Chicago DrupalCamp Planning, Workshop & User Group Activities
Last week Duo Consulting saw an intense week of Drupal activity.
All Hands On – Drupal Orientation
On Tuesday, 10/13, we had 12 people from the greater Chicago area attend the 1st ever Duo Drupal Hands-On Workshop. The roster was an impressive display of NFPs & community organizations; including the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, the American Library Association, Lombard Area Libraries, and the Theosophical Society in America. Sonny Cohen, Director of Internet Marketing Strategy, and I took to the stage. We began with a 45 minute history and description of Drupal as a Content Management System and Web Content Framework. After that our students followed along on their own laptops connected to our server as we walked through the Drupal back-end. Attendees learned how to change the front page, chose a different theme, create content, add a field to a content-form, and other common Drupal administrative functions. Judging by reactions the program was just the right mixture of geeky tech-talk and practical experience with Drupal. We plan to offer this again January 12, 2010.
Drupal Camp Planning – Hold the Date: December 12 & 13, 2009
Later that week we doubled down with Drupal. First we hosted the DrupalCamp Chicago planning meeting. In one afternoon we made tremendous headway on gathering sponsors, A/V equipment, and volunteers. A big THANKS goes to Tiffany Ferris of Palantir.net who couldn’t join us for the meeting but did handle the mundane details like date and location. December 12-13 at the Hotel Orrington in Evanston Il.
Following the planning meeting Duo hosted the monthly gathering of the Chicago Drupal MeetUp Group (CDMUG). Forty plus people filed into the spacious Duo Consulting Bistro enjoying pizza, drinks, snacks and the large wall projection. I presented on the Demo and Demo_Profile modules. These can be used to roll a website back to a specific point in time as well as easily create install profiles. Lisa Fischer Presented “Extended user Profiles utilizing Panels 3, Ctools, Views 2.” As usual much free time was spent mingling, socializing and getting to know our fellow Drupalers better.
Rinse & Repeat
Thank you to those who attended the Duo Drupal Workshop, the DrupalCamp Chicago planning meeting, and the monthly CDMUG. Duo has benefited greatly from Drupal. Rapid application deployment, extensibility, and open source are only a few reasons its fits our business strategy. The Drupal community is essential and we very much enjoy being involved. In fact… We’ll see the CDMUG gang in the Duo Bistro again for the upcoming January 12 meeting! You are invited, too. See you there, er, here.
