Thank you, Phase2!

Posted Apr 14, 2011 // 0 comments
Irakli:
Teaser: 

After wonderful three and a half years, I will be leaving Phase2, this week. As I wipe tears of sadness to be partying with my friends and receive congratulations with the new position, I took time to write a blog post to my colleagues and the Drupal community, talking about my departure and what that means for Phase2 products.

As I write this blog post, I am completing my last week at Phase2 Technology. In a week I will be joining NPR as a Director, Engineering in Digital Media.

About Irakli

As our Director of Product Development, Irakli revels in developing packaged, turn-key solutions using open-source technologies and cutting-edge, semantic APIs. He brings vast expertise in the areas of: product design, development, ...

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Apps in Drupal and on the Web: The Why and The How

Posted Mar 10, 2011 // 5 comments
Irakli:
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One of the main reasons Drupal is so popular, among hundreds of other open-source content management systems, is due to its developers' constant thirst for innovation and the ability to push the limits of the possible. From its roots as a flexible, hooks-based CMS to modules like Views and CCK, to CTools exportables and Features, Drupal community has been challenging the status-quo, re-thinking the old ways of doing things and constantly delivering more usable, flexible, superior solutions.

Today we are pleased to introduce a new paradigm in content-management systems: an App. Apps are very popular and well-established in the mobile world, but have not been present on the web or in any content-management systems, quite as much. We think it's time for that to change.

One of the main reasons Drupal is so popular, among hundreds of other open-source content management systems, is due to its developers' constant thirst for innovation and the ability to push the limits of the possible. From its roots as a flexible, hooks-based CMS to modules like Views and CCK, CTools exportables and Features, the Drupal community has been challenging the status-quo, re-thinking the old ways of doing things and constantly delivering more usable, flexible, superior solutions.

About Irakli

As our Director of Product Development, Irakli revels in developing packaged, turn-key solutions using open-source technologies and cutting-edge, semantic APIs. He brings vast expertise in the areas of: product design, development, ...

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Read Irakli's Blog

Ideation Feature for Drupal

Posted Feb 10, 2011 // 0 comments
Irakli:
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Ideation feature for Drupal was released today and it's Kit compliant! In the following blog post we take a look at what this means for the Drupal distributions, where the new module fits in the existing distro eco-system, and discuss the future plans for the module.

Phase2 has been championing the Drupal distribution movement together with Development Seed for a while now. These two companies have created some of the most well-known, best supported, and advanced distributions in the community: Open Atrium, OpenPublish, Managing News and Tattler (App).

About Irakli

As our Director of Product Development, Irakli revels in developing packaged, turn-key solutions using open-source technologies and cutting-edge, semantic APIs. He brings vast expertise in the areas of: product design, development, ...

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Read Irakli's Blog

Setting Up LAMP Stack On CentOS and RackSpace Cloud Server

Posted Dec 30, 2010 // 6 comments
Irakli:
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A step-by-step guide for setting up and configuring a LAMP (PHP 5.2) Stack on a 1GB or 2GB RackSpace Cloud Server.

The following is a step-by-step guide for setting up and configuring a LAMP Stack on a 1GB or 2GB RackSpace Cloud Server with the latest CentOS distribution.

About Irakli

As our Director of Product Development, Irakli revels in developing packaged, turn-key solutions using open-source technologies and cutting-edge, semantic APIs. He brings vast expertise in the areas of: product design, development, ...

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Read Irakli's Blog

Presenting on the Drupal Distributions, OpenPublish and Future Drupal Architecture at DrupalCon Copenhagen.

Posted Jul 9, 2010 // 1 comments
Irakli:
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Phase2 will be in Copenhagen! And we have selected a variety of topics that we would like to share our vision on. If you are planning to be at DrupalCon in Copenhagen, this August, check-out the list of proposed sessions and panels by Phase2 and please vote on the ones you might be interested to attend.

Phase2 will be in Copenhagen! And we have selected a variety of topics that we would like to share our vision on. If you are planning to be at DrupalCon in Copenhagen, this August, check-out the list of proposed sessions and panels by Phase2 and please vote on the ones you might be interested to attend.

