I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the Ottawa Book Launch for Transforming Power, that was held at the Raw Sugar Cafe earlier today.  The cafe was definitely packed with people who came to both see Judy & celebrate Octopus Books' 40th Anniversary.  The venue was intimate and everyone was interested in hearing from Judy.  We have been doing the Website for Octopus Books now for probably 8 years (Krishna & I put up what was at the time a fairly complex site at that time) and also helped Judy Rebick put together her site over the past couple of months.

We took a leadership role in supporting Judy's site because we saw the potential for this project to mobilize the social justice movement in Canada.  When we (Krishna & I) first worked with Judy it was when we helped to launch rabble.ca back in 2001.  Rabble.ca has done a lot to help to focus left leaning media and discussion since that time and it was with rabble.ca that we were involved in our first advocacy campaign to build a petition to release Jaggi Shing. 

This was a WordPress to Drupal 6 conversion for an organization focused on environmental challenges and solutions.

Using panels and aggregator modules, we created a system for filtering incoming news feeds to determine which ones are shown on the front page. Normally, aggregator feeds appear unfiltered, but this organization wanted to control what external links are visible on the website. A custom panel shows the incoming feeds with admin links for choosing which feeds show in the custom feed blocks.

We recently upgraded the OctopusBooks.ca website from Drupal 4 to 5. In the process, we decided to upgrade the eCommerce module to the new Ubercart 1.0 shopping cart.  There are many flexible product and shipping options available in Ubercart and the whole shopping process is more slick and simple.

New blocks were added to take showcase the in-house and aggregated content that had been added to the website but was not being highlighted.  The blocks ranging from 'News' to 'Reviews' were randomized to give the site a fresh look each visit.

We are happy to announce that we are working with Volunteer Canada to help them make better use of their website. We upgraded and standardized their existing install and provided better support for their bilingual site.

We are helping this national organization to consolidate a number of other important tools in one website. We will be using this one website to help launch member forums, a corporate volunteering centre and National Volunteer Week. Using Drupal's advanced theming capabilities we will be able to create different themes for each section of the site.