Amazee.com

On September 17, 2008 Amazee released a fully redesigned version of its social collaboration platform. We made this case study for all Drupal developers interested in how the site is being built and what the challenges have been so far.

What is Amazee

Amazee is a platform that channels any kind of activism and provides powerful tools to help project initiators organize, promote, and fund projects of any size with participants from anywhere around the world.

Whether the goal is to assemble a multinational football team or set up a massive number of broadband connections in remote towns in Africa, Amazee is easy to use for any kind of project.

Overview of Amazee features

Amazee provides you with effective tools to promote your project and collaborate with project buddies. You can for example decide upon the degree of openness and publicity of the project, assign different member rights and keep your visitors informed through an easy editable project magazine. The project team can exchange ideas in the discussion section and jointly edit text in the project's writeboard area. Members can upload pictures as well as other files and organize events and to dos in a calendar. Project funding is an important and unique part of Amazee, providing three built-in mechanisms for projects to raise money and ask for further support.

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LEADEL.NET is a video portal and social network, funded by the European Jewish Congress, which revolves around the elements that make social, technological, political and financial leaders tick and thereby encouraging Leadel's viewers to explore what makes them do what they do.

The site focuses on jewish identity and tries to explore the differences which make us as identity bearing human beings unique.
The path LEADEL have taken in inspiring the perseverance of that identity, is to create a website which will appeal to young people and will adhere to their standards of quality, user experience and ease of use.
This was a great chance to take the services module further then we (at linnovate) have ever done before.
We ended up writing 16 custom services and using drupal to organize the site's information and flash as a front end, this comination seems to be the best of both worlds.

The Talk Carousel

The talk carousel is the main visual component in the home page and is used to promote the videos inside.

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About Student Activities at Texas A&M University

The Department of Student Activities at Texas A&M University is responsible for overseeing the annual recognition process of the 850+ student organizations on the College Station, TX campus. The department also advises several large organizations directly and offers leadership and involvement opportunities to the entire student body. Many of the most popular traditions on campus are heavily supported by the department, including Fish Camp (an extended orientation program attended by over 5,000 freshmen a year) and The Big Event (a one-day service project in which 10,000 students complete over 1,000 community service tasks in the city and surrounding areas).

History of Student Organization Web Hosting

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After months of hard work, Acquia is now open for business! Starting today, everyone can connect their Drupal 6 site to the Acquia Network to take advantage of our services. Oh my!

The Acquia Network (previously code-named Spokes) is a hosted service that helps you with site management (update notifications, spam blocking, cron service, modification detection, etc) and provides real-time visibility into the health and usage of all your Drupal sites that are connected to the Acquia Network.

Second, the Acquia Network gives you access to Acquia's technical support team. Whether it is an installation question, a development question or a configuration question, our Drupal experts are ready to provide you with technical support. The kicker? Acquia Network subscriptions are available for every budget -- including a free community version. Give it a try!

Third, we are also releasing Acquia Drupal today. Acquia Drupal (previously code-named Carbon) is our Drupal distribution that bundles some of the best, most essential Drupal modules for building social publishing sites. Acquia Drupal is available for free, and all our bug fixes and improvements go straight to the module maintainers on drupal.org. Acquia Drupal defines the collection of modules that you can get technical support for.

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I remember when the word "crunch" was a word which I associated with tasty breakfast treats. It's biscuits. It's the soothing sound of a booted foot flattening virginal snow on a cold December morning. Now the word has a much more sinister mean...

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The Knight Drupal Initiative which funds new and existing Drupal projects. The next monthly review meeting takes place on Thursday, 2 October 2008 at 15:00 EDT (19:00 UTC). The meeting will be held in IRC #drupal-dojo on irc.freenode.net. (See http://drupal.org/irc for information about using IRC.) We will meet for an hour and a half to review current proposals, discuss the application process and introduce new proposals to the community.

Community members are encouraged to review and comment on the existing proposals before the meeting.

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A new top-level handbook will be added to Drupal.org this weekend, September 27-28, titled "Getting Involved." It will appear on the main Documentation landing page. We first posted about the new book back in August and have been working hard to get everything in to place to take it live.

For the creation of the new handbook, the "Developing for Drupal" and "About" handbooks will have some sections moved into the new book. The work will be happening this weekend, so those handbooks may be in a bit of disarray during the process. We are mostly moving existing pages or creating new ones so that no URLs will be harmed. Some pages may be rewritten to reduce duplication, but we are striving to not remove any pages.

What is it?

The driving idea behind the handbook is to not only tell people how to contribute to Drupal, but also to explain why, and encourage folks to explore contributing as a great way to actually learn and make their own Drupal lives better. The new handbook will cover everything from how to get an account on Drupal.org to how to use CVS.

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Davis Applied Technology College

The Davis Applied Technology College (DATC), located in Kaysville, Utah, offers open-entry/open-exit, competency based programs on a year-round schedule. Our programs are broken up into the following schools: Business & Information, Construction & Apprenticeship, Health Professions, Manufacturing, Service Professions, and Transportation. For 30 years the DATC has been offering opportunities to individuals with difficult schedules or tight finances to further their education. Which is why our motto is "we change lives."

Web Team

With a medium-sized College we definitely had a lot of people willing to give feedback regarding the new web site. With that in mind we decided to put together a team of about 10 faculty and staff members that met regularly to discuss the progress and plan for the site. This team made the preparations for the site a lot smoother because we were able to look at it from all angles. It helped us feel more comfortable about the decisions that we were making along the way. In the end it definitely made the outcome more welcome.

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I’ve worked in IT for while now - just over 10 years. In that time an awful lot has changed, but one thing has remained constant - every user who has played any sort of game on a PC thinks they’re an expert and they demand that I explain everything I fix.

I used to try and explain correctly, but this started to irritate me when I constantly had to explain the difference between RAM and hard disk memory. Then I tried shunning the explanation demands with “technical stuff”, but this just led to more questions.

The method I’m currently using is ‘making shit up’. You have to be careful with this - guage your users experience level, use a mixture of some words they know and some that they’ve heard but don’t understand.

A few examples…

• Random crash
  The SRAM got out of sync with the data bus. That can happen on fast systems sometimes. The only real solution is severely underclocking the system, but that may cause collisions on the CPU core and cause it to overheat.
• Web page time out
  The secondary firewall must have detected a protocol error in the http request. That can happen if a T3 link to the remote host is overloaded.
• VPN connection error/timeout
  The secure key lost cohesion with the master RSA key due to small variation in the server clocks, it happens if the UDP packet is re-routed over a lower capacity intermediary network link. Restart your router to get onto a different subnet.

Kill them with ire (not a typo).