PRONOVIX

Tonight a tweet from Laura Scott lead me to a blogpost by Zack Rosen at Semantic Focus. From the first sentence it seemed a bit odd, it's been more than 12 years since Tim Berners-Lee started working on the Semantic Web and most if not all of the points that followed seemed outdated.

We really liked the concept of the Drupal card game pioneered by NodeOne. It is a great starting point for coaches to teach teams the value of collaboration. If you make an external reward system (e.g. winning team gets a bag of sweets) and you let teams play a couple of games, you can make a meta-game in which teams can experience the difference between different playing styles (and therefore the value of collaboration).

This week we launched modulecraft.com a fundraising tool that we want to use to raise interest, involvement and money for the development of a series of tools for Drupal professionals. Pure donation systems like chip-in have a pretty bad track record, but a donation/reward system has to our knowledge not yet been tried in the Drupal community. When you donate you will be contributing to the community AND getting something valuable in return.

We launched the platform with Documentation+, our first fundraising effort which primary aim is the development of a Documentation distro for Drupal.

Last night I browsed 4chan as usual. Besides the usual Pedobears and Lolcats I found out that the Drupal.org server has been hacked, and someone made a torrent from all of those very expensive modules that are stored in the "contrib" repository.
This is a very serious issue, since the whole thing worth around $189.000 if you buy it in the shop...

Yesterday I saw this post with a video on the new P2 theme for Wordpress and how Automattic* is using that as a real time microblog like tool for status updates in their company. And it got me thinking...

Drucumber is a new module that converts native-language like text into a Drupal Simpletests.

The following is an outline of the new concepts and the architectural changes we want to introduce in the next version of Graphmind. If you are interested in the project please give us your feedback in the comments!

Concepts

Multi-user modes:

• Transactional updates: all updates are packaged in an object that gets communicated through a P2P connection with the other Grapmind clients that are viewing the same session. We've got a demo of an initial proof of concept on Peter's post.

It's always been possible to use service bridges to delegate tasks between Drupal sites. Recently however a lot of new modules have been implemented for Drupal that are (going to) making this a lot easier. So much easier that I believe that Drupal service clouds, in which features are distributed over more than one specialized site, will become one of the great architecture options (together with organic groups, domain access and installation profile powered multi-site setups) to keep in mind when planning a project.

Together with the renaissance of installation profiles and Drupal distributions, this will make it more interesting to integrate a couple of distributions with a custom site than to try building all the features into 1 site. This is already happening with third party software integration projects such as the Alfresco and Apache Solr modules. A similar distributed feature architecture could however also be very interesting if implemented with a series of specialized Drupal sites.

In this post I'll talk about the pro and contra's of this approach and do a short review of the technologies that could be used to implement it.