December, 2009

Duo Consulting's Doug Vann presentation at the Do it with Drupal Conference in New Orleans

This last week was a whirlwind of Drupal craziness. It started at the 2nd annual Do it With Drupal seminar in New Orleans. The Lullabots pulled off another high quality, highly educational, highly fun event! Duo’s CEO, Michael Silverman was there to enjoy it with me! Many of the top Drupal module authors and maintainers and Drupal Core contributors where there to deliver Drupal training straight from the source. I was extremely honored to be invited to deliver a Drupal Introductory session. It was well attended and I took them over the major hurdles of wrapping their minds around Drupal. Each session was assigned a moderator and I was fortunate to have Angie “Webchick” Byron as my moderator. I invited her to actively join me and together we worked the room. It was a blast! Oh yeah, I found out that I LOVE a local New Orleans dish of Shrimp and Grits!

From New Orleans I flew back to Chicago for the 2nd Drupal Camp Chicago. At last year’s camp I presented 4 sessions and 2 Birds of a Feather, or BoFs. This year saw a much larger variety of presenters so I only presented on an Introduction to Content Construction Kit (CCK) & Views. We had a sold-out crowd of 350+ people at the Hotel Orrington in Evanston IL. Emma Jane Hogbin, Earl Miles & his family and I made the trip from New Orleans to Chicago so that we could present at both events. Duo Consulting was one of four sponsors of the Camp. We attracted a lot of attention at our exhibit. We were looking for new hires and many attendees were looking for new jobs. That worked out quite well.

350 Drupal enthusiasts sold out this weekend's Drupal Camp Chicago

Here’s the bottom line. The Drupal community is growing at a phenomenal rate. At any given moment there is a large quantity of people desiring Drupal training; wanting to know what it is and how to use it. At the same time there is another large set of people who know the basics but they want to transform that knowledge into marketable skill sets. In my experience many of the Drupal events, from the DrupalCons to the Drupal Camps to Do it With Drupal, are all taking a much more dedicated approach to reaching out to the uninitiated and the intermediate base. For as much as I love teaching on the Drupal API and hook_nodeapi or db_query etc, I just find it intensely rewarding to see the “AHA!” in the faces of attendees who show up hoping that some one can make sense of all this crazy, complicated Drupal stuff.

In 2009 Duo Consulting has really plugged into the Drupal community. Involvements include becoming partners with Acquia,  sponsoring Drupal Camp Chicago, sending me to speak at the Ohio Linux Fest and Drupal Camps in LA, Chicago, and Atlanta. We also provided a half day Duo Drupal Training session that was open to the community. We’re doing it again on Tuesday, January 12! And, of course, don’t miss the Chicago Drupal Meet Up Group also on January 12. We know that Drupal is growing and we’re committed to helping it along as we grow with it.

As many of you already know, the whitehouse.gov site re-launched on the Drupal platform recently. There has been much talk about the implications of that, including local commentary on this very blog.

In November, we all got to see just a little bit more. The White House New Media team spoke briefly at the DC Drupal Meet-Up, and their comments were captured on video. Kent Bye has written a blow-by-blow blog about it on the Lullabot site (including an embedded version of the video itself), which is pretty comprehensive in capturing the meat of the meet.

(As a service to others, I’ll add my own highlights from the video. At about the 4 minute mark, the designer steps in and basically re-hashes the tug-of-war between designers and developers in the CMS / open source world. I found it refreshing to see that the same difficulties get encountered at all levels. At about the 10 minute mark, the floor is opened to a few questions, and the team speaks extemporaneously about various interesting topics. The middle bits are fine as far as they go, but not that interesting.)

There were a few things that I found intriguing about this little peek into what happens behind the scenes. In the first place, the team says that most of the functionality for the site is out-of-the-box (although it’s acknowledged that of course there is no box for Drupal). I would have expected that they would have needed more customized work done, but apparently not — or at least, not for this first pass. The site isn’t a simple configuration, however — multiple instances behind a CDN (Content Delivery Network).

Secondly, the team claims that their biggest time sink on the project was simply dealing with cultural and government issues. They apparently had lots of meetings about the implications of using open source technologies, how to use them, etc. Again, I find this a bit comforting, since many of our clients and prospects have had similar concerns about the possibility of using Drupal. The use of technology, and particularly open source technology, cannot be separated from the cultural environment in which it’s used — it’s very much an active dialogue. That said, it’s clearly a conversation that more and more people (White House included) think is worth consciously having.