Our KB project - going to Drupal

Very often we exchange tips with colleagues and partners. Things like do you have an example in OpenERP of a search / function field etc

Simply, we exchanges these by e-mail. Best of them go in mail folders.

When working on windows I am using OneNote (great MS office app with IMHO no open-source close equivalent).

I think these e-mails represent valuable material. Good for us during projects, but may be good for other people. So I decided to setup a knowledge-base web site where we can easily store and publish tips and code snippet.

My intention is to use Drupal instead of my usual Joomla. There are 2 keys reasons:

• Taxonomy : in Joomla the section/category is limited and makes impossible to classify articles. World is not a 2 levels tree - n level (Joomla 2.5) is not better. What I am waiting for since at 7 years: be able to put 1 article in multiple categories... E.G python / openerp / query / partner etc
• Front-editing : I just want to be able to login and change , cut and paste articles directly. The separation between the site and the admin may give security feeling for a classical site but is clear not appropriate for a community sharing site. 

Installing Drupal 7 is as easy as with Joomla.

Creating content-type is also easy to manage. In Drupal 7 the so called CCK is now a core module. One click and you are done.

However my first snippet post was disappointing... All the alignments are lost. Well for python samples with indent being semantically import the result was not that bad.

2 google search later? I found a Geshi filter module. Well a drupal module using a PHP library called GeSHI.

http://qbnz.com/highlighter/index.php

Much better than simply keeping indentation. It hilight source code syntax with colors for an incredible number of languages.


This is were  hughe communities of coder are incredibly good - thanks to all Drupaler and PHP guys and of course the GeSHI autors - you are great and you did my day !

What's up OpenERP training - Drupal Camp at Louvain-La-Neuve

This week I followed my first Open ERP training - this was kind of chaos at the beginning, but I learned a lot. Yet there is still many things to learn and do before feeling completely conformable.

Giving a course on such extended and modular product is difficult (so I pardon them) and I am thinking about developing my own training program/material/solution. You can expect more on this blog about Open ERP. I am not saying it is perfect but it is really an excellent product for managing small to medium size companies in a very large number of sectors - services, manufacturing, distribution... Still I regret the Python stuff but I must admit there is no such product in Java.

This morning there was a DrupalCamp near my location. Not that much people but it was a first attempt to organize such an event in the french speaking part of Belgium . I think they could have attracted more people just by sending the conferences program more in advance -- 2 days is very short.

I attended a few sessions - top 25 modules (interesting). A presentation about government/administration usage of Drupal (see for example http://premier.belgium.be/fr). Per say, nothing exciting except a sentence from this civil servant who think that government should provide as much data to citizens so they can build mash-up and invent services. It remains the question on how do that... micro-formats (e.g ical, vcal), rdf and rdfa - http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/ are part of the solution - at least a start. I will call that pragmatic semantic web... as a foundation for digital democracy.

The last session I attended was about building Web 2.0 apps with Drupal. Not excellent mostly because they tried to show an evolving usage case, not in line with the announced title and not fittting the one hour format.