Arnold Leung

Yet another year has passed. My company Appnovation Technologies, a Vancouver Drupal Development shop is now 2 years old. I remember starting the company with just myself and a contractor. It's been a crazy experience to go from ground zero to now a company of 12 people.

For the last few months, my company Appnovation has been deeply involved with a number of sustainability projects. We are building a site called Sustainability Television for a local entrepreneur. The site will be here in about 3 weeks: www.sustainabilitytelevision.com . The site will be a video site which helps to inform the public on Green and sustainability related topics.

Our other sustainability project is for a Boston based company called Sustainable Minds (www.sustainableminds.com). They create software which helps companies implement sustainable business practices.

My company Appnovation, a Vancouver Drupal Development shop has just helped BroadSoft Inc. (www.broadsoft.com) with the launch of their market place web site. BroadSoft is a leading VOIP software developer and would like to open its API so that third party developers can create applications on top of their platform.

I attended Drupal Con Boston last week from Monday till Wednesday and had to go to New York for 2 meetings on Thursday. It was exciting to see that over 800 people attended this conference as oppose to 400 last time at Barcelona. I would expect to see 1600 people at the next conference.

For myself and Appnovation, it's great to see that Drupal is growing. Appnovation focuses on Drupal development and ever since last year, we have experienced tremendous growth at the company. We went from 2 people to 8 people in just a few months.

I posted a blog post about Drupal Google Map integration a few weeks ago. In that posting, I mentioned that Google Maps can be integrated by simply creating a custom .php page which embeds the Google Map API JavaScript inside it and then fetch the right Google Map based on the URL ($_GET variable).

I think that while this method works for most sites, this may not work for a lot of directory sites simply because people enter non conventional addresses. In order to prevent this from happening, there are 2 things that can be done:

It seems like 37 Signals basecamp (www.basecamphq.com) is down again. This is the 2nd time ever since the start of 2008.

For development shops like mine, it means that we cannot access our project files and information.

For an E-Commerce that my company is working on, we need to create a View which shows a list of products based on 2 arguments. For those who do not know what Views Arguments is, you can check out this page.

There are currently numerous ways for integrating Google Maps with Drupal. The most popular method is to use the GMap Module together with the Location module. This method provides the most functionality and highest level of customization. However for relatively simple integrations, it is possible to simply embed the javaScript as part of a custom module or part of a custom page. This will allow for a simple JavaScript integration which makes use of the Google Geo Coder API.

My company Appnovation got the opportunity to work on an interesting project for the UBC Faculty of Education. This project involves integrating Drupal and Moodle for the students of the faculty. The idea of the project is to allow education students to use Drupal for managing multi-media course files, and to use moodle for delivering the course content to their students.