World Bank Open API Data: Now in Google Search Results

Earlier this year we blogged about the launch of a new Open API, which Phase2 built for The World Bank. The Open API allows third-party developers and organizations to freely query World Bank's largest dataset containing world economic and business indicators and create all kinds of interesting mash-ups.

Today Google announced the addition of the API data to its search results.

Drupal Smallcore: Where Do We Start?

There has been increasing amount of discussion and debate about Smallcore initiative in the Drupal community. Smallcore's purpose is to separate Drupal's CMS capabilities from the core framework APIs and enhance Drupal's characteristics as a universal web-development framework. The Smallcore movement mostly benefits the development of packaged Drupal distributions - a hot topic in the Drupal community, these days.

Phase2 Technology is the author and maintainer of two popular Drupal-based distributions: OpenPublish and Tattler (app). We also have worked on numerous high-profile Drupal-powered websites. In this blog post we try to digest the two perspectives and offer some of our ideas regarding Smallcore and Drupal's future, in general.

While You Were Sleeping

A look back at some of the "disruptive technologies" which emerged in the last couple of years and how they are changing the way we live and operate.

A Story of a PHP Variable Reference Pitfall

If you think you have something as "basic" as PHP variables and reference rules all figured-out, you may have to think twice. Or at least that's what happened to me and following is an honest-to-heart story of it.

Your First jQuery Plugin

We all have come to love and admire jQuery for the amazing Javascript library it is. But we also have fallen in love with numerous extensions to jQuery; plugins, modules - whatever you call 'em.

Drupal: Hooking Into Menu Item's After Save State

A short blog post that describes how to "create" post-state hooks if you have pre-state hook in Drupal. The specific example simulates a post-menu-item-save hook (which does not actually exist).

Cleaning Up After SVN Externals, the Bug and the Fix.

SVN externals are a convenient way to organize your subversion repository. Unfortunately, there seems to be a bug that may give you a good deal of headache of you later decide to replace an external with an actual folder (a drop). This quick blog post describes the problem and the solution.

The Future of Drupal In Professional Open Source

Today Phase2 announced our second turn-key open-source solution: Tattler (app), a topic monitoring tool for the Web. Tattler finds and aggregates content from the Web on topics you ask it to monitor. Using Semantic Web technologies, Tattler mines news, websites, blogs, multimedia sites, and other social media like Twitter, to find mentions of the issues most relevant to your organization.

B[r]ing it on, Google! Microsoft is Back!

Microsoft's new "decision engine" Bing just launched this morning. What does it mean for the industry? Should Google be concerned? Do users care? Is it just buzz or real?

How to Enable Local SMTP Server (Postfix) on OS-X Leopard

The fastest way to send e-mails from your e-mail client (e.g. Mail) on OS-X is to use local SMTP server. You also need local SMTP if you are using your Mac as a development platform (say, for Drupal) and are testing some e-mail related functionality. Since OS-X Leopard is a powerful Unix system, installing a local SMTP server is not a problem. As a matter of fact, Leopard comes with pre-installed SMTP server (Postfix), we just need to enable it. The following quick tutorial, from the In Under 5 Minutes series, shows how to do it.