I like it when other folks go on rants so that I don’t have to.

Poynter Online columnist Amy Gahran lets fly at journalism schools who teach students to use DreamWeaver:

Dreamweaver is a decent Web design and development tool. However, it’s not very relevant to journalism, because it does not include a robust content management system! Apparently, this j-school (like many others) offers little or no training in true CMS-based tools. Their online courses focus on Dreamweaver.
….
If your journalism classes are part of a larger communications program, I think clarifying which tools are right for the job is even more important. The journalism class projects should focus on CMS tools like Wordpress or Drupal. Leave the teaching of Dreamweaver to the PR and advertising classes, where it’s much more relevant to the kind of sites created in those disciplines.

For those of you following along, this sentiment is one of the reasons why the Knight Foundation is interested in Drupal.

It’s that time. Time to start porting MySite to Drupal 6. It will take some effort, since I will be refactoring some code and doing an API cleanup to more closely integrate with Panels.

One of the coolest features in MySite is the ability to drag-and-drop elements around the page. Problem is, the feature is a little buggy and relies on the jQuery Interface project. Based on some recent discussion, I think a Drupal-specific solution might be best.

But I’m not a jQuery ninja. So I’m looking for one. I’m already hoping to leverage starbow’s AJAX popup modals to make for cooler interfaces.

If you’re a jQuery ninja looking to contribute to a Drupal project, just let me know.

Well, this is not a big deal to most people, but fun for me.

This patch for Drupal 6 includes the first function that I have written for Drupal core. All my previous patches were just bugfixes.

And this custom_url_rewrite_outbound patch mirrors the patch that I had to include with Domain Access, so for Drupal 6, we can use the core function.

I suppose I am finally working up the Drupal curve. Heck, the esteemed dww even referred to me as a rock star in IRC.

You may have heard that the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will be a Platinum sponsor at DrupalCON Boston March 3rd - 6th. What you may not know is what the Knight Foundation does and how they are connected to Drupal.

Knight Foundation’s signature work is its Journalism Program. Since 1950, the foundation has invested more than $300 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression worldwide. Today, the program focuses on leading journalism excellence into the digital age. We define journalism excellence as the fair, accurate, contextual pursuit of truth. [more]

I spoke to Gary Kebbel, former head of AOL News and current journalism program officer at the foundation. Among his duties, Gary runs the Knight News Challenge, a $25 million contest to find digital news innovations that are used to create community in a given geographic area.

In 2006, Drupal-based projects by Benjamin Melançon and Lisa Williams were both funded by News Challenge grants.

2007 was the second year of the Challenge, and while the winners won’t be announced until May 14-16 at the Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas, Gary tells me that this year featured a large number of outstanding Drupal proposals.

Since the Knight Foundation is a strong believer in Open Source and sees great potential in Drupal, Gary thought that DrupalCON was a perfect chance to:

• Explore the Drupal community
• Give back to Open Souce through funding
• Announce the next big initiative

Now, I can’t say what the next big initiative is — only that it is very exciting for the Drupal community. Over at the Newspapers on Drupal group, we’re thrilled to have the Knight Foundation involved.

Gary and I are planning a session at the conference to discuss the Knight Foundation, and we are both going to be at the News Industry meetup on Monday the 3rd.

I’ve been doing my version of shouting this message from the rooftop, and since I can use this forum, too, here goes.

DrupalCON 2008 is coming to Boston, March 3rd - 6th.

Details are online at: http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/

For those of you in the news industry who to learn more about the platform, the community and the future of Drupal, this is the best event of the year.

The following events and topics are designed with news professionals in mind:

– Monday, March 3rd features the first-ever Drupal job fair, so your organization can come and recruit Drupal developers and trainers.*

– Monday will also feature a News Industry meetup, which I am hosting. This is the perfect chance to connect with professionals who are working with Drupal to meet the same business needs.

– The conference “Site Building” track is designed to help those new to Drupal learn how to build, host, scale and manage their Drupal sites, with a special emphasis on integrating Drupal with external systems.

There will be four “tracks” at the conference, dedicated to the following topics:

– Marketing and business
– Design and user experience
– Site building
– Community and core

Attendance is $195 per person and covers all 4 days.

For vendors and recruiters, there are sponsorships available:
http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/sponsorships

* Job fair participants must be event sponsors.

If you have any sponsorship questions or ideas for the industry meetup event, please contact me at agentrickard [at] gmail [dot] com.

I read with some fondness and a chuckle the release announcement of RedBlueAmerica.com. Why? Well, because I know some of the PingVision team and I know some folks at Scripps.

And because our similar, Drupal-powered site went live for all our newspapers last month.

ActiVote uses the Domain Access beta to provide content across a group of affiliate domains.

Tip of the hat to grndlvl for his work on ActiVote and to the PingVision and Scripps folks.

But this also illustrates one of the oddities of open-source. I’ve been arguing for a while that news organizations need to move behind open-source in part so that we can pool resources to solve similar problems. Here, we have two groups using the same platform but different projects in order to meet similar goals.

I just wonder if we could have teamed up. (Probably not, the business logistics tend to interfere.) I am hopeful, however, that the News Industry meetup at the upcoming DrupalCON will help get some collaboration moving.