It's a baby beta named Ægir - say "eager"

Today, Drupal rockstar and the  Raincity Studios super-developer and South African Emissary, Adrian announced the release of Ægir 0.1 Beta1. Named for the Norse God of the Seas, this evolution of Hostmaster is a critical part of Bryght's hosting environment.

The hardwork of Raincity Studios and Koumbit software engineers, and other contributors, is helping take mass Drupal hosting to the next level and you can join the fun - start at the Ægir hosting system group.

Added this release:

• Drupal install profiles - can be localized to provision sites in various languages
• Improvements to the comprehensive inline documentation
• Installation wizard to modify and/or simplify the user interface

User-interface refinements, non-critical ancillary features, and a Drupal 6 version are on the immediate roadmap.

Designed for Campaigns

No matter which side of the USA/Canada border you live on, it's impossible to ignore the political campaigns in full swing. Regardless of your leanings, no doubt the campaigns with polished social media strategies are enjoying advantages. Indeed, this is the first election cycle which 'Web 2.0" tactics are mandatory rather than merely optional or an after-thought.

Because Google (and the other search engines) efficiently index mostly all the pages within a site, visitors can obviously enter a site via hundreds of different on ramps. While this means the visitor may easily find the information they seek, the organization's time-sensitive objectives might not receive enough attention.

To rise above the noise, the savvy campaigner needs to transmit their message in a method in which people will receive and react to it with a clear and easy call to action.

New Drupal tool

A new module developed by Raincity Studios' Makara Wang will help the many politico sites using Drupal to harness their Google-juice and funnel their visitors to a desired actionable task.

The module is called "Roadblock" - a term which usually denotes a unwanted traffic snarl, but in this case, the roadblock is designed to focus the visitor's participation and funnel them towards a specific action.

Inspired by Darren's boring site note—which I usually find interesting—about his trying out a new WordPress plugin to his blog, and a brief email conversation, I developed the What Would Seth Godin Do? module.  It uses code from the WP plugin written by Richard K. Miller, adding a block to Drupal 5 sites for the first few visits people make to the website, with a friendly message to that visitor.  The administrator chooses how many visits constitutes a few, and what the message might be, such as 'how to get started' or, currently, a link to the site's main RSS feed.  The block disappears after the number of visits set by the administrator.

The way it works is that it adds content to the enabled block if the visits are under the specified number, tracked through a special cookie, and if that number is reached, the block's content goes blank.  (Drupal blocks do not display if there is no content to display.)  The name of the module is inspired by a blog post Seth Godin wrote last year arguing that new users to a site should get a little more help than frequent visitors.

It took about a half day to write, test, create the project on Drupal.org, and re-learn the correct steps for checking it into CVS, and fix silly bugs like leaving in the dummy text during the initial checkin.  Oops!  I still have the module flagged as 'developmental', since I haven't done enough testing, and would like to make sure it works across browsers.  It's a pretty simple module, so I would love to hear feedback about it before tagging it for a 1.0 release.

I just committed a working version of my new OpenSearch Aggregator module to Drupal Contrib CVS.

OpenSearch is a standard by Amazon which allows you to share search results through RSS. The feeds are valid RSS, they just contain extra meta-data for searching. So, you can use OpenSearch with any RSS reader to set up feeds to track tags or keywords for example.

We also have an OpenSearch client module that provides these feeds, and I just updated it to send search relevance information along. So, you could set up 5 Drupal sites with OpenSearch module, and a sixth site with the OpenSearch aggregator. Now, you can search all 5 sites simultaneously, and get a single, ordered list of global results.

However, because OpenSearch is an open standard, it can be used for anything. Amazon's A9 search already offers media search for example. The possibilities really are endless.

The best part? The OpenSearch Aggregator presents its results through the normal search system. So, if you install the OpenSearch module on top of this, you automatically provide OpenSearch feeds for the aggregated search. In other words, Drupal is now a complete OpenSearch processing suite! There is no other CMS out there that can claim this.

More info is on the Drupal.org project page.

[cross-posted from acko.net]