Long-time "Bricoleur" Chris Schults reports that every Seattleite's favourite co-op, PCC Natural Markets (the largest consumer-owned natural food retail co-operative in the United States), has just re-launched their Web property using BricolageCMS and Drupal:

Last week PCC launched its redesigned website, which is a blend of Bricolage, Drupal and custom PHP.

So far, the response has been very positive, and I invite you to give the new site a whirl:

http://www.pccnaturalmarkets.com

I had the pleasure of meeting Chris, if ever so briefly, while we were both working on a re-launch of online daily environmental news site Grist.org in 2004, which was re-built using BricolageCMS (now running Expression Engine, I believe). Five years later and Chris is the Bricolage expert -- I love it.

Interestingly, online daily news site TheTyee.ca made a similar decision to use BricolageCMS and Drupal when they upgraded their Web operation recently, and they've contributed a model to help folks make similar integrations.

Lately, "form spam" has been the bane of my existence. Anyone who runs more than one or two Web sites has probably had the experience of dealing with what can amount to hundreds of junk messages a day coming through different types of Web-based contact forms. "Report a bug," "Contact the Web team," "Write a letter to the Editor," etc. -- they're all targets for malicious spam bots and their ilk.

Recently I decided to double my previous efforts to find some solutions to Web-based form abuse.

Many of the organizations that I'm working with rely on a number of different systems to deliver content to the Web, which makes it more challenging to find a one-size-fits-all solution. That said, they all use a LAMP stack and several of them are using the Drupal content-management system in some capacity, e.g., to provide some front-end interactivity, user management, etc. So, the real opportunity was to find something that either played nice with Drupal, or was built in PHP/Perl/Python so that it could be integrated with Drupal where necessary.

The biggest challenge was that I'd been using a Web-form processing script that I was pretty happy with until now; it made it possible to set up a number of rather complicated forms with relative ease and lots of processing flexibility (automated e-mail responses, etc.). The shortcomings were no form protection and the data wasn't stored in a database. So, the first options that I looked at were ways to simply improve the existing forms with a "captcha" or something similar. The short-list of options were:

• Safer Contact Forms Without CAPTCHA’s
• Captchas.net - Free CAPTCHA-Service
• Jcap (Captcha Validation Javascript)
• Simple Javascript CAPTCHA
• HTML_QuickForm

And, last but not least, the rather socially-responsible reCaptcha -- a service that helps the folks at Archive.org to digitize books.

Looking at reCaptcha got me thinking about Drupal again. Since the release of Drupal 5, I hadn't done a good review of what "Web form" capabilities and options were available -- so I thought it might be a good idea to have a quick look there too. A scan of the Projects page revealed a number of potential options including:

• Advanced Contact
• Contact List & Forms

Both of these only deal with Drupal's basic site-wide contact form ... so they weren't quite right for my needs. Next stop was the Feeback module (which is maintained by Khalid Baheyeldin of DrupalCampToronto fame), which was quite close to what I was after, but didn't have enough form customization flexibility and appeared to have an issue with captcha integration.

Last stop was Web form (my new favourite module!). It offers complete form flexibility, validation and post-processing rules, and a great form data management interface. I guess this module's been around for a while, but this was the first time I'd taken the time to install it and play around.

After a quick tip from Adam Ma'anit that lead me to the Form store module, I was able to create some test contact forms and attach math-based "captcha points" to them.

And, finally, to make it possible for these Drupal-powered contact forms to play nice with non-Drupal pages, Webform allowed me to drop in a hidden field with a "%server[HTTP_REFERER]" variable, which pretty much reproduced the behaviour of the old forms by grabbing the URL of the referring (non-Drupal) page.

Score one for the good guys. Next up: making Forward module's "Send this page to a friend" functionality play nice with non-Drupal pages.

Big week in nerd world!

First, the exciting re-launch of the Social Source Commons. This platform has been a work in progress for over a year now, under the of astute guidance of Aspiration. In their own words:

Social Source Commons is a place to share lists of software tools that you already use, gain knowledge and support, and discover new tools. It’s a place to meet people with similar needs and interests and answer the question: what tools do they use?

The re-launch incorporates lots of improvements, including a user interface overhaul, new "Community Toolboxes" that allow users to share lists, and greatly enhanced searching, tracking, and browsing. Not to mention, the darn thing is way cooler than it was before. Yeah Gunner -- nice work!

Next up: DrupalCampTorontoII

Just announced, DrupalCampTorontoII will take place on May 11 - 12 at the Bahen Centre. This two-day event will attract over 100 participants -- both Drupal "newbies" and ninjas -- from far and wide. There will be sessions for all experience levels, great parties, t-shirts, and, well, that's about it.

If you've ever had the slightest interest in learning more about one of the world's most popular open-source content management systems, or if you are currently managing a Drupal site -- or several of them! -- and want to know more, or if you've been working with Drupal for years and experience to share with others, this is the event for you.

Go get registered today. Space is limited to 150 participants and it will go fast.

That's it for this week: over and out.