Drupal is a robust, open source, PHP-based content management system. I've been involved in serving and implementing projects based on Drupal since 2004.
Systems Administration
While at EchoDitto, a consulting firm where I was the founding systems administrator, along with the developers, I helped design, deploy, and maintain several high traffic sites, in whole or in part built from Drupal, for such clients as:
- United Nations World Food Programme
- Barack Obama's 2004 Senate Campaign
- Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation
- SinceSlicedBread.com
- Pearl Harbor Survivors Project
- Seventh Generation
- Rosie O'Donnell
I continue to consult in systems administration, particularly on open source platforms and with Drupal. See the services page for more info.
File Management
I have most recently been involved in a lot of development of Drupal-WebDAV integration. I am working on ways to make batch uploading of files, particularly photos, easier to integrate into a website so that people can share their experiences after events that are scheduled, managed, and archived on a Drupal website. See a recent blog post for more about this work.
Additionally, while at EchoDitto, I wrote the Asset Module which implements database-backed file uploads and graphical thumbnail previews. I later added some basic extensions to it to provide XML-RPC capabilities, mostly as a demo of XML-RPC for the Washington, DC Drupalers meeting in April 2007. See the original blog post and grab the code, including a hastily-made demo Cocoa application, here.
High Traffic
Boost is a module that performs plain HTML caching of a Drupal site, avoiding the need for Drupal, PHP, or MySQL and enabling much higher traffic throughput for anonymous users. I wrote a somewhat technical overview of Boost and have implemented some unreleased additions to it. Also, the original author, Arto Bendiken, has made me a co-maintainer of the project.
Other
I ported the development tool, Trace Module, to Drupal 6.
I wrote & maintain a module called Advanced Comment Trigger that supplies a configurable trigger for new comment additions on a site, allowing easier moderation of potential spam.
I made some enhancements to the already-available http_redirect module for aliasing paths in a Drupal site to external URLs. These include Drupal 5.x support, an enhanced user interface, sending the proper referrer to the target URL, and proper 404 Not Found handling, among other things. Grab the code here for now until my changes make it into Drupal CVS. See the original blog post here.
Other Drupal code that I've contributed remains, or will be released, over at EchoDitto's open source site, where I originally released it. As of this writing this includes echo_bat, a thermometer-like goal progress indicator which uses the GD Graphics Library to dynamically create the images.
Also, in the trivia department, it turns out that I had some code in Drupal before I even knew what it was. Back in 2001 or so, I had contributed a patch for HTTPS support to Edd Dumbill's XML-RPC library, which eventually became part of Drupal. Though that library is no longer part of Drupal, the first time I sat down to use Drupal, in 2004, I was surprised to find my name listed in the source code. You can see evidence of this today in this old patch.
More about Drupal
Interested in Drupal? Read the blog posts here about Drupal.
