Last night we gathered at the Bryght office for our monthly Vancouver League of Drupaleers user group meeting. Theoretically I help run the group, but Dale McGladdery does most of the heavy lifting.

This month Dale got the guys from the Donat Group to come over and talk about the set of Facebook API modules that they are building to make it easier to build Facebook apps with Drupal.

All I can say is....wow. James and Ross took us through how they built their Opus Player Facebook app, and we had lots of discussion / beta feedback. They've built something very interesting, and I can't wait to see it hit Facebook.

After mainly looking at the app itself (related but not yet integrated into Project Opus, although those are the future plans -- to mirror the functionality in Facebook on the public Project Opus site as well), we dove right into some code. Not yet available in Drupal CVS (soon!), there is some code posted here.

So what does this mean? Well, the Donat Group team built a great Facebook app, and just happened to implement it using Drupal. Along the way (and, um, at least one rewrite / refactor :P) they built a great set of base tools for interacting with Facebook APIs and generating FBML content. The Drupal framework gets another win for being a great flexible base to build all sorts of functionality on top of.

Last night Mark Mayo hosted the first Joyent meetup in Vancouver.

I've been following the Joyent adventures for quite some time. They're a small company, but they're aiming high. A while back, they merged with TextDrive, and became a vertically integrated hosting + applications/product company (and even open-sourced their Rails-based Connector suite -- see you at OSCMS next year!). In many ways, this is what Bryght's partnership with WorkHabit has been about: if we hadn't found such great partners, we would have had to build their expertise as part of our own company. Application hosting is still something that isn't that well understood, and the commodity-shared-hosting-optimized-for-Dreamweaver is in for a rude awakening one of these days.

Yes, it's true, James is moving on from the Bryght team. What's the scoop? As James says, not much to gossip about. It was always tough to be the guy out in the 'burbs half a continent away. True, there's our favorite African, Adrian, but we're working on getting him moved to Vancouver as well.

I have very much enjoyed having James as a partner: thanks. Best of luck in your future adventures. And yes, I imagine Drupal will have a thing or two to do with that.

Wow. 20 projects accepted for Drupal for the 2007 version of Google Summer of Code. Thanks to all the mentors and especially top GSoC wranglers Robert Douglass and Angie Byron for herding us through this application process.

Not only did this pay off in 20 projects, but the folks that help host drupal.org at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab *also* got two projects accepted which are actually working with Drupal: integrating the Google API into Drupal.

There are some really great projects planned out. Here are some of my favourites:

• RSS / Atom integration: I spent an hour or two with some of the guys from Achieve Internet last week on scoping some patches for the core aggregator code...there is lots of work to be done here, and I think we can get far, fast, by doing a bit of coordination
• Jabber / XMPP: yay! my two favourite communities continue to collide
• Scalability, Load Balancing, and High Availability: Vancouver local hadsie got in, which is great; Scott, want to work out of the Bryght offices for the summer?
• SMS Framework: it's clear that mobile users are continuing to become first class citizens of the web, but that SMS is a great tool for easily integrating into virtually any mobile environment; can I hear the phrase "Twitter clone"?

It's been a while since I helped organize a reverse bounty. On the auction block is some great functionality that is likely going to make it's way into Drupal 6, but is super useful for:

• high traffic sites
• ISPs / mass hosting
• enterprise deployments
• people that like having their website instant message them

Today, the watchdog table logs regular system events (e.g. users logging in, creating new accounts, or posting content) as well as error conditions and other explanatory notes. On a high traffic site, the watchdog table must be pruned on a regular basis so that the database table doesn't grow wildly out of control. There is also no way to archive this information.

Enter Khalid's (2bits.com) patch for Drupal 6: instead of only logging to the database, the patch will enable the destination of logging to be configurable. Raw text file, syslog, and email logging are all modules that have been implemented as proof of concept using this new system.

But seeing this, many of us immediately wanted this functionality for Drupal 5. Much like Bryght's system included free tagging of categories and configurable RSS feed support in our hosted 4.6 version, functions in future versions of Drupal can be backported. That's what this reverse bounty is for – we've spoken with Khalid, and he's willing to make this functionality available via a patch to Drupal 5, including the porting of the support modules such as syslog and email notification. How can you help? Well, we're gathering funds using ChipIn -- click on the Flash widget below to contribute. If you really want to help promote, grab the ChipIn widget and post it on your own blog or website.