About Irakli

As our Director of Product Development, Irakli revels in developing packaged, turn-key solutions using open-source technologies and cutting-edge, semantic APIs. He brings vast expertise in the areas of: product design, development, ...

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Read Irakli's Blog

Wikheu - Managing Drupal Multisite Releases with SVN

Posted Jun 4, 2010 // 1 comments
Irakli:
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Drupal Multisite is a powerful and mature tool for creating platform deployments of Drupal-based web-systems. However creating a release structure that allows atomic deployments of individual sites within a multisite is a somewhat less explored problem. Presented blog post describes one such approach that uses Subversion version control and a set of bash scripts for Linux to automate the process.

Multisite, the ability to run several websites from [almost] the same code-base is one of the most powerful and unique features of Drupal. You can deploy a "platform": the Drupal core and common set of contributed modules (typically located under "sites/all") only once and use this common base to build multiple websites. The websites, however, can have unique look-and-feel implemented via site-specific themes and can even customize functionality, through the use of additional modules, specific to the site, installed under: sites/sitedomain.com/modules.

About Irakli

As our Director of Product Development, Irakli revels in developing packaged, turn-key solutions using open-source technologies and cutting-edge, semantic APIs. He brings vast expertise in the areas of: product design, development, ...

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Read Irakli's Blog

World Bank Opens Development Data

Posted Apr 20, 2010 // 2 comments
Irakli:
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The World Bank Group has announced today that it will offer free access to more than 2,000 financial, business, health, economic and human development statistics that had mostly been available only to paying subscribers. The data will be immediately available through the World Bank Open API for developers and and also gets a user-friendly user-interface at: data.worldbank.org

We have blogged about the launch of World Bank Open API, that Phase2 has helped architect and develop, and later we wrote about how it enriched Google search results.

About Irakli

As our Director of Product Development, Irakli revels in developing packaged, turn-key solutions using open-source technologies and cutting-edge, semantic APIs. He brings vast expertise in the areas of: product design, development, ...

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Read Irakli's Blog

Drupal 6 Theming for Module Developers - Suggesting TPLs From a Module

Posted Apr 10, 2010 // 2 comments
Irakli:
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The ability to write self-contained modules (thank you, Hooks API!) and a very flexible theming layer are two important aspects behind the power and extensibility of Drupal. The following blog post describes how to leverage this power and write "proper" modules - modules that externalize all rendering logic into TPLs, suggest default implementation but allow themers to override default TPLs if needed. Several use-cases are discussed.

A common problem that Drupal module developers run into is: creating a module with an appealing default user-interface, but also allowing designers to easily override the default UI, in a theme. There are multiple ways to solve this problem. While Drupal theme architecture is certainly capable of allowing such implementations, the exact code you need to write depends on which kind of template you are providing default implementation for.

About Irakli

As our Director of Product Development, Irakli revels in developing packaged, turn-key solutions using open-source technologies and cutting-edge, semantic APIs. He brings vast expertise in the areas of: product design, development, ...

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Read Irakli's Blog

World Bank Open API Data: Now in Google Search Results

Posted Nov 11, 2009 // 0 comments
Irakli:
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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.

Earlier this year we blogged about a new Open API launch, 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.

About Irakli

As our Director of Product Development, Irakli revels in developing packaged, turn-key solutions using open-source technologies and cutting-edge, semantic APIs. He brings vast expertise in the areas of: product design, development, ...

more >

Read Irakli's Blog

Drupal Smallcore: Where Do We Start?

Posted Nov 4, 2009 // 13 comments
Irakli:
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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.

There has been increasing amount of discussion about the Smallcore initiative in the Drupal community. Smallcore's purpose is to separate Drupal's CMS capabilities from its core APIs and enhance Drupal's characteristics as a universal web-development framework. While most people agree that some level of change is due, the debate around what exactly should smallcore be is still very active.

About Irakli

As our Director of Product Development, Irakli revels in developing packaged, turn-key solutions using open-source technologies and cutting-edge, semantic APIs. He brings vast expertise in the areas of: product design, development, ...

more >

Read Irakli's Blog