It’s been our pleasure to work with distinguished author Neil Baldwin over the past several months.  Canary redesigned www.neilbaldwinbooks.com and created a custom content management system utilizing the  Drupal platform and a grid-based custom theme.

Neil was kind enough to send us the testimonial below.  For more from our clients, check out our testimonials page.

“I was petrified when www.neilbaldwinbooks.com began to receive its makeover from Canary. Intuitively I felt that I knew what I wanted, but despite — or perhaps because of — being an author, I had trouble expressing these needs to Mason, John and the Canary team. Of course, from the moment they came back with slate blue and earthy brown as the basic colors for the site (I had never even told them that blue and brown were my favorite colors), I was in the right hands & never looked back. I also admit that I was even more petrified when Mason told me — once my new site was built — that he was going to teach me (omigod, as they say…) how to go into the invisible infrastructure and make changes on my own. Yet again, John and Mason patiently talked me through the looking glass, and, before too long, I got used to the subversive nature of what I was doing. We literati develop an intense ownership over our work. Canary ‘gets’ this obsession intuitively and respects it as well. The best attribute of Canary? They combine cutting-edge creativity and inductive reasoning with infinite patience — and they are always there when I need them.”

We just had our first Drupal Camp here in Philly last Wednesday (Nov 19, 2008), and it was a surprising success. I say surprising because we really put this together in a very short amount of time. There was certainly a chance that we’d have a couple near-empty rooms and a very full buffet table. But Drupallers around here are hungry, and they showed up in droves!

We had a Beginner and an Advanced track, and I was happy to see people at both sides. I led the Intro to Theming session with my friend Jody Hamilton from ZivTech where we outlined the possibilities and tools available to a Drupal themer. My main goal with the session was to open it up to questions as early as possible and we did get to a lot of people’s questions. We tried our best to be clear and offer our best advice, so I hope we didn’t steer anyone wrong! There are usually many ways to accomplish your goals in theming and the rest of Drupal and you can’t go over all the options in a setting like that.

We at Canary were happy to help sponsor and organize the event, but the bulk of the credit and praise goes to Nate Gasser of Rock River Star. He did the bulk of the legwork and paid out the bulk of the cash to put us in such a great venue. We’re planning to do these regularly so look out for the next on sometime in Spring.

(more photos)

Just launched today: ClassicTowns.org. The site promotes eleven Philadelphia neighborhoods and suburbs as places to move to when you grow up, or to grow up in. Our task was to turn the designs into a easy to use and sophisticated Drupal site. Site visitors are able to easily find detailed and useful information on the towns, as well as on the classic towns program. Site administrators have a powerful set of tools behind the scenes that allow them to easily add more towns in the future and precisely edit each page while keeping the integrity of the design.

The standout feature of the site is a map of all the towns in the program. Feeding dynamic information from Drupal into Flash we were able to build a simple to use system for showing each town’s information in geographic space. The real power is reserved for the site’s administers. Once they’re logged in they just have to drag and drop a town’s icon to precisely adjust it’s placement on the map.

Classic Towns of Greater Philadelphia was designed by Paragraph Inc. for the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission.

More on Philly.com

We like using the FlashVideo module in some of  our Drupal installations, as being able to transcode submitted videos via ffmpeg is pretty sweet. However, as you may know — testing this locally on Windows can be a difficult task, as setting up ffmpeg locally can be somewhat enigmatic to say the least. Right now I’ve only tested this method on XP (I ‘m stubborn and haven’t, erm, “upgraded ” to Vista yet), so anyone who can confirm it works on Vista — please! I don’t see why it wouldn’t, though, as it’s really just an executable file. [Works for me on Vista! -Ed.]

Just FYI — I’m running Apache (using the great XAMPP distribution) locally for testing purposes. I don’t think this matters too much, but wanted to throw it in there.

I’ve opted to not cover how to install and configure FlashVideo, as there is good documentation available for that here. This tutorial is focused on installing ffmpeg locally, so you can test workflow, etc on your machine before you go to staging on a live server (which ideally will already be configured with ffmpeg).

First of all, you need to find windows binaries for ffmpeg. The one I’m using came from http://ffdshow.faireal.net/mirror/ffmpeg/. I just downloaded the most recent archive in the list.

Decompress the archive somewhere inside your Drupal installation folder. I make sure to exclude it when on commit to a live server, cause its pretty useless once you go live on a linux box or what-have-you. I guess being lazy and leaving it in wont hurt anything, but its sloppy!

Assuming you already have the FlashVideo module installed, lets work on the global FlashVideo settings first: admin/settings/flashvideo/edit/global

First things first, check the box to “Convert videos immediately”. I don’t really know why you’d ever not want to do this, but I guess there’s a case. If you don’t want to check this box, just make sure you run cron after you submit a node w/ a FlashVideo, to see if it worked.

Now, obviously there are a plethora of other options to choose from, all which are covered in the docs, so follow those to do whatever it is you’re doing, and we’re going to jump directly to the ffmpeg settings.

Scroll down and open the FFMPEG settings group. The first thing you’ll see is the ffmpeg command. The one that is set by default doesn’t exactly work properly (or didn’t for me), so I recommend starting with what I’m using:

-i @input -f flv -acodec libmp3lame -ar 22050 -ab 64k -ac 1 @output

as far as I remember, the thumbnail command was good to go, but just in case, here’s mine:

-y -i @input -vframes 1 -ss @thumbtime -an -vcodec mjpeg -f rawvideo -s "@thumbsize" @output

Next, you should enter the path to your ffmpeg executable. I extracted it to a folder off my installation called ffmpeg, so mine looks like this:

ffmpeg\ffmpeg.exe

Then I set up the output folders. I prefer to set the paths relative to the Drupal root (so I dont have to change this later), so mine are just set to files/original and files/converted, respectively.

Hit save configuration and go back to the main FlashVideo admin page: admin/settings/flashvideo.

Enable FlashVideo for whatever content types you want, tweak all your other settings and try adding a node with a video. On submit, the files should convert and end up in the folders you specified.

Doesn’t work? Double check your path to ffmpeg and your conversion commands. Make sure your new node has the [video] tag somewhere in the body. If everything seems in order, there’s one last way to troubleshoot.

Go back to your global settings and tick the box for “Log Conversion Data” and save your settings.

Open up phpmyadmin (or whatever you feel like using to browse your mysql db) and look for the table ffmpeg_data. Browse the table and you should see a row for every time you submitted a content type that tried to run a conversion.

Choose a row and look at the fields. input_file and output_file should show the filename of what you’re trying to convert including path (relative to the Drupal root).

Now drop down to a command prompt and change to the directory you decompressed ffmpeg to. Try running ffmpeg with the command you specified in the configuration, with the input and output files replaced with what you found in the db (make sure you adjust the path to be accurate, Drupal runs ffmpeg from it’s root). A test case for me looked like this:

C:\drupal_site\ffmpeg>ffmpeg -i ../files/original/Test.mov -f flv -acodec libmp3lame -ar 22050 -ab 64k -ac 1 ../files/converted/Test.flv

If anything goes wrong, you should see an error message. If this is the case, sorry I couldn’t help. At least now you’ll have something to stick into Google.

Now, worth mentioning is that when you go live you must remember to change the ffmpeg path to wherever the binary resides on your server. You can ask your admin where it is if you dont know, but for my server, I change the path to /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg.

This posting doesn’t really cover you if you’re looking to set up ffmpeg-php, however Lorenzo Gangi already has you covered on this one, and it works for me.