Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

I’ve been working with Drupal a fair bit over the last few weeks, with the ultimate goal to basically be able to really work with it to create sites. I converted my (very simple) consulting site to Drupal, without any bells and whistles. I’m working now on a site that needs some bells and whistles, like translated pages and a WYSIWYG editor (ah, the WYSIWYG editor thing in Drupal is going to get its own blog entry, I’m sure).

My next step is to try and create a simple theme (so I understand how theming works,) and write a module (so I understand how modules work.) There are still lots of things that are mysteries to me, but perhaps I’ll learn more at Bay Area Drupal camp this weekend.

I’ve also been digging a lot into the new(ish) social network software Elgg, and beginning to develop a members-only site with it for a client. In my estimation, it’s amazingly promising, as a platform for interesting private sites. And, since it has OpenID (which seems to have bugs, though), OpenDD, and OpenSocial, it’s not such a bad idea for public sites either (although I’d still not suggest that nonprofits spend the time to do this.) Maybe someone will use it to create the Facebook killer (I kind of doubt it, but I can hope, can’t I?)

As well, I’m still honing my WordPress skills, mostly in the realm of dealing with themes and moving the darn things around and upgrading from ancient versions. I’ve done some theme hacking, but haven’t yet written a plugin (I can’t think of one to write that hasn’t been written yet.)

And, on top of all of that, I’m re-writing in PHP some core functions of a web-database/CMS framework I wrote in Perl a gazillion years ago (and still is in use for an application called EASE.) That’s been fun. What’s also fun in retrospect is that the framework (the erstwhile Xina) was written basically using the MVC architectural pattern before I knew it existed!

It feels like I’m beginning to focus on a core set of tools and technologies (PHP, Drupal, WP, Elgg,) and that in a few months, I’ll be up to speaking PHP fluently, like I spoke Perl a while back. And I’m looking forward to getting to work on the kinds of projects that I’ve been watching as a spectator in the last year.