English
Session - Installation Profiles
After too many days of work building installation profiles in Drupal, I decided to give a session about this interesting topic.
Installation Profiles
I am curious, wether people like the idea. If you are interested in installation profiles, write a comment with the point you want to hear in that session.
Bildungsreisen
Ich hab einen tollen Job. Ich fahre durch Europa und entwickle Projekte im Rahmen des europäischen LifeLongLearning Programmes und Trainingskonzepte für cocoate. Es geht um Erwachsenenbildung, in all ihren Facetten mit dem Schwerpunkt des lebenslangen Lernens.
In den europäischen Projekten sind meist 5-7 verschiedene Einrichtungen aus verschiedenen europäischen Ländern beteiligt und während der Projektlaufzeit besuchen wir einander. So lernen wir uns, die Orte an denen wir wohnen und leben und die Bedingungen, unter denen wir arbeiten besser kennen.
Das ist eine tolle Sache! Ich komme so an Orte, die ich als normaler Tourist eher nicht sehen würde und ich lerne Menschen in ihrem ganz normalen Leben kennen.
Immer, wenn ich wieder nach Hause komme, fragen mich meine Nachbarn (ich lebe in einem kleinen südfranzösischen Dorf mit 1.200 Einwohnern), wo ich war und was ich dort gemacht habe. Ich erzähle Ihnen oft von Orten, von denen sie noch niemals gehört haben, von dem, was mir dort begegnet, was ich sehe und wie ich das empfinde. Ich sehe mit “meiner Brille”, die ist natürlich gefärbt mit meinen Erfahrungen, von meiner Sicht auf die Dinge. Auch wenn ich versuche möglichst neutral hinzuschauen, ich bin mehr oder weniger in die Situationen verwickelt und daher ist das Geschriebene etwas sehr persönliches.
Joomla! 1.5 Workshop
Joomla! 1.5 basics and more, I'll try to cover two days in one.
The content will depend on your needs!
Les logiciels que nous utilisons
Prochaine formation gratuite à Fitou:
La formation portera sur quelques logiciels que nous utilisons sur nos ordinateurs pour:
- Ecrire et administrer les e-mails
- Ecrire des lettres
- Créer des tableaux
- Surfer sur Internet
- Créer des brochures
- Se protéger des virus
- Téléphoner
Nous présentons des logiciels gratuits.
Pensez à amener votre ordinateur portable.
Abbaye de Fontfroide
Between Fitou and Narbonne, in the picturesque hills of Corbieren, is the church Abbaye de Fontfroide.
1093 the Abbay was founded as a Benedictine monastery and joined few years later the Cistercian Order. During this time the construction of the monastery church started. The Cistercians preferred the solitude and loneliness, but the sites had to have enough of forest (for furniture, utensils and firewood), stones for construction and water. All this was available in Fontfroide, inside the court of the monastry is a very cold source - Fontfroide - which gaves the monastery its name. Until the 14th Century, the monastry expanded to the size we can visit today.
The Abbaye de Fontfroide had, like all monasteries in this region, an eventful history. Since about 100 years the monastry is privately owned and has been completely rebuilt and restored. Today, in the Abbaye takes place concerts and exhibitions during the whole year.
building coverflow slideshows with flickr
I am always looking for tools to create slideshows. Yesterday I have found a "nice" possibility. If your pictures are at flickr, you can create a coverflow slideshow. It is possible to embed the slideshow via iframe in a website. Here in my blog I have not enough space 
, therefore I made only a little screenshot to make you curious.
Watch coverflow from the Drupalcon Szeged 2008 :
http://coverflow.tinou.com.s3.amazonaws.com...
create one:
Drupalcon Szeged
What a nice Druplicon 
Where do the people come from?
by gender ...
10 % is not bad for a computer conference
La mer jaune
Allusion à l'imagination de lumière de W. Turner
Acryl sur toile 2005
Vide Grenier
Twice a year a flea market takes place at Fitou, the first at Whitsun, the second at the middle of August. Not only antiques dealers of the region are there, also the inhabitants opens their (wine) cellars and sell what they do not need anymore. These markets are, of course, a touristic attraction. You can make a good bargain there and find some very special or rare things.
fitou.eu
August 2008
We launched a platform for Fitou inhabitants and guests to publish relevant information about that village and area. Each user is able to create it's own content: events, special places and of course, the business in Fitou.
The service is offered free of charge.
fitou.eu could be the beginning of an online community for " les fitounais" and their guests.
First chapters of my new Drupal 6 book are on line
After many other projects I found the time to write a Drupal 6 book and record a new Drupal 6 video training.
Of course, it is in German language because of my origin. The book will be available on line for free at http://drupal.cocoate.com. It consists of three parts. Today I have published part 1 (the introduction and chapter 1-3). Part 2 will be published at August, 4th and part 3 at August, 11th.
The German Drupal video training is released and is seems, that it will be translated or better "new recorded" in French language.
For the book, the German publisher negotiates with an American publisher for a translation and they asked me to translate the table of content and the chapter 11, which is about CCK. My daughter Isabell did the tranlation of the texts and I did new screenshots. So a small part of the book is now earlier available for free in English than in German language .
I'm going to Drupalcon Szeged, who else?
I would like to make an advertisement for the Drupal conference in Szeged, Hungaria, from 27th - 30th august 2008.
