Earlier this month, the Executive Office of the President of the United States of America relaunched their website, Whitehouse.gov, using Drupal. This week three members of the White House new media team presented at the Washington, DC Drupal users group. New media director Macon Phillips, deputy director of technology David Cole, and creative director Nik Lo Bue talked about their use of Drupal.

Watch the screencast here: http://vimeo.com/7669508

From the award announcement,

We are pleased to announce that Drupal has won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. This category featured a very close contest between the top three, Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! in which Drupal ended up as the overall choice for the judges and the public.

This is the highest award that Drupal was eligible for in 2009. Drupal previously won for Best Overall CMS in 2007 and 2008 has been placed in the Hall of Fame. The winners of the Hall of Fame Drupal awards for best Drupal theme and best Drupal contributed module will be awarded Thursday, November 12th, 2009. The themes and modules nominated were selected both for the most used and for a diverse set of nominees.

We use Drupal exclusively for building customized, scalable high end web applications. It’s no surprise developers, designers and users keep voting Drupal as Best CMS for years in a row. There is nothing you cannot do with Drupal. Being a CMF (content management framework), it is not pigeonholed into any one particular niche like Wordpress (strictly blogging applications).

What has Inclind done with Drupal?

• Integration with Microsoft Dynamics SOP System into Ubercart for product importing and inventory management
• Integration with Ubercart and Drupal into UPS Worldship for rock solid quoting
• Integration with UPS Worldship for automatic label printing for commerce orders
• Integration with Amazon S3 services for synced failsafe CDN (Content Distribution Network) support
• Integration with Windows LDAP Protocol support
• Integration with Invision Power Board Forum for external authentication of users through Drupal
• Integrated Ubercart as a management application of customers with interval based shipping orders (drop shipment / bulk ordering)
• Built routing algorithms to track and route best delivery methods for truck drivers on to Google Maps
• Built over 100 custom modules to meet the needs of individual clients
• … with more to come

Who else uses Drupal? Check it out!

• AOL
• The White House
• Yahoo
• IBM
• Bob Dylan
• The Onion
• CNN
• Metallica
• United Nations
• jQuery
• Sony BMG
• Michael Jackson
• Ozzy Osbourne
• EA Games
• Star Trek Online
• Mastodon
• Warner Bros
• CKY
• MTV
• MTV2
• SpreadFirefox
• SpreadThunderbird
• Computer World

What are billboards (banners, header images, et al) you ask? Billboards are the large images you see on various websites that cover the header area. They typically contain marketing statements and imagery relevant to the websites purpose or page content.

Here are is one of my favorite examples:

Visit Southern Delaware Tourism Website

See that set of images just above the content, fading in and out? That is a billboard. With this module, you can create those in a matter of seconds.

After some brainstorming between Shaun and myself, we set out to create something simple, as simple as creating a Page node, without all the aforementioned hassle. After a week of coding, testing, testing and testing, we achieved just that. Now all you have to do is say, I want to create a Billboard, drop in your images (with a cool AJAX in-place uploader, you don’t even have to leave the page), and tell it what pages to display on and you’re done! It couldn’t be any simpler. You also have additional options available to you such as changing how the images display (random image, or fade in/out between images), setting ALT and Title tags for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and select a resize option to size the billboard to (which is controlled and hooked into ImageCache!). Oh, on top of all of that, it’s all output via a single block. That’s right, you can have 100 billboards and just one block. Once you place it in the region, depending on your site theme, it’s ready to go. In the future you will be able to add blocks so you can have a billboard in the header, and also the footer or sidebar if you wish.

We have been taking feedback from our clients over the months, taking notes during training meetings, and analyzing massive amounts of performance data from our servers. It’s been pretty quiet in the blog, Facebook and our Twitter and it’s because we’ve been very hard at work. Over the last few weeks Inclind has been working at refining what we do in order to better serve, better train, and better our clients online presence. The Billboard module is just the tip of the iceberg, a precursor to the ultra-streamlined CMS package we have been putting together. There is so much going on, I couldn’t even begin to write up what will be coming in the next few months.

We’re here to serve you, to help you get things done faster, and make it so you don’t need a PHd to manage your site.

If you have any questions regarding Billboards, Drupal, our refined CMS package or need help managing your content, we are here to help. Give us a call at 302-856-2802, send us a tweet @inclindinc, or stop by our office.

It was without a doubt one of the biggest projects we have completed here. Blood, sweat, and tears beers were spent completing it and we are honored that it is featured on drupal.org. It is the culmination of many hours of teamwork.

