Drupal DC: Of Jabber and HTTP Redirects

Last night was the semi-regular monthly DC Drupal MeetUp and I got the chance to show what I've been working on lately. Since I take a keen interest in the systems side of web applications, two of the projects that I've been working on have been a perfect fit and made for great demos last night.

The first project is with MakaluMedia, whom you may have heard of from the winning Slashdot redesign. I have been involved in some research into the Drupal/XMPP space. XMPP is the protocol behind Jabber, the open source instant messaging protocol, and Drupal is a robust open source content management system that I've been involved with for a few years. Right now, things are only in the research stages, but eventually we will be developing a whole host of functionality in this area. I've put up some screenshots of what I showed last night on my Flickr account.

The other item that I showed was something that already existed in some form, but that I enhanced a bit. I've been working with DC's very own Environmental Working Group on their upcoming transition to a Drupal-based site and believe it or not, Drupal does not have any built-in functionality for doing external redirects (i.e. redirecting something like /blog to an external URL like http://blog.domain.com). While Jon over at professionalnerd.com had put together the http_redirect module, it was not compatible with Drupal 5.x and needed some slight UI adjustments to be useful for us. I recently made those changes and as per the GPL, am releasing them back out to the world. The new version is not yet available in Drupal CVS, but you can grab a tarball locally right here on my new Drupal contributions page.

In Cocoa news, I've got some things in the works that I'll hopefully post more about soon. Stay tuned!