I advertise, because I will be there too and I like Drupal
Great software, nice people, beautiful location, interesting country ... and the food ... wow
So - register immediately
What does it mean to be an Open Source author?
I hear daily about open source projects, the open source business model, what it means in terms of freedom, choice, risks, investment, etc... What I rarely hear about is what is life like for those who actually contribute and dedicate a part of their life to open source?
Book review on zend.com
Another review of my Joomla! 1.5 book from zend.com with this conclusion
Conclusion
The book is very complete. It is a real beginning to end piece that has great instructional value. I can see it easily implemented in workshops etc. Up to chapter 13 not much knowledge is needed. Chapter 13 to 15 require some experience with php/html to be completely understandable. The only thing I really miss is a chapter about security. A lot of sites get hacked because of the behaviour of beginning developers. Some simple guidelines would have made a great addition especially for the beginning administrator. Hagen Graf was able to transfer his knowledge of the subject, combined with his teaching knowledge, in a way that organises the book into a complete tutoring and reference document. He is not just listing features and their use but also explains very clearly how Joomla! happened, what technology was used and how everything evolved. He is clearly very passionate about Joomla! which shows already in the preface starting of with "Joomla! is life!". But anyone that ever worked with Joomla! will easily forgive him and might be equally enthusiastic or become it after reading this book.
Read the full review -> Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5
Joomla! 1.5 book review on zend.com
Another review of my Joomla! 1.5 book from zend.com with this conclusion
Conclusion
The book is very complete. It is a real beginning to end piece that has great instructional value. I can see it easily implemented in workshops etc. Up to chapter 13 not much knowledge is needed. Chapter 13 to 15 require some experience with php/html to be completely understandable. The only thing I really miss is a chapter about security. A lot of sites get hacked because of the behaviour of beginning developers. Some simple guidelines would have made a great addition especially for the beginning administrator. Hagen Graf was able to transfer his knowledge of the subject, combined with his teaching knowledge, in a way that organises the book into a complete tutoring and reference document. He is not just listing features and their use but also explains very clearly how Joomla! happened, what technology was used and how everything evolved. He is clearly very passionate about Joomla! which shows already in the preface starting of with "Joomla! is life!". But anyone that ever worked with Joomla! will easily forgive him and might be equally enthusiastic or become it after reading this book.
Read the full review -> Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5
cross cooking & learning
With our company eduate.eu we are partner in several european projects. The focus of these projects are learning from each other, share experiences, do things together, developing special skills etc. - all in a European view.
The project I want to talk about is a G2 Learning Partnership Project and it is funded by the European Commission in the framework of Socrates. Funded by the European Commission means not that you can spend thousands of Euros in nice bars in Brussels. Funded means, that you get the flight costs (up to a limit) and a bit money for paper and printer ink in the office and so on.
Eduate.eu (Christine Graf) is the project coordinator of the Cross Cooking project.
Project description:
The project aims to rediscover and preserve traditions in cooking across Europe, whilst enhancing the possibilities of learning and cross-generational and cultural cohesion - read more.
So in these kind of projects there is no real money (in the sence of getting rich) involved and most of the people do not have IT skills. All of these projects needs a website and a communication system (even Phone, Skype, E-Mail, whatever). For most of the smaller projects it is nearly impossible to do something more than five HTML pages with the outcomes of the project. For this project we wanted to make few things different. We choosed Drupal and tried to develop the website in a way that the project participants can follow the development and still be able to use the website. That means no special design, no individual module development, etc because that would be too expensive. Another decision was to open all the content and the discussions, because we spend European tax money and the website visitors should see everything. If there were technical needs during the project, we installed a contributed module and tried to find a clever solution. The project started with Drupal 4.6 and now we have Drupal 5.7
And now?After one and a half year and several meetings (real & virtual) the group has written a European cookbook in many languages on-line! This cookbook is a collaborative work made with the Drupal book module by people who never touched a computer before.
Because they want to share all the recipes from Wales, Germany, Italy, Finland & Hungary they decided that the cookbook is downloadable for free (download here). It is also possible to buy it but the most important thing is to try out cooking
From my perspective this was a wonderful project and the group has reached much more for the development in Europe than they expected at the beginning!
And I am very happy about the fact, that Drupal is one big Lego Brick in this project.
At the moment the group has applied for another project with the name "doing2learn".
I am very curious!
Joomla! in Ankara, Turkey
May, 16th we gave a training in Ankara at DIKEMN ENDÜSTRI MESLEK SCHOOL. Their website is made with Joomla! and the students are very interested in this CMS and the possibilities (even when it is not the main topic at that school).
They only spoke turkish but we had a wonderful translator from english to turkish and vice versa. After around one hour there were no more problems with understanding, because of the international topics like HTML, CSS, PHP, Apache, Joomla!, ...
I have taken a few pictures in the break and in the classroom
Our first Drupal Group Southern France meeting
took place in our new office in Fitou.
I don't like cross posting ... so see my "full report" here
Video codecs, aspect ratios and other buzzwords
As I promised long time ago I will talk more about our european projects.
In one project, we have a few videos and today a had ... not a real problem ... but something like a chain reaction But finally the video from the turkish tv station made it on the website!
Video codecs, aspect ratios and other buzzwords
Btw:
Have you seen Sara & Christine in Ankara?