At the end of July, we also gave a presentation to the Delaware Web Developer group from the University of Delaware at the WBOC offices in Milton, Delaware. They love the new Dogfish Head website and were curious to know how we utilized Drupal to make it come to life. Shaun Tyndall presented it to the group in a 100 minute presentation, with demonstrations and functional walkthrough’s from Pete Stein and Kevin Quillen. When it was over, they were treated to a Dogfish Head brewery tour and sampling of some of the Dogfish Head brews.

Speaking of beer, can someone get our President something better than Bud Light? Just saying!

This will be the first time the band has released a studio album with more than 11 tracks. It is expected that the total length of the album will also exceed 35 minutes, another first for the band, with potentially two instrumentals.

What happens when four exceedingly different and distinct personalities come together to create heated, inspired music? Well, as CKY have shown over their ten plus years as a rock and roll force, it can lead to intelligent, provoking riffs and lyrics, meticulously detailed production combined with magical multi-textured melodies and heady drumming. But, “it also creates tension, tension that must be let off,” says the band’s singer/guitarist, Deron Miller.

Not too long ago, ten years of tension caught up with the West Chester, Pennsylvania outfit. Producer/guitarist Chad I Ginsburg says the band “ended up physically beating each other up at once on their tour bus,” CKY decided to take an extended timeout. “We needed a break, more than just the kind of break you think,” explained Miller. A break leaving drummer Jess Margera and bassist Matt Deis wondering what future, if any, there would be for CKY.”

The band were halfway through the writing of their forthcoming album, Carver City (which was recorded and produced by Ginsburg at his new Studio CIG in Pennsylvania), CKY found itself unable to resolve internal issues, resulting in the band being put on the backburner. For an entire year, Ginsburg and Miller did not speak, nor did Miller and Margera. This extremely uncomfortable time away from the thing they loved most would allow the band to overcome the many lingering obstacles standing in the way of their greatest effort to date, Carver City, which hits stores May 19.

“We could have just said, ‘F**k it. We’re not going to finish the record.’ But no one could make that decision.” says Ginsburg. “When we finally got together to resume the sessions, we didn’t talk about the past or what had happened. We didn’t look back. The passion came back blazing, in a distinctly different, effective and inspiring way. Yeah, We took a year off by accident. But, I really think it helped the music greatly.”

Carver City is CKY’s first album of new material since 2005’s An Answer Can Be Found, and the band’s first studio offering since its split from Island Records in 2006. “Having a studio at my house, gave me the ability to work on [Carver City] for literally several thousand hours, for two years straight,” Ginsburg says. “We added a ton of new textures. Layering has always been something we’ve been into; guitar textures alone tend to bore us, [Carver City] is sonically, our best effort to date.”

Thematically, Carver City is part fantasy, part autobiography. To assist in the completion of the album, CKY concocted the fictional town of Carver City to help them. Miller and Ginsburg inhabited this imagined municipality with notoriously bad luck with dozens of illusory characters, and even created an elaborate history behind Carver. At its heart, Carver City is a late 1970’s/early 80’s-era seaside resort town, much like Wildwood, New Jersey – a place Miller visited often with his family when he was a child. The song “The Boardwalk Body” was directly inspired by one such visit, when Miller says police discovered a corpse underneath the boardwalk. “Lyrically and musically, it all reminded us of that nostalgic beach vacation feeling,” Miller says.

Carver City (which features album art by Travis Smith) is perhaps CKY’s most challenging and creatively gratifying endeavor to date. Conceiving Carver City and its folklore helped the band complete what was becoming an exhaustive writing/recording process, at a time when they were still recovering from their near-meltdown. The band is back on solid ground again, back with a vengeance and a record that the band’s allegiant fans will appreciate. As Ginsburg puts it “the world didn’t end, CKY still exist and are better than ever.” “Trying to please each other and ourselves…that’s always the challenge,” says Ginsburg. “We wouldn’t release a note at this point if we didn’t dig what we were doing. This whole record was done basically without speaking to each other. It was just the music, and work, work, work all the time, with no bullshit. Learning to solely communicate through the music alone was tough but I know we did the right thing taking our time with Carver City.” This summer, to coincide with the resurgence of CKY and the release of Carver City, Ginsburg, Miller, Margera and Deis will be hitting the road bringing the unique energy and atmosphere that only a CKY show can.

