Last weekend, I was invited to Anadolu University to give a seminar on Drupal. The seminar took place on November 21st and 22nd.

I must say, Anadolu University has one of the most beautiful campuses among the universities I have seen before. And the students seem to know the value of such a great education place.

The seminar was organized by IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) in cooperation with Science and Technology student groups. The organization was flawless and the participants were highly involved, in spite of the school was just announced to be closed on whole coming week on short notice.

I tried to focus on introducing Drupal as a CMS and wanted to show what can be done with Drupal, instead of giving a detailed technical information. After all, 2 days is a very short time to get a good grasp of Drupal, but it is enough to learn if it is worth learning. I just stated the facts and let them decide if it is the tool they want to use to develop websites. The feedback was positive.

Here is the presentation I used on the seminar: Drupal_sunum.pdf. (in Turkish). In order to download, right-click on the link and select "Save link as" or "Save target as".

I will also post the pictures here, if they ever send me :)

Netbooks are becoming more popular every day. People mainly use them for Internet, office applications or multimedia. With the development of fast mobile Internet technologies such as 3G, they become more important. They are small so they can be carried easily. But this very reason causes some problems while browsing the Internet.

Note: As Irakli comments below, Charts and Graphs module has changed in time. Please refer to http://drupal.org/node/681660. Information below may not be correct for the latest version of the module.

Displaying data with charts and graphs is a nice way to visualize numeric data. Not everybody is good with numbers, while most of the people like to see a bar chart to see the change in several values.

On sahandafutbol.com, the users get points for their correct guesses on a match day. So, I thought displaying user’s points per match day with a bar chart would be really nice.

We could use a free charting API that can work with the data provided by our custom module. But at first, I searched for a contributed module which already offers the needed functionality. I must say that, charting is a wild area in Drupal world. There are some modules for charting; but their names, dependencies and the lack of solid documentation can easily confuse anybody. There are 3 different modules named as “Chart API”, “Charts” and “Chart and Graphs”… If I ever contribute a module about charting, I will name it as “Charts API and Graphs”, because there may be a secret naming convention for this area and I don’t want to break it :)

I tried each module and in the end, I decided to use Charts and Graphs in combination with Views Charts. Our custom module is fully integrated with Views so it is easy to display any kind of information with charts. The module supports 3 different libraries. I chose the Open Flash Chart 2 API. With this opportunity, I would also like to thank to the creators of the Open Flash Chart project.

I created this little widget after reading a long discussion on merlinofchaos's blog: www.angrydonuts.com/an-observation-about-designers-versus-developers