Last night I had the pleasure of emceeing a tech forum where Jeff Whatcott, VP of Marketing at Acquia, Inc. gave a very informative presentation of his views on overall trends in the content management market, specifically in Drupal as a social publishing system and how his company is forging the future for Drupal into commercial marketplaces.  His presentation can be found here.

From Jeff’s Twitter feed:

“Completed a webcast to a Drupal meetup in virginia. Seemed to go well. Good questions.”

Frank Febrarro of Phase2 Technology then demonstrated a module they have recently released for Calais.  The Calais web service allows you to automatically annotate your content with rich semantic metadata, including Entities like People and Companies and Events & Facts like Acquisitions and Management Changes.  Phase 2 has integrated this service as a module for Drupal 5 and 6.  You can watch a short screencast Frank recorded to demo main features of the module.

Toward the end we as a group decided to keep this meeting rolling as the Drupal Northern Virginia Users Group.  We are targeting the second Tuesday of the month.  This forum will be very much dependent on audience participation for suggestions of topics and also utilizing a rotating emcee.  If you’re interested in Drupal we would love to have you join us.

I’d like to thank Teqcorner for providing the space for us along with Andy Forbes and Arman Anwar of WorthPoint for their invaluable assistance in coordinating this event.

For more information on future meetings, to suggest topics, volunteer to host or make a presentation please contact me at marc [dot] benton [at] worthpoint [dot] com.

I am now in a situation where I am hoping that there were documentations made.

Advance cache modules comes wtih lots of patches to be applied to the core modules. Wondering why the patches don’t apply cleanly, I investigated the modules and found out that these modules were edited sometime in the past.

I am now doing a task that takes a lot of time, a task that could have been avoided if only there were proper documentation, a task to sweep and search the whole core modules and see what changes have been done. And after finding the changes, investigate how those changes affect the system.

I’m writing this blog not to brag about what I’m doing nor to announce how I’m studying the drupal core, but to emphasize and remind every developer to make proper documentation in every code. In this way, it will be a lot easier for other other programmers to finish/continue/edit/modify previous programs.