Raincity Studios is listed along side 9 other companies in the current issue of WE. The West Ender Cover Feature:Made In Vancouver.

Our city is a hotbed of creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. From the fashionable to the ecological, here are 10 businesses — new and established — we think are at the top of their game.

We are honored and exited to be featured with some of Vancouver's greatest and most innovative companies.

Tags:

• Drupal
• pioneer
• raincitystudios
• robertscales
• technologist
• Vancouver

We're excited about the re-design of drupal.com. Most of us who work with Drupal on a regular basis are very familiar with drupal.org - the home of the Drupal project, the contributed modules and all the amazing developer activity that makes Drupal such a great platform. But as Dries pointed out in his DrupalCon keynote this past year in DC, the Drupal.com page, until now just a simple placeholder page forwarding visitors to the project, is apparently getting a significant amount of traffic. Lets face it - lots of people just assume your website ends with a .com extension. And since people who are familiar with drupal are likely browsing directly to drupal.org, we can assume that most of the folks that end up on drupal.com are trying to learn about the project.

Now these noobies have a great place to learn about our favorite CMS and Drupal gets the slick showcase it deserves. The good folks over at Development Seed did a excellent job of designing the site and the images they've used make for a very compelling presentation. We can't help but notice the smiling face of Raincity's own Robert Scales (who is responsible for many of Drupal's tattoos) and our good friend and community hero Boris Mann (apparently responsible for Drupal's great haircut).  It's great to see the Vancouver drupal community so well represented!

Drupal.com looks great with this new makeover and it's another victory in battling Drupal's reputation for being "less pretty" than other platforms like Wordpress and Joomla. Efforts like the Design4Drupal camp held this past spring in Boston are trying to build the design community and proving that with a good designer and a solid themer, anything is possible. We already know that Drupal is powerful, but, like the at end of many hollywood teen flicks, the nerdy girl just took off her glasses on prom night and it turns out she's beautiful!

It's been our pleasure to work with two amazing mothers, Pixie and Gail of Thirty Years Multimedia. The pair have been friends for over thirty years and since meeting for the first time in an 8th grade art class, have seen each other through the highs and lows of motherhood. After witnessing how often their friendship had saved them and realizing how fortunate they were to have that support, the pair set about creating a place where mothers from around the world could connect and find that same support from each other. After a lot of hard work, we were very happy to see the pair recently announce the launch of their new community site, MyNameIsMom.com.

As Pixie explains, "The site was really born out of our friendship! We truly believe that Moms don't get enough support and the most media makes things a lot hard harder than they have to be." While Martha Stewart can create unrealistic expectations and the depictions of Mothers in film and on television don't seem to reflect the real experiences of the Moms watching them, Pixie and Gail wanted to create a space where real Mothers themselves could be known, supported and have the chance to really share what motherhood is really all about.

In November of 2007, Raincity Studios struck a deal to acquire, Bryght, the pioneering Drupal hosting solutions company. By combining the Raincity Studios development and design team with the hosting expertise of the folks at Bryght, we hoped to provide comprehensive online solutions to a range of clients. The last year and half has been a great learning experience, however it is with regret that today we must announce that effective April 30th, 2009 Bryght hosted services will be phased out with a plan to be closed completely by May 29, 2009.

Over the past five years, Bryght and Raincity Studios have forged many wonderful and productive relationships with partners and clients around the world. We pride ourselves in being able to create mutually beneficial partnerships.  As two companies that emerged at the same time and grew up together in Vancouver, we have had no relationship more meaningful than that with Bryght. The shared vision and complementary personalities of the two companies made for a excellent fit and we believe the cooperative efforts produced great results. 

The "featured content rotator" seems to have become a standard feature in our client sites - a front page device for promoting content, using nice "flashy" effects during auto-rotation between promoted items. For Drupal 5 sites I ended up always working off the same custom module I had built for the first one and having to tweak it according to different client requirements: Did they want tabs? Did they want pause and play buttons? Should navigation be triggered on tab click or on tab hover? And so on. I had been thinking to myself I should really get around to writing a one-module-fits-all solution, where these options would just be different configuration settings. Well, I am now certain I will never write such a module. Recently, we needed to implement a rotator feature for a D6 client site. I had heard vaguely that there were D6 modules available but until I came across this post in the Duplicated Modules Hall of Shame on groups.drupal.org I had no idea that so many developers had contributed their own version of this feature.