Solving A Common Problem
MyFCC seeks to solve a common problem: many website users who know exactly what they want, but can't easily access that content. By providing a clean interface that enables the user to customize blocks of content, called widgets, they can create customized pages that are a single point of access for anything of interest published by the FCC. Widgets are collected on a user's dashboard, allowing them to create fully customized pages containing multiples streams of information. The initial set of widgets include a Topic Watcher, Latest News, the FCC Twitter feed, and a version of the FCC Daily Digest. Lots of content can be intimidating for users, but the Dashboard and Widget approach creates a manageable experience where users control how the information is displayed.

An API Approach
MyFCC utilizes a content API published by FCC.gov. Because we were able to leverage the FCC.gov content through the API, the time and cost to develop MyFCC were radically lower than alternative approaches. This is a great example of how a Web API Platform architecture can help to reduce development cost while supporting cutting edge applications.

Social Sharing Tools
MyFCC includes a series of innovative social sharing tools designed to help make FCC content accessible to a wider audience. Each widget inclues an embed code, allowing users to take a widget and embed it natively into another website. Each user dashboard also includes a 'Share' button that generates a unique URL they can send to others. When clicked, the link opens up an exact copy of the dashboard. This is a great tool for creating a dashboard that monitors a series of topics for specific content coming from the FCC.

MyFCC is a new approach to open government — making the content easily available to everyone, everywhere via APIs. Using the Content APIs, the public can create their own tools like MyFCC. An exciting time for technology and government!

Putting the Response in Responsive Design

Existing methods of supporting mobile design have significant limitations. The combination of Drupal and content APIs gives designers a strong alternative set of tools to deliver content to multiple devices. Jay will talk about these new technologies and how decoupling the front end creates responsive user experiences.

Building Flexible Platforms with Drupal and APIs

Drupal's powerful features have made it the standard in open-source content management systems, but Drupal developers know there are still several drawbacks in the platform's architecture. Using content APIs with Drupal creates an architecture that directly addresses some of these issues. Mike will take attendees through the approach of an API-based architecture, with real-life examples such as FCC.gov.

Introducing the Content API Module: Instant API publishing with Drupal 6 and 7

You know what content APIs are, you understand the advantages to the approach, and you want in on it. Come join Dirk as he takes the group through how to setup and configure the Content API module, including how to include (and exclude) the exact information you want to publish.

VanRoekel is the former managing director at FCC who oversaw the new FCC website, and was just named the US Fed CIO.

The Content API module is a drop-in solution that publishes Drupal content as web APIs. The module includes a full featured administration interface for choosing which content types and fields to publish. Built on top of the Services module, the module provides all you need to publish web APIs without having to do any programming, even as your site structure and content changes over time.

Publishing your Drupal content as web APIs makes it accessible to any application or platform, while allowing you to continue leveraging Drupal’s strengths as a great Content Management System. Using Drupal and the Content API module, you can create a publishing platform that includes multiple websites, applications and mobile apps, all using Drupal as a single source of content.

We’re obviously big fans of serving content as APIs, so this is an exciting release. With many other government websites running Drupal, its an opportunity to get a lot of public domain content available immediately as APIs.

• Events: We made quite a few improvements to the way that events are handled in Cumula. This included refining the way that you register new events, to how events are tracked during the lifecycle of the application. Overall, using events is much improved and much easier for developers, requiring fewer lines of code.
• Components: We rewrote the Component Manager for this release, cleaning up the API and the code. The Component Manager now supports enabling and disabling components programmatically through standard getter/setter functions.
• Autoloader: Version 0.3 sports an autoloader which makes developing much simpler. Rather than having to use require_once or risk calling classes that aren't loaded yet, the autoloader takes care of it all for you.
• Namespaces: We added support for namespaces in this release. With namespaces, overloading the default classes and components is easy; just define your own class with the same name in your own namespace, and the autoloader will load that instead.
• Installer: A new installer is now included that will walk you through setting up Cumula, ensuring all your permissions and settings are correct.
• UserManager: We rewrote the UserManager to provide plugin support for authentication to any component with one simple line of code.
• Admin Interface: The Admin Interface is now password protected. You create an admin account during installation that is used to restrict access to the Admin Interface using the User Manager.

There's a whole list of smaller features and additions spread throughout. We're planning on a 0.4 release in the coming weeks which will continue adding new functionality and improving the code. Updated documentation is coming soon. You can download the 0.3 release on GitHub.