Today, Mediamosa has been released. It is hard to describe what it does, but the picture above should give you a hint..

From the website, you can read that MediaModsa

[...] is a state-of-the-art, scalable Middleware Media Distribution Platform and facilitates access to, and usage of (shared) storage capacity, metadata databases, transcoding- and streaming servers. The platform offers functionality for searching, playing, uploading, transcoding, as well as a fine granularity media access control system towards its users.

You can see MediaMosa as a Drupal Module that provides central storage, publishing and transcoding functionality. A Media Asset Manager Hub on steroids! It was developed by/for SURFnet, an academic network in the Netherlands. Dutch readers are encouraged to read the pressrelease.

It is not easy to understand or easy to install, but please give it a try on your localhost if you are into Media (management) and Drupal. Many broadcasters are already looking at this in the Netherlands. Great job!

If you do not think that OpenID or LDAP is a good solution for you identity management solution, you might want to take a look at SAML.

I was triggered to look at SAML again beacuse a very old fature request (2003, nid 1575) was re-opened regarding having SAML in Drupal core. I think it would be a great add-on to have this in core, yet most will think it should be contrib. And the fact is that for most users SAML (endpoint) is not needed and it makes sense to have it in contrib. For a long time, the module that came the closest to this was shib auth; user authentication with Shibboleth.

Now I found a module, hosted outside drupal.org that gives the power of SAML to Drupal at https://ow.feide.no/simplesamlphp:drupal

BTW: Boris wrote about this some time ago as well.

BTW2: If you are into identity management, please follow super Pat Paterson, the nicest person in the Identity Management showbusiness.

Today my employer Dutch Open Projects launched the website for Radio Nederland Wereldomroep. The public broadcasting system in the Netherlands is endless complex, so I will not explain that system here. But Radio Nederland Wereldomroep (Radio Netherlands Worldwide) is a very old international public broadcaster, with regular transmissions starting back in 1927 to the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. More information about RNW can be found in the wiki entry.

The site rnw.nl has more then 100 writers in eleven editorial staffs and writes in six languages, including Arabic and Chinese. Building the site in three months with Drupal sure was fun. We had a team of three coders and two themers (and me as consultant) that created the site using D6, lots of contributed modules and custom code. We choose to use Organic Groups for the editorial staffs, making it possible to cross-post content in multiple groups and write in one group in multiple languages. I am not the biggest fan of OG but it fitted the business requirements and worked very well.

By itself, the fact that Radio Netherlands Worldwide switches from a proprietary CMS towards an Open Source CMS is not the biggest news. However, the switch is a milestone since it symbolises that companies and NFP that didn't look to Open Source and only listened to the proprietary prietpraat are moving over; we are winning! Lost of newspapers, broadcasters and other companies are ditching the proprietary CMS-es and migrate towards Open Source. I have seen business cases where just the migrating costs from a proprietary CMS towards an Open Source CMS were lower then the yearly license costs. In the Netherlands, the financial crisis is not as bad as in many other countries in the world, but the crisis sure make people look towards how to spend many well. It used to be true that people switched towards Open Source because of the quality and stayed for the (lack of) cost. Now people switch because of the money they save and stay for the quality! The Open Source market is booming in the Netherlands. (Note that it can also backfire, I see a lot of companies using Open Source tools without knowing the pitfalls, have a failing implementation and thereby give Drupal or Open Source a bad name.)

The site is not finished yet, both content and coding wise there is some work to do. That is one of the disadvantages of a time boxed approach. However, meeting a deadline, having a dedicated professional team that worked 36 hours in two days during Pentecost, sure is a adrenaline boost. With the Wereldomroep being a switcher and another public broadcaster in the Netherlands (NCRV) that has been using Drupal for a long time for many sites and more to come (more news soon ), the future of Drupal in the low lands is looking bright!

For a customer who has a simple list of 10 RSS items that he wants to show on mobile devices, my employer build a website. Most mobile websites are based upon a domain, the user has to visit a different website from his mobile device; often m.example.com instead of (www).example.com. This is not the right way to make a mobile edition of a site IMHO. It is not the user that has to change his behaviour, it should be the site that has to adept basedupon the users preferences.

So for this customer we build a site that looks for the capabilities of the users and changes in form and function based upon the clients possibilities. When you visit example.com in a normal browser you will see a normal template, but when visiting the site from a mobile device, the site changes. Drupal reads the useragent, looks this up in an imported database of 5.000+ devices (WURFL) and based upon the capabilities, delivers a template and HTML structure that is optimized for that specific client.

So when on an iPhone I see the picture above using an iUI template and when on an old nokia, I get for example a CHTML site.

The site should change, not the user. Form follows capabilities.

Last week my emloyer Dutch Open Projects launched a new site for the Dutch broadcaster NCRV, manbijthond.nl. Trying to explain the Public Broadcasting system in the Netherlands is impossible but lets just say that from the dozens of channels we have in the Netherlands, three are from 20+ the Public Broadcasters that share these channels with each other. And one of these broadcasters, the NCRV, standardises all marketing and program sites on Drupal.

Man Bijt Hond (Man Bites Dog, an old journalist joke about the definition of news) is a program format that started in Belgium, just like Drupal. The TV program attracts a broad audience and is on early prime time watched by more then half a million people every day. It features sketches but mostly odd news from all over the Netherlands. So the site reflect this, it is a mash-up of elements of the TV program of the last 10 years on a (google) map. Using Drupal for all the views, content types and videos meant we did not have to code lots of complex modules although there is always some custom code to be written. The design is not groundbreaking but clean an mimics the TV program.

The fact that (nearly) all sites of the NCRV (and more Dutch broadcasters will join ) standardises on Drupal might not be big news compared to Sony using Drupal but in the Low Countries it helps to 'sell' Drupal to a broader audience. Go NCRV!