“those new shirt designs are the last ones to come out through our old merch deal. they are contract fulfillment, bound to be collector’s items. so pick them up even if you dont like them…i did. working on the art for CC still, its turning out amazing. chad’s in town and we have some meetings. a lot going on. spoke to james murphy yesterday, he will be engineering and mixing the WUB record if things go as planned. if anyone’s interested, the japanese release of carver city is available for pre-order on amazon.com. its expensive, but if youre a collector and familiar with japanese cds they’re pretty cool…its our first japanese release.“

And why are Japanese CD releases cool? The extras:

No-one packages a CD album quite like the Japanese. Known as a culture for elaborate and excessive packaging, their approach to the CD album is no exception. From the visual delights of the artwork and packaging, to the content itself, you will without doubt get your money’s worth here. The inclusion of the famous ‘obi-strip’ not only adds a uniquely intriguing aspect, but is also a great marketing tool for the Japanese labels. The term ‘obi-strip’ is derived from the name of the piece of wide fabric – the obi – that a geisha woman wears around her waist over the traditional Kimono dress. An amazing amount of information is packed onto this little wraparound piece of paper, often noting special tracks, concert dates, discography information and release anniversaries. And, as this information is intended to be read in the home market, it’s all printed in Japanese kanji and ~kana script! Whilst they are safely sealed on new release CD’s they are often discarded once opened, so they should be considered a real bonus when intact on out-of-print CD’s. In recent years we have seen the obi-strip occasionally replaced with a sleeve sticker, no less attractive and equally unique to the Japanese pressing.

Japanese CD albums often benefit from extra music and new video-style content, to further entice the Japanese public to buy their native release and not an import. Non-album tracks and exclusive mixes often feature and there are a huge amount of ‘Japan-Only’ releases that do not have an equivalent release elsewhere in the world. Japanese pressings will nearly always include a lyric booklet or fold-out lyric sheet. These are dual-language, printed in both the ~kana script and in English, the latter often having some wonderful mis-translations!

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/03/inamo-restauran.html

A year or so ago when Microsoft revealed their Surface hardware and software, I mentioned to Trey our IT director how cool it would be to develop something like this for a restaurant, and now someone is doing it! I suppose this will be the norm in 5 to 10 years when the price of that hardware comes down, provided it has an easy API. There are so many more things you could do with it too.

Such exciting technology.

John, one of their sales guys out west, remarked how innovative, easy and exciting their new site is in terms of marketing, and “he’s been doing this for a very long time”.

We do all of our training sessions and troubleshooting via Cisco WebEx, which allows us to teleconference via phone multiple people at once and share computer screens. That way we can walk people through managing their site in real time, from wherever. Additionally, via screen share, we can switch at any time and let them show us any problem areas they may be seeing, which is essential in a mixed browser, mixed PC/MAC hardware environment where static development environment variables cannot be guaranteed.

You’d be surprised at the differences in javascript handling alone between Safari (common on Mac) and Internet Explorer are (common on PCs), let alone rendering HTML and CSS. Which is why it’s also important that we stick as close to web standards as possible, so everyone has the same exact experience when using a website. Well, everyone but Internet Explorer 6 users. We do all we can to help you, but please upgrade your browsers!

Of course, you don’t have to be Dogfish Head to enjoy the same level of service. We offer the same service to all our clients and/or future clients who are in need of a web design / web developement company of a higher calibre.

Their new site has everything they have been wanting and more. Dogfish Head Brewery can now easily manage their 800 page (and growing!) website, all its users, media, newsletters, news articles, events, RSS feeds, and comments. They can add/remove ‘locations’ of where their product is sold, served, or distributed. This allows customers to log in and see where they can find Dogfish on the ‘Fish Finder‘. Try it out!

With that, the new site features a fully functioning community section and social network. Users can register on the website for an account, after which they can create a basic profile. From there, they have access to submit a map location to their Fish Finder, add or comment on threads in the Forum, submit questions to Dogfish staff in Ask Dogfish, comment on Dogfish staff blogs (Blogfish), and connect with other Dogfish loving fans. All applicable content is able to be sent instantly through Twitter/Digg/MySpace/Facebook/etc in a single click of the ‘Share’ button. We really went all out to flesh out the community side and give users stuff to do in between staff blogs and answering questions.

Our new system that was used on Dogfish Head Brewery has no official name yet, or I’d tell you what it is ha. We hope to have that nailed down soon. What I can tell you is that its the most feature complete, stable and scalable CMS you are going to find on the east coast. I would put it up against anything the competition has to offer from Maine to Florida with confidence ours is as on par or better than what else is available. Since the code is modular, its not coded for 1 strict specific project (as we used to) but rather, any client who comes in the door can have the same power, accessibility, UI and functionality of big time folk like Dogfish. In other words, it makes our platform highly scalable and consistent.

All ya gotta do is ask us.

As for the rest of the week, Pete, Trey and Kevin are representing Inclind at DrupalCon in Washington DC. They will be talking to fellow developers and programmers and sharing / showing off work. You can follow what we’re up to on our Twitter (either by going to the Twitter site, or the side of our page on this site, or adding us inclindinc).