Today Lullabot released an exciting new project into the Drupal community. It's the Form builder module: an AJAX, Drag and Drop interface for constructing forms in Drupal. We hope that it will become the defacto standard in building forms in Drupal, replacing our inconsistent form-building tools that are spread across CCK, Webform, Profile, and other modules.

Drag and drop and AJAXy, but degrades too! No need for JavaScript required.

Overview

The Form builder project reads and modifies Form API arrays. Using a well-known data-structure that most Drupal developers are familiar with should make for low barrier to entry for utilizing the new module.

The project uses a AJAX-based interface for updating form elements. As you modify properties such as "Title" or "Description", Form builder makes requests in the background to update the element through Drupal's internal FAPI system. The user gets a live preview of their changes without saving the form. This approach means that no additional JavaScript needs to be written by implementing modules, since the rendering is done in PHP and then sent to the client as needed.

Demo

Enough talk, go try out the demo and see it in action.

Implementing Form Builder

For those of you who haven't been keeping up with the Do It With Drupal blog, we've been posting profiles on some of the speakers who will be appearing at the event. Recent posts include short profiles of Earl Miles (author of Views) and Karen Stevenson (co-maintainer of CCK).

Whether or not you're planning on coming to the event next month, it's important to recognize the achievements of the people contributing such wonderful work to the Drupal project.

Karen and Earl are just two of the list of great speakers appearing at The Do It With Drupal Seminar in New Orleans. Check out the schedule for the latest list of sessions and topics. We're really excited about the way things are coming together. Seats are still available and we hope that you'll be able to join December 10 - 12 in New Orleans for this exciting event!

Packt Publishing recently announced their inaugural list of Most Valued People from a variety of different Open Source Content Management Systems. As you may have heard, Earl Miles (aka merlinofchaos) was voted as Drupal's MVP in large part "For his work with Views 2, which has become an indispensable part of Drupal."

A question that often comes up is "Why use Views when it'd be so much easier to write my own SQL query?" Well to answer that question and to honor Earl's genius query-building module, I've created a musical ode to Views! It includes quotes from James Walker, Jeff Eaton and Angie Byron that are taken from a recent Lullabot training event.

So congratulations Earl, and hopefully this "Views Melody" can both educate and entertain others as to why the Views module has become such a vital part to the Drupal contributed module ecosystem.

Jeff Robbins shares his experience of the previous NetSquared conference where he learned how non-profits are being told to use Drupal, but then struggle with the platform by not having the resources or expertise to overcome the Drupal learning curve.

The conversations at NetSquared led to Jeff's vision of how Drupal will save the world and ultimately to Lullabot's new venture of distilling Drupal down into key choices and simple tools to use for free.

Check out the full interview here.

With our recent announcement of our new venture, the web has been abuzz with speculation. What follows is a guest blog post by Ed Sussman who visits lullabot.com to help shed some light on the situation.

Amid the gyrations of the stock market, and predictions of a severe economic downturn, I have found myself in the interesting position of launching a start up with my friends at Lullabot and Bond Art + Science. Over the past six years, I've worked within the comfortable fold of two well known brands in the media world: Inc. and Fast Company, the last four years as president of a digital division with six websites, 40 employees and more than $10 million in revenue. Now I've left to be the CEO of a self-funded company formed by Lullabot and Bond Art + Science that doesn't even have a name for its product yet (even the name of the company is just Codename Enterprises.)

Some people think we're crazy to do this now. Jason Calcanis wrote a couple of weeks ago that he expects 80% of the start ups already funded would collapse because of the down, part of a "start up depression." And legendary VC Fred Wilson said companies without angel or VC funding in place would probably have to try to make it without VC funding.