RD2 recently worked with StoneGate Senior Care on a content management solution requiring many websites to be deployed within one master website. The challenge, all of them need to have autonomy while using the same system for publishing and maintaining content.

We’ve done this sort of thing before, but for very large companies, developing within “enterprise-class software” rather than leveraging the power of open source. StoneGate wanted to be able to scale beyond 50 websites with one content publishing system. Drupal is a perfect fit – except for one important thing – There was no available mechanism for deploying multiple sites within one system that is managed and maintained from one central source. So, we built one…

Now, StoneGate Senior Care is creating new websites quickly and easily using one system with “single sign-on.” New facility websites will be a popular thing for StoneGate. We received accolades from StoneGate’s marketing communications manager and the VP of StoneGate’s development arm for how easy it is to deploy and manage these websites.

Very soon we (StoneGate Senior Care and RD2, inc.) will be giving back to the Drupal community by making our Multi-Site Management module available for use with any Drupal 5.6 and 5.7 website. We’ve seen some great things happening in this community and very soon we can share more…

Today we are releasing a series of screencasts that introduce the Villages of Jackson Creek web site and the Multi-Site management module. We will be adding more screencasts each week to showcase the many features of Drupal that were implemented and customized for StoneGate.
Many thanks to StoneGate Senior Care for their support and many thanks to Ryan at Slant for a great user interface to make this come together.

With no further ado:

• Villages of Jackson Creek Tour
• Drupal Dashboard
• Introducing Multi-Site Management
• Single Site Setup
• Website Creation

I’ve written before about the DFW Tech Community. Since then the monthly groups have continued meeting monthly, there have been two more BarCamps, and another MashPit.

Christopher St. John is at it again, putting Dallas on the tech hotspot map by bringing another un-conference concept to Dallas, the DemoCamp. The concept is simple: 5 people with 15 minutes each to demo working software only. Free for everyone to attend.

The first DemoCamp Dallas is happening Thursday, February 15, 2007 - 6:30-8:00 at Sabre Labs. Primary demo slots are already filled, but alternates are still be accepted. You don’t have to have a demo to attend, but if you’re thinking of coming, sign up on the wiki.

When I first typed in my search to learn about Drupal, I spelled it “Droople.” Luckily “Droople Blog” on google returned the proper spelling. It took a few requests from Charlotte to get me there, but after realizing that I might be coming across like we were a WordPress only shop, I wanted to prove the strength of our team and prove our knowledge in many applications. Keeping the faith, after learning enough to sound smart (sort of), I asked Chris and Blake if they had heard of it before. They both looked at each other and paused. I knew we were in for a ride. They both admitted to have worked with Drupal in the past, but mentioned that it was slightly more complex.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and it is now very obvious to me why so many Drupal sites look very similar to each other. At lightning speed, our designers and developers completely reconstructed Chris Shipley’s Guidewire Connection.

Great work Chris, Blake, Brandon and Mike…not to mention the rest of the RD2 team who covered for us during those late nights of working through all aspects of the Drupal framework.

More to come on the details of what we all believe to be a great platform for business applications that want a content managment platform that supports social networking functions.

I have been really fascinated with what has been happening with these Mashup applications we have been seeing a lot of lately. By Wikipedia definition, a mashup is a “website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.” (more…)

When you think of the technology hot spots, what places do you think of?

“Raleigh–Durham–Chapel Hill, Northern Virginia, Seattle, Boston, Portland, Austin, San Diego, Silicon Valley. Notice anything missing? Despite an abundance of geeks (TI invented the semiconductor here), Dallas does not normally appear on lists of leading technology communities. It’s up to you to change that.”

Christopher St. John, of Dallas, TX based Event Mirror, on the BarCamp Wiki.

Now, we do have our entrenched social and user groups in various states of decline and resurgence, such as Dallas PHP, Dallas Macromedia, and DFW Blogs. However, recently DFW has been super–busy getting its geek on, and is even turning the tables and inspiring events in other cities. Here’s just some of the latest events that have happened and new groups that you can get involved with:

(more…)

If a company owns multiple domains its website, its Google PageRank can be split up among those domains. As you may be aware, Google establishes relevancy in part through links which point to a page. Here’s a made-up example using Chiquita Banana… (more…)

RD2 launched our new site yesterday. One of my interests was in building RESTful URI for the website. The site is very minimal and only has sections for about, work and contact. Inside of work we break it down by client and then by section number. You end up with URI like work/entrust/1. The work portfolio section is built out with a PHP file. This creates the problem of a non-cacheable page. (more…)

Web servers send a “MIME type” with each file which tells the browser what kind of file it is. For instance, HTML files are “text/html” and CSS files are “text/css”. “Well,” you may be asking, “why not just use the file extension to determine the file type?” While file extensions commonly indicate an author’s intentions, that’s not always the case. (more…)

When building a web application you sometimes need to dynamically generate the image. In my case I’m not using HTTP authentication so I have to secure the images another way. I tucked the images outside of the document root and pull them in through a php script as needed. At it’s simplest your php script merely sets the Content-Type, Content-Length and dumps the image.

  $fh=@fopen('path/to/image.jpg','rb');
  if ($fh) {
    header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');
    $s_arr = fstat($fh);
    header('Content-Length: '.$s_arr['size']);
    fpassthru($fh);
  }

This is all well and good except that php is adding all sorts of headers to prevent the browser from caching. By overriding php’s headers and adding some of our own we get a much more intelligent solution that allows the browser to cache images locally if they have not changed. The first thing we need to do is generate an Entity Tag or Etag header. (more…)

As a web application developer I get frustrated by the sluggish user interface that most web applications provide. I want interaction with a web application to be as quick as a desktop application. A number of web applications take advantage of the XmlHttpRequest object, Google suggest being a recent notable addition. All versions of IE 5 and up have XmlHttpRequest, as well as Safari and the Mozilla based browsers. This magic little object lets you make asynchronous HTTP requests behind the scenes and dynamically update the web browser. Apple has a great writeup on XmlHttpRequest in Safari.

Over the coming weeks I am going to publish a series of articles on using XmlHttpRequest that demonstrate the following tasks:

• Demonstrate how to dynamically update form elements
• Using a POST based XmlHttpRequest for when you need to update a lot of stuff
• A technique for making sure the form works without Javascript
• How to use basic authentication with the request