard pre-debate show, followed by the Live Presidential Debate at 9pm EST/ 6pm PST. Find Current TV on your local cable/satellite provider or come here to watch the live stream of our broadcast. 2.Make sure you’ve registered with Twitter to participate. 3.During the debates, chime in by including “#current” in your tweet. Example: “This discussion about universal healthcare makes me want to pop some pills! #current” 4.You can follow along with other Current tweeters here by following #current on Twitter search. 5.If you have any questions about participating, send us a tweet @current  Also worth mentioning Perspectv.com, a dashboard/aggregatory of statistics, blog posts, polls and — yes, tweets — about the...

DrupalSouth: The New Zealand Drupal Event for 2008

CivicActions is a proud sponsor of DrupalSouth; the New Zealand Drupal Event for 2008. DrupalSouth will bring NZ’s Drupal community together for the first NZ-wide Drupal event and the first ever DrupalCamp in NZ. A collection of individual Drupal professionals in Christchurch, New Zealand are organizing the event, including our very own Bevan Rudge. Bevan will be presenting on Google Maps in Drupal; The Hub Map, in which he will showcase the Hub Map, and talk about implementing Google maps mashups in Drupal. From the DrupalSouth press release: DrupalSouth runs for two days in the first weekend of November, starting at 9:30 am on Saturday 1st November and concluding at 6 pm on Sunday 2nd November 2008, New Zealand standard time. The morning of each day will be filled with presentations, while the afternoons will be open to less formal talks, discussions, demonstrations, tutorials and hacking. Many of the speakers are well-established Drupal and Open-Source community contributers like Dan “dman”, Brenda “Shiny” Wallace, Bevan Rudge and Marek Kuziel (Open ID, Python, Postgres). Others have won NZOSS awards for their contributions to Open Source, like Joshua Campbell and Dave Lane. The awesome line up of presenters will present on a variety of topics, such as How Drupal stacks up in enterprise, OpenID and Drupal and Google Maps in Drupal, to name just a few. DrupalSouth presents a great opportunity for attendees to learn new and interesting Drupal skills, techniques and resources, network face to face with industry leaders and Drupal professionals, companies and users, engage new clients, employees and contractors, discover how others are using Drupal or promote their own...

Setting Up CiviContribute Forms For Anonymous Users (ACLs and User Access)

Here is a little tip that will make your life easier, especially the first time you go down the road of setting up CiviCRM’s CiviContribute forms for a website where anonymous users will be making donations (not anonymous donations, just users that are not logged in). When setting up CiviContribute you need to grant access via the Drupal User Access to “make online contributions” to anonymous users, AND you also need to add an ACL to CiviCRM for “Everyone” to access the profile you are using for online donations. Visit /admin/user/access to set the Drupal User Access Visit /civicrm/civicrm/acl?reset=1&action=browse If you do not add the ACL, CiviCRM throws a very ugly error to your anonymous users. CiviCRM’s user facing errors are generally pretty ugly and scary and don’t often offer enough information to diagnose a problem even for a power user pretty familiar with CiviCRM. I’d love to see better error reporting in CiviCRM and a “custom” error page setting like Drupal has so that at least anonymous users can get a page that is less alarming. While I am on the topic of CiviCRM it is also worth noting that Drupal5.x’s menu system does not like CiviCRMs dirty URLs.  If you are going to put a link to a CiviCRM donation page or profile in the Drupal Menu system you will need to doctor is just a little bit: /civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=1 should be altered to /civicrm/contribute/transact/reset=1&id=1 Catch the difference there? its the “?” just replace it with a...

Aggregating Delicious Bookmarks From Multiple People

Last week Andy Laken asked me if there was a way to aggregate only select bookmarks from a group of users that would prevent an “unauthorized” user from posting a bookmark to the pool.  The aggregated bookmars would then be published ona  website.  After a little bit of thinking and some exploration while on the phone, we figured it out. Here is a quick and dirty recipe for creating a group bookmark feed from delicious. Get everyone delicious accounts Create and account for your organization Decide on a tag that you will use for all bookmarks you want to share (eg “civicactions”) Login with your organization account Click on subscriptions (in the horizontal nav below your user name) Click on “Add a subscription” link under the search box on the right hand side Enter the tag you decided on in step 3 above check the box “From a specific user” and enter the user name for the person you want to subscribe to. repeat this last step for each person. Grab the RSS feed from your subscriptions. An advanced step, if you need multiple different feeds from your “hive mind”, is to add the subscriptions for a particular tag to a subscription bundle (click the “Subscription options” link under the search box on the right hand side) and then grab the RSS feed for that bundle.  This would allow you to have a book mark feed for “resources” and “news” for example. Note: you can check out my bookmarks on...