Software

There are a million ways to make a website, but my personal favorite – and arguably the most popular – is WordPress. Because of its ease of use, price ($0.00!), and community, WordPress has been my Content Management System (CMS) of choice for every client – including nonprofits, small business, and university departments – I have worked with as a freelance web designer.

Despite the increasing relevance of social media tools like blogs, twitter, facebook, etc, the best place to connect with people remains their email inbox. Especially in Africa, email mailing lists such as Pambazuka News, WOUGNET-L, and African Democracy Forum remain essential online platforms enabling civil society activists and practitioners to connect, inform and support one another on a daily basis. We helped start all three of those lists back when Kabissa provided traditional domain hosting services, but have since moved on to promoting social media. Now to go forward while going back: let's revisit mailing lists.  

Update: these workshops have been cancelled, but there is an interesting discussion now starting amongst potential CiviCRM developers and users in Berlin to get together soon to start collaborating on bringing CiviCRM to the German "Sprachraum". This will involve localizing the application and documentation into German.

As for Kabissa, we are pleased to be in the middle of an upgrade to the latest version of CiviCRM which we hope to launch in the coming weeks - so we will need guidance and support on setting it up optimally for our needs. Let us know if you're a CiviCRM export and interested in volunteering. Thanks!

Oxfam Deutschland has graciously agreed to host hands-on CiviCRM workshops on October 6-7, targeting nonprofits using (or considering) CiviCRM in their organizations as well as web developers that want to add CiviCRM implementation and customization to their toolchest.

CiviCRM is available as a companion module for Drupal and Joomla content management systems, and like these tools is also open source software and available as a free download.

The CiviCRM team have also agreed to give a quick overview of CiviCRM on October 5 at the Socialbar ("ein Treffen von Weltverbesserern" = a social event for dogooders).

Workshop Registration is open!

If you are interested in participating in the workshops, see the following links to learn more and to register:

• Berlin user and administrator training : Oct 06, 2010 9:00 AM
• Berlin developer and implementer training : Oct 07, 2010 9:00 AM

If you have any questions about the event, feel free to contact me as I am helping to coordinate the event.

As you will see, the trainers have an agile approach and the agenda is still not set in stone. It will be finalized at the event so that the workshop can be tailored to the participants. CiviCRM is fairly feature rich, so before you come be sure to review the CiviCRM manual and take CiviCRM for a test drive.

Book Review:
Drupal 6 Performance Tips for any serious Drupal developer
by Trevor James and TJ Holowaychuk
Published by Packt publishing

Some months ago after the publication of my second Drupal book Drupal 6 Site Blueprints a Drupal disciple called me up and asked :
"Rabbi, my ass is grass; what can I do to take my megacool site to internet heaven? It is damn too slow".
"What have you got running on it ?", I asked him.

A Learning Management System - LMS, is software that teachers can use to publish their coursework online effectively and efficiently. An example is the Open Source Moodle framework. The LMS is being successfully integrated in the following manners at most educational institutions:

A Google map mashup site will typically permit content , profiles etc to be linked to a specific geographical location and displayed as a marker on a Google map . Such a website can be extremely useful for real estate marketing and also for social networks of moderate size. When clicked each marker will display the content that generated it. A page teaser can also be displayed on hover.This type of site is the basis of Pimp My Pizza a personal project which I am working on and which will enable users list and rate restaurants all over the UK.

Why would you be interested in building a blog site ? Well if you are reading this, you already are !! A blog is a contraction of the term weblog which means a type of website, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.

Drupal 6 Site Blueprints was a book that was published in August 2009 and written by Timi Ogunjobi.The objective of the book was to make it possible for complete novices to put together an impressive web site in a few hours by using the powerful Drupal framework from which most websites, including kabissa are now built.

Book link: Drupal 6 Site Blueprints

Drumbeat is a new project led by Mozilla Foundation, the folks who create the free and open source Firefox web browser. The initiative, which is organized around community-driven events and projects, is still taking shape and community input is being solicited broadly - so if you have an opinion on what is needed or want to get involved early, now is a good time to jump in.

I think Africa has a great deal to offer Drumbeat, and Drumbeat might also help bring attention to the many innovative social/mobile media projects going on in Africa. 

I am also considering Kabissa's possible role in helping to promote Drumbeat in Africa and so would be glad to hear your reactions to Drumbeat and if you want to get involved. 

The Kabissa online community platform was built using Drupal and CiviCRM, two very powerful freely available open source web applications. It would be great to get more folks in Seattle who are working in Africa to pick up on the benefits of CiviCRM for nonprofit/charitable work and consider using it. A terrific opportunity to find out more is coming up - a new CiviCRM Users Group will meet for the first time on May 27th. Details at http://bit.ly/b1vUY1