Moblin is a global open source project to develop a Linux-based stack for embedded devices ranging from mobile phones to netbooks to in-vehicle entertainment/navigation systems. With support from Intel and other embedded systems engineering companies, there are hundreds of engineers around the world helping to create an open tool set for the next generation of smart devices.

Intel announced the 2.0 iteration of Moblin to the public at OSCON 2008. Moblin is already being used to build Ubuntu's Mobile Internet Device (MID) distribution, and the first Moblin-based devices will be hitting shelves this holiday season. In short: very cool.

Naturally, a good open source project needs a good home for its developers, and that means Drupal!

Eight years ago today Drupal 1.0.0 was released. It's been a big year for Drupal, another big release with Drupal 6, a lot of awards, and a lot of recognition. The project has had some notable departures, promotions, and the addition of many great contributors and users. Happy Birthday to the Drupal project and its amazing community.

November 1st, 2008 saw the Alpha launch of Blog to it.

Blog to it is a social blog directory developed using 100% contrib modules. Well, there were a few tweaks to one module and a few more tweaks in the theme. This case study has been written to give an insight into how and why Blog to it was developed.

What is it?

"Do you have a blog that you would like to share with others? Do you enjoy reading blogs but don’t know where to effectively look for them? If you’re in this predicament, drop by Blog.to.it and take a look at what they have for you to enjoy.

Blog.to.it is a website that allows users to import all of their blog posts via RSS or start a new blog directly on their site. The site has eight different blog categories including technology, business, science, gaming, lifestyle, entertainment, sports, and other. Whatever you want to write or read about is easy to find, just look through the categories that interest you most.

Recently the Christian Assemblies International website was launched on Drupal 6. With much of the site’s content translated into 10 languages, it’s a perfect example of the excellent Drupal 6 i18n advances put to good use.

Build Story

The Need for Change

Christian Assemblies International is a largely volunteer-run Christian church, based in house groups throughout about 15 countries worldwide. The church’s original website was being manually maintained in 7 languages with Dreamweaver by a handful of very dedicated volunteers. Besides the obvious challenge of replicating changes 7 times throughout all pages, the workers had to struggle with making changes to languages that they couldn’t even half understand, like Russian and Polish. Many would have been keen to help in the work and share the load, but each new maintainer/helper required expensive software along with quite a bit of training, making the barriers to entry quite high. Adobe Contribute was used with some success to integrate non-technical users in a limited way, but slowly the site was becoming unmaintainable and a total rethink was needed.

The challenge

The main challenge for this project was to build from scratch an online store that originally was running on OsCommerce. Our proposal to the client was to use Drupal for managing his online shop, which would mean a big quality improve, as we included some social functionalities to the project.

Ama Tu Salud is a group of health therapists that have been helping people to improve their life quality for more than 20 years. In their physical shop, they sell dietetic products, herbalist, health food and fair trade, but they also teach courses about alternative therapies, acupuncture, naturopathy, kinesthesiology, reiki, diets and so on.

Starting Point

The design was old-fashioned and Oscommerce does not provide the social features we wanted to implement on the site: