I'm known, famously or infamously, for my code quality reviews and, whilst I don't get enough time to perform the same anal-retentive behavior at Trellon, I've streamlined checks of the most egregious errors with daily e-mailed reports using Coder and Drush. Drush allows you to operate your Drupal site from the command line, while Coder is a friendly "do it right, bub" for code quality.

We were recently approached by a client who wanted to create two sites to serve different audiences but with vast amounts of common content. The same group of people would be responsible for the upkeep of both sites and the desired solution would allow content to be shared with great ease.

Online event registration has always proved tricky for website developers. Even with the rise of social media, capturing information from participants has always been subject to the nuanced details of organizing events in the real world. How many people are allowed to attend? Do people have to pay to get in? Where am I storing the information we collect so it is most useful to event organizers? These kinds of questions lead to very specific, focused solutions within open-source event management systems, and make it difficult to address the needs of general audiences.

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.

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.