WebWise Solutions

This article from the Beagle Research Group caught my partner's eye recently. It offers good advice for those looking to pick a community services firm. We could all do well by making note of what our clients are looking for in a good community partner.

Here's an excerpt of the article:

I've been a Robert Douglass fan for a long time. My first Drupal book was penned by Robert. I learned from him then and continue to pick up bits of wisdom from his ongoing stream of articles and presentations.

Here's a list of ways to improve Drupal search that I've compiled from things I've learned from Robert over the past two years:

I've written a small module that makes it possible for voting widgets (that leverage the Voting API) to hook into the User Points ecosystem. This means that sites using voting tools like Fivestar, Voting, or Latest and Greatest (to name a few) can now award their users points for voting.

At the recent Lullabot training at Portland, I was thrilled to give a quick demo of how my company is using User Points to create a rewards program for our community members.

As part of the demo, I showed our "Top Contributors" module. This module simply builds a block that lists the site's top 10 contributors and links to a page that lists the entire (sortable) list of contributors.

Some of the attendees encouraged me to release the module so, here it is. It's not rocket science (in fact it's extremely simple) but it's my first small step in a new and exciting direction.

We've all wrestled with the dilemma that comes with the "Administer Nodes" permission. It's a very powerful permission that really only belongs in the capable hands of the most your most experienced site administrators.

The rub, however, is that there are some very fundamental tasks (like publishing a node) that cannot be performed without this permission. If you have a large site and are trying to spread responsibilities, it's difficult not to grant this right.

We recently figured out a way to grant group managers *temporary* and limited Administer Nodes rights. Check it out.