I’ve been spending most of my free time these days working on Drupal projects. But I still have a day job. In fact, I routinely turn down Drupal consultancy jobs because I simply don’t have enough time.

Not only do I have a day job; I recently was promoted during a company restructuring. Bob Gilbert (my boss) and I are now the Strategic Partnership Development group at Morris DigitalWorks (MDW). (We are working on hiring one more person right now, too.)

What is Strategic Partnership Development? Well, to me, it’s similar to venture capital, except that it works inside the confines of our existing corporate structure. Our mission, at its core, is to find ways to extend and renew our core business by acquiring, hiring, or partnering with third-party developers.

The impetus for this new team is largely the Yahoo! newspaper consortium (NPC), a complex content and revenue sharing agreement between our parent company, Yahoo!, and over a dozen leading US newspaper companies.

Currently, my time is split between reviewing agreements between MDW and its partners and looking for new technology and business models that will help the newspaper industry.

Look for more details in this space, but first I’m off to my first vacation of the year.

I just released my second official Drupal project today.

Skeleton for Drupal 5.

I created this module (like most Drupal developers) to solve a specific problem. I’m building a corporate intranet site to store complex information about clients and partners. We want to store the same information for each partner, but not all in a single node, because: a) not all users should be able to access all data; and b) that node would be ridiculously long.

The solution: create reusable book outlines, which contain preset nodes containing sample (or static) data.

From the project description:

The Skeleton module works with the core Book module to create pre-configured outlines that can be reused. After creating a skeleton and assigning templates to it, users with the proper permission will be able to create new books that clone the outline and content of the skeleton.

The original use-case of this module is for publishing on an intranet site, where it is important to create the same information structure repeatedly. The skeleton module is designed to make this repetitive task easy to perform — especially for non-technical site administrator.

This is an alpha release, as the module has only been tested on localhost by a single user. if you need this module and want to be a co-maintainer, let me know, too!

I took these this morning in the back yard. Hoping to print them and hang them in the bedroom, but my printer ran out of yellow!

Note: These blooms are about 6 ft (2m) off the ground. The day after I took these, the stalks collapsed under their own weight (it happens every year).

After several weeks of testing, and some diligent bug reports, I’m pleased to release MySite v 5.x.2.0 for Drupal 5.

The new version adds a host of new features, including an Icon browser for making a snazzy interface for adding content to a personal page.

The coolest new feature, of course, is drag-and-drop sorting of content, thanks to the Interface library for jQuery.

Some quick credits.

MySite is sponsored by Morris DigitalWorks.

Special thanks to:

* jjeff for the jQuery Update and jQuery Interface modules
* starbow for his work on AHAH and ajax-based tables and forms
* merlinofchaos for tips and tricks regarding page layouts
* Mark Baggett and Heine for security review
* dww for the Project module
* jonbob for the API module
* douggreen for the Coder module
* kbahey for getting me started in CVS
* yelvington for encouragement
* bobscape and MDW for time to work on the project

* All the Drupalers who submitted bug reports and patches

The module is available for download from Drupal.org.

Developer note: There is no 5.x.2 branch yet, since 5.x.2 and HEAD have not diverged.