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Come join us for our Surrey Drupal Meetup on Feb. 11, 2010 7-9pm at ABC Restaurant at Fraser Hwy and 158th Street. Robert Scales, former CEO of Raincity Studios will be sharing with us relevant anecdotes about his company's open source business model, international markets, and their adventures in Drupaland.

Troubleshooting

Task: recreate live site on desktop server for development purposes

Problem: clean urls not working

1. Make sure that mod_rewrite is enabled on your server
Go to httpd.conf file and uncomment this line:
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

2. If you copied all the files from the live site directly to your local server, you may have
copied over the .htaccess file as well. This file applies specifically to your live server so it

Topic: Doing Business with Drupal
Date: Jan. 28, 2010
Time: 6:30-9:00 pm
Location: Appnovation Technogies
L200-560 Beatty Street
Vancouver, BC - Canada V6B 2L3
Phone: 1 (604) 568-0313

You can view a FREE video about Drupal 7 Alpha. Released by Learn by the Drop, this video covers what's new in Drupal 7. See http://learnbythedrop.com/drop/154

You can download the alpha version yourself and check it out. See http://drupal.org/drupal-7.0-alpha1

Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization is a new Drupal book authored by Ben Finklea and published by Packt Publishing. It’s a practical, step-by-step guide that takes the mystery out of Drupal search engine optimization (SEO) by showing you the tricks of today's top marketing pros to achieve top ranking in the search engines.

Come out and join us at the ABC Country Restaurant on Fraser Highway and 156th Street in Surrey, BC. Ben Finklea, the president of Volacci will be joining us via Skype video from Austin Texas and will be presenting on SEO for Drupal 6. This session will cover which modules you’ll need, how to configure them, and what more you can do to get your site to the top of Google. We’ll also have a little time for Q&A so bring your biggest SEO challenges and let’s solve them together.

For more details and RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/surrey-drupal/?a=fd_new_rsvp_grp

I really like these Drupal modules, Node Clone and Node Export.

Node Clone
If you need to copy an existing page on your site like a custom webform, node clone is what you need. Recently I needed to copy a custom sign up form and make minor edits. Node Clone did the job easily.

Node Export

In December at our Surrey Drupal Users Meetup, we shared our favourite Drupal modules. Here's my list:

Admin Menu – puts the admin menu at the top of the screen out of the way
Vertical tabs – makes your edit forms much shorter and easier to manage
Quicktabs - organizes your page content easily

Webform block – puts your webform in a block to show on any page
Block edit – lets you click on configure link to edit blocks from any page the block is on

Better Formats – assign input format to user roles

I love the new Drupal 6 themes from Agileware Software located in Australia. These 2 are my favourite:

• Energetic  -   View Demo
• Wilderness  -   View Demo

I like the graphics - especially the rollover menu buttons. The menu highlights the button of the page that you are on. When you are editing your content, you get nice rounded coloured buttons for View, Edit, etc at the top of your page. The block theming looks great. Just swap out the graphics with ones with colours that you like, and you have a new theme in a very short time indeed.

Q. How do I incorporate email newsletters in my Drupal website?

There are 3 ways to use email newsletters on your Drupal website:

1. You can use a popular e-newsletter software to collect email addresses and to send out your newsletter. Eg. Constant Contact, MailChimp or Campaign Monitor.

2. You can create your own custom form using Drupal module called Webform to collect names and email addresses and download the results. These results can be uploaded to the e-newsletter software of your choice.