Drupal in Government Part 1: Five government sites using Drupal effectively for open government initiatives

Why is Drupal important to the the Federal government? That is the main topic I will cover in a 3 part guest blog series on GovFresh. GovFresh works to inspire government-citizen collaboration and build a more engaged democracy. It features Gov 2.0, open gov news, guides, TV, tech, people and official U.S. government feeds, all in one place.

The first post Five government sites using Drupal effectively for open government initiatives provides some high profile examples of who is using Drupal effectively in government and why Drupal is a great fit for what these sites are trying to achieve.

My second post will focus on the unique aspects of providing web content management for government that are relevant for Drupal (i.e. what can Drupal learn from Government?) And my final post will provide ideas and predictions for the future of Drupal within the Federal government.

HIbernate C3P0 Connection Pool Config Changes

Hibernate no longer uses the c3p0 connection pool automagically in response to setting a few c3p0 config properties. You have to explicitly tell it to use c3p0 now.

CSS Specificity Scoring

Most folks realize what the "cascading" part of Cascading Style Sheets means for styling Web pages. However, some of the inner workings of CSS specificity are lost on many of them. Especially when it comes to those maddening CSS selectors that should be taking effect, but aren't.

Groovy: Quick and Easy Scripting

Groovy provides a viable (hipper? More modern?) alternative to shell scripting and/or Perl.

What Does the Open Government Directive Look Like?

On the first anniversary of the President's inauguration, I wanted to share some thoughts about the historic Open Government Initiative and discuss the implementation details of last month's Open Government Directive. Since we are developers, we wanted to do more than talk and write about what open government is, we are interested in how it actually looks and works to a user on the web. So we prepared some mock-ups for this purpose and shared it around town. This mock-up demonstrates both our concept for the user interface and content of a great /open site, but also prototypes what a simple approach to open government data and communications could be through a templated installation of Drupal we would like to build if some agency wants one?

My Review of "Cracking Drupal" by Greg Knaddison

Cracking Drupal's goal is to help Drupal maintainers and module developers recognize, diagnose, and ultimately prevent security issues, from the perspective of code. It gives a good overview of how to think about security when building and/or analyzing custom, contributed or core modules. With included code examples and some real world cases, the book presents a good foundation to build from.

Enforcing DRY Concepts in Drupal

Don't Repeat Yourself, or DRY, is a software development principle aimed at speeding development efforts and reducing repetition in code bases. The great part about DRY is that in addition to getting work done quicker, it makes maintaining code much easier: if blocks of code that perform like actions across a site, or across multiple sites, is in fact the same code, making changes and adding features in one place results in those changes being quickly made in all places. Even better? Drupal makes enforcing DRY concepts incredibly easy in many different ways.

Login issues and $cookie_domain

If you find yourself unable to log into a pre-existing Drupal site after a migration and despite making sure everything has been transferred, you may want to check settings.php.

Quick homepage optimization

On Drupal sites, it is easy to implement page-front.tpl.php to layout your custom homepage, but forget that nodes are being rendered into $content if you use the default homepage. Here is a little trick to get a quick optimization on your homepage and avoid unnecessary nodes from being rendered.

Using hook_views_query_alter to change your views sort order

Sometimes you might need some extra help getting views to sort correctly. This is especially the case when sorting on a column that might include NULL values, or when your criteria for how results should sort is complex. Instead of implementing template logic to correct the result sorting, you can use hook_views_query_alter to modify the sort criteria in the query itself.