Development Seed Blog

Meet Drupal Developers and Users and Talk About Your Latest Projects

The next Drupal Meetup is right around the corner. This coming Monday, May 12, we'll be meeting at Stetson's Bar and Restaurant at 7:00 pm to get together and talk Drupal. We'll be in the room upstairs.

As usual we'll kick off the meeting with several five minute lightening round talks. This is your chance to share your latest project or module with the group. Since this meetup is for people of all levels of Drupal expertise - including experts, newbies, those interested in becoming newbies, and users - we do ask that you focus on the big picture needs and functions and keep out the Drupal jargon.

So far, we have these talks on the schedule.

• Showcase of Green Media Toolshed: A community-powered set of tools for communications experts that allows them to create and customize group workspaces - and control the branding and urls. This is done with new advances made the to context module.
• Announcement of ChinaOSL, a two month long code camp happening this summer in Bejing

If you want to talk, post your topic here or come prepared to take over the floor.

Come on Out and Toast Technology This Week

Feliz Cinco de Mayo! As you're dusting off your sombrero, munching on a taquito, and preparing to salt a few margaritas tonight, take a look at some of the great tech events happening in DC this week. There's a lot going on in the local art scene this week, and we've included some of the events with a tech element here to put them on your radar. Here's a run down of the events we're hoping to attend, with a surprising number of them taking place during the day. That just leaves you more time for those margaritas.

Monday
11:00 am  - 12:15 pm
Open Source, Open Education and Eco-friendly: Can Sharing Improve Policy? - Start the week off by listening to Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems talk about how openness and sharing can improve public policy and international development. 

Tuesday - Saturday
7: 00 pm and 9:30 pm
Screenings of the Washington, DC 48 Hour Film Project: People had exactly 48 hours to write, shoot, and edit a seven-minute movie over the weekend. Now it's time for us to see what they came up with.

How We Advertised a Job on Facebook

When we needed to post a new job ad online, we started going through the list of usual suspects: Idealist, Craigslist, various DC tech job boards, and advertising on sites where we knew people might be. Then we thought, "What about Facebook?" We couldn’t remember ever seeing a good job ad on Facebook, but we figured we'd try it out. Here's what we found.

First, Facebook's combination of price, targeting options, and ease of use made it just about unparalleled from the perspective of the ad placement itself. But those of us who use Facebook are used to these ads being nightlife promotions, surveys to make quick cash online, or corporate ads. I even remember once seeing an ad for a plastic surgeon in the Midwest (they weren't making the best use of the targeting feature, unless they expect a 26-year-old male from Colorado to fly to Wisconsin for Botox ;). Would a reputable job ad work? We created one in order to find out.

We guessed that our best chances would be to target it to people who live in the Washington DC metro area and have interests in things we might look for in a job candidate. We used Facebook's ad placement tool to target people in DC, VA, and MD, and then listed out keywords that we thought the ideal candidates may have. Some of the keywords we thought of didn't hit any users' profiles, but others did. When they hit, the Facebook ad placement interface told us how many people used this keyword in their profile. In the end, here's what our list looked like – there are a couple odd ones, but it was what we had to work with:

Plug In Gives You the Best of Both Email and Web Forum Features

"Reply ABOVE this LINE to POST a COMMENT." This is how automatic email notifications from the teams' intranet blog posts look these days. And it's true! Now I can just reply to any email notification I receive and my comment will appear on our intranet. The only bad thing is that I don't have an excuse anymore for not replying right away ;-)

Typically there are two ways to carry on online discussions and to keep up with the replies - mailing lists (that may have a web interface) and web forums (that may have email subscriptions). Though each of one has its own advantages and drawbacks, trying to mix both usually ends up in long threads of differently formatted messages. Besides, mailing lists are usually exposed to spamming (worse yet if spam ends up on the web) and the "from" address is really easy to forge.

As usual, we wanted it all - the reliability and readability that come with authentication in a web forum and the ease of replying through a mailing list. Since we already had the Notifications and Messaging framework and an excellent mailhandler module to fetch incoming emails, it was just a question of putting the pieces together and adding some extra security/authentication into the recipe to get to this. 

Check the new "Mail2web" plug-in in the Notifications module. This first version is for Drupal 5. And by the way, we just released the Drupal 6 version of both Notifications and Messaging modules. The Mail2Web Drupal 6 version, however, will have to wait for the mailhandler module.

Being paranoid about security and spam, we added a more secure method for message authentication than the ones currently used. Our outgoing emails have some digitally assigned parameters that are checked when the reply comes back. Thus only emails posted as a direct 'Reply-To' operation will get in as responses. And replies to a given thread will get only into that thread, nowhere else. But best of all, these tokens are completely invisible for a regular user and should work with most email clients without the need to install any extra software. (You can set an expiration time frame for replies too).

So what do I need to to do to get it working?