Drupal

Recently, I made a very informal proposal for Drupal developers to cooperate to fight spam at the source of the problem. Unfortunately, there has been no reply to my email.

Regularly, the developers' mailing list, just like many other discussion groups, would go into lengthy debates about fairly inconsequential topics. Around that time, a new default theme for Drupal was being heavily discussed, as well as a new convention to name different Drupal releases.

Recently, spammers were heavily targetting wechange which was experiencing problems as a result. I wrote to the Drupal developers' list to ask for assistance. Fortunately, I have been able to find a solution quickly.

Alaa Abd El-Fatah is a renowned Egyptian blogger. He's been campaining in Egypt for Free software, Free Speech, Human Rights and political reform.

His blog, manalaa.net has won special reporters without borders award from the 2005 Deutsche Welle International Weblog Awards.

Alaa, together with a group of activist, have been calling for political and judiciary reforms. At stake, in particular, is a motion to ensure that the judiciary is independent and free from pressure from the government during elections. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/egypt/story/0,,1770311,00.html)

Hello,

Wechange runs on stable Drupal release

Wechange.org started running last fall on a development version of Drupal. A stable release was then due out very soon, but due to some circumstances unforeseen by any Drupal developper, the release date kept being postponed. Unfortunately, this has impaired the proper functioning of our website because of a certain lack of stability.

At last, thanks to the hard work of the Drupal developper community, wechange is now running on the latest 4.7 stable release of Drupal.

As a result, we are at last able to introduce some more features to the site.

Tags, tags, tags. Tags everywhere!

Today, I am happy to introduce a little new feature, but that will make looking for information more interesting and fun: wechange now has not one, but a set of Tag clouds.

What is a Tag Cloud, you may ask.
Have a look yourself:
http://www.wechange.org/tagadelic ,
http://www.wechange.org/tagadelic/people ,
http://www.wechange.org/tagadelic/places ,
http://www.wechange.org/tagadelic/topics .

Click on any keyword/tag, and you will get a list of posts on the corresponding topic.

You can find the links to the tag clouds in the main menus at the top of every page.

When you create a post, you will notice that you are given the possibility to enter a list of people's names, places and topics that your post cover. Do so conscienciously so that other visitors can find your post more easily.

This is a copy of a message I posted in the Drupal Voting API group

I would like to introduce you to a php voting API that I wish to develop further and for which I'd like to create a Drupal module. It is a complementary alternative or even replacement to the Drupal voting API.

Please, don't consider having a heart attack just yet. Please, read further and decide later.

Allow me to start from the beginning...

A world of alternative voting systems

It is a sad fact that for most people, whenever they think about voting or election, they can only think about what is known as "plurality voting", the voting method whereby you can only select one choice among many. Unfortunately, this voting method is demonstrably very bad.

You have only up to Nov. 11th to vote against software patents and safeguard Free Software.

Free Software is about liberty, cooperation (among and between developpers and users), sharing, and more such values promotted by this site. This site is run by numerous Free Softare (Apache, Debian, MySQL... and Drupal) as a matter of ethical choice.

By following the appeal by Open Source Software leaders (Richard Stallman, Tim O'Reilly, Alan Cox, Rasmus Lerdorf and Monty Widenius) and casting your vote in the election for the European of the Year, you can show your support for Florian Müller, creator of the web site www.nosoftwarepatents.com and award-winner campainer.