My visit to DrupalCamp Alberta was a huge amount of fun and an amazing opportunity to speak to other Drupal users based in and around the Canadian Rockies. In my previous post, I talked about the presentation I gave and the work Trellon is doing on the Drupal Services module.

The Services module allows Drupal developers to easily build out web services on their sites and is an important component for web portals that offer access to content through an API. It fits nicely into a web strategy where widgets, mashups, and other applications can pull information from a Drupal site without needing to scrape HTML. There are some important considerations for sites using web services which are addressed through a number of configuration options that are part of the module.

Security configuration

Facebook's newsfeed feature introduced social network users to continuous updates of news about the goings-on in the lives of their friends and contacts. Activity aggregators have turned out to be a pretty useful feature for social networking sites, and can even be a little addictive when done right. Most sites that bill themselves as a social or professional network now have some kind of newsfeed, friend feed, lifestream or other feed.

The Activity module is your best bet if you want to aggregate activities from within your Drupal community. Its API is a little more complicated than similar modules like Activity Stream, but allows for a greater awareness of the context of activity items, so that their appearance can change depending on who is viewing them. Activity comes with seven contrib modules that cover most of the common activities on a community-based Drupal site (creating/editing nodes, adding/removing buddies, voting on content, etc.). This makes it very easy to get activity streams up and running on your site quickly.

Affinity Labs in Washington, D.C. was mobbed Wednesday night by a crowd of Drupal open source developers eager to share ideas and knowledge about their latest projects.

I recently attended Drupal Camp Alberta with about another 50 people. The reason for my attendence was that I had been invited to speak about the drupal services module as one of the co-maintainers of the project.

The drupal services module is maintained by myself, Rob Loach and Scott Nelson and has been existence as a drupal module for about 18 months. The module attempts to abstract both servers and services to allow multiple protocols to have to the same data. This opens opportunities for drupal to act as true server and a remote data repository for distripate clients. Services is currently under going active dvelopment and is maturing rapidly as a module. The module ships with a number of services being available:

• Node service. This provides the ability to create, save and delete nodes.
• Search service. This provides the ability to initiate user or node based searches.
• System service. This provides utility functions to get and set variables and re-start connections when using a cookie-less client.

As a well-known Drupal shop, Trellon continually strives to contribute back to the Drupal community in any way it can. Sometimes, we're just too busy, other times, we're just plain ol' lazy and, more often than not, Morbus is complaining about quality or phenoptosis or whatever. By keeping track of what we give back, however, we hope to more clearly see how much we are, or aren't, helping Drupal help ourselves.