drupal

After several months of development, I'm excited to announce that QDrupal for Drupal 6 has just gone into BETA. You can find the download on the new home for QDrupal at Drupal.org.

http://drupal.org/project/qdrupal

This release is the culmination of effort from several people, specifically Cliff Meece.

As this release settles, I will begin work on documentation for this release. Here's a quick overview of some of the exciting new features:

• QForms are now Drupal Node's
• QApplications now provide a way to define QDrupal settings right through your browser
• You can codegen right through your browser

http://drupal.org/project/qdrupal

I've got some exciting news. Over the weekend, Zcodo officially launched! Zcodo is a PHP5 framework built for rapid prototyping web applications that is based upon the Qcodo framework.

The motivation for creating Zcodo could more than fill this blog post. Suffice it to say that contributing to Qcodo was becoming difficult and my efforts for the last year to change this were uneffective.

Additionally, the future of QDrupal will be based upon Zcodo, so stay tuned for exciting news in that area.

http://zcodo.com

A Mountain Top has been privileged to work with Minted, a new online store. Built on Drupal and QDrupal, Minted will be offering fresh, modern custom stationery and invitations.

In preparation for launch, Minted has announced their first Freshly Minted design challenge. The challenge is to design a sophisticated and modern "Save the Date" card for engaged couples. Cash prizes are being offered for the top 5 designs.

Details are available on Minted.com.

Drupalcon is wrapping up today with a code sprint hosted at MIT's Stata Center. At least 100 drupal developers are all gathered in this beautiful building right now.

My goal for the day was to submit one patch back to the Drupal project. The ways of collaboration in Drupal are designed to keep the project quality high. The effort required to download the code, change something, test it isn't new. However, the extra steps of creating a patch, explaining what the patch does, submitting the patch to the issue queue, receiving feedback from other developers, changing my patch, uploading it again, etc, etc is new.

So, as of 4pm, I was finally able to submit not just 1, but 4 patches back to the Drupal project. Surpassing my goal is pretty exciting, but contributing back to a project that's given me so much is even more exciting. If you don't know about Drupal, check it out at http://drupal.org.

I'll be in Boston this week for Drupalcon. If you're at Drupalcon and would like to meet up, feel free to contact me. I'll also be attending the jQuery BoF session on Wednesday night!

The past few months have brought many changes to my life. As I've blogged about before, I am a new father!!! My daughter was born in December 2007. In addition, today I'm announcing that I have founded a new consulting company, A Mountain Top, LLC, and will be leaving the ranks of Crowd Favorite.

This is an exciting opportunity for me. Alex has been very gracious and we are parting as friends.

A Mountain Top, LLC will be focused on jQuery, Qcodo and Drupal. If you have a project, or are thinking of starting a project using any of these technologies, we'd love to hear from you!

I'll be speaking at the upcoming meeting of Refresh Denver on December 17th. The topic of the night will be "A jQuery Introduction, with Drupal and Qcodo".

If you're in the area, we'd love to have you attend. Matt and Chip have done a great job with the Refresh group. I was able to attend the November meeting and thoroughly enjoyed it.

As you can probably see, I've finally updated my blog. This is pretty exciting for me, not just because I'm now running on Drupal 5.1, but because I have many new things in store for this site.

For now, I've simply upgraded the software that runs this site, Drupal. You can find out more about Drupal at www.drupal.org. Using Drupal simply for a blog is trying to kill an ant with a bazooka. I chose Drupal over Wordpress for various reasons, but they all boil down to the fact that I like Drupal better. I have nothing against WordPress, but I just like Drupal better.

Also, I'm working on a new theme for the site. I've taken a few more "Mountain Top" pictures and I'm planning on working them into the theme. Look for that in a few weeks.

I've also enabled comments and my contact form. For spam prevention, I'm using the new Drupal captcha module and the Akismet spam screening service. We'll see how this works.

Hopefully this will lead to me blogging more, but I'm not promising anything.