Tagged with 'Drupal'

Nashville is joining the growing number of cities this year that will host a DrupalCamp. Saturday March 13th will see the first ever DrupalCamp Nashville. More and more camps are meeting the need to see solid presentations geared towards attendees new to Drupal. To suit that need, Nashville will have a beginner track in addition to the more advanced track. I’ll be presenting five beginner sessions.

Another common theme is to see DrupalCamps occur on a college campus. Vanderbilt University Owen School of Business will play host to DrupalCamp Nashville. Details at http://drupalcampnashville.com

I’m flying out Friday and having dinner with event organizer Jamie Meredith. Jamie heads up the local Drupal Users Group and runs a Drupal development firm named TMG Studio. Jamie has put together what will surely be an excellent first time out for all of the Tennessee Drupalers willing to make the trip to the Country Music Capital of the World!

DrupalCamp Orlando 2010 has come and gone and I’m on a plane leaving the land of 70+ degrees for the land of below freezing. I’m sending an email to Michael, Duo’s CEO making the case for having me head up the Orlando office of Duo Consulting. Wish me luck!

This DrupalCamp had 3 tracks; a beginners, an intermediate, and special topics. I presented an intro CCK (Content Construction Kit) session in the beginner track and an advanced VIEWS session in the intermediate track. The special session track had longer sessions that were rather advanced. The only one I made it to was a demonstration of GIT; a software version control system that gaining a lot of attention and momentum these days. It’s pretty much been decided that the CVS repository of Drupal Core and Contributed Modules is switching to GIT very soon.

For my advanced Views session I showed off the glorious yet complicated Views that Duo created for the Leonard.com law firm project. Michael Porter, and Rose Miller, and I had the task of creating content types with large numbers of related fields in them. After that, we had to create views that would take advantage of these relationships and show related data on very specific pages. We accomplished this through the heavy use of the ViewField module and very heavy use of Argument and Relationships in the Views settings. Going in, I knew the topic was very meaty and would be complicated to grasp. I stressed the point that the videos would be available soon, and they could re-re-re-watch the parts that didn’t make sense the 1^st time.

My basic CCK session was a hit! I’ve never done it in 30 minutes before, but still, I saw the “Aha!” on most faces as I went through it. For this session we created a Job Posting content type and added two fields to it; one for salary and the other to indicate to whom the applicant would be reporting.  One thing that is always fun to explain to the uninitiated is that you use CCK to create the content-type of Job, then once that’s done, users can use the content type to add content to the site. It’s an important distinction that needs to be understood.

Duo Consulting was among the sponsors of DrupalCamp Orlando – as well as sponsoring my trip.  Thanks to all the sponsors, each event attendee paid only $5 for the camp. And that ain’t all. They also received a free camp t-shirt, a swag bag, and super yummy lunch from Tijuana Flats which originated in Orlando. (Note: My home in Indianapolis is 4 miles from the only one in Indiana!)

Lastly, an old familiar friend showed up at the camp – the Drupal Song! Written by Lullabot cofounder Jeff Robbins in 2007, the Drupal Song is a simple jingle that has inspired many a musically inclined Drupaler to break out in song at various Drupal events. Watch  me ending vocals while Florida local Vernon plucks his ukulele only moments after I taught him the tune!

Last night was the presenter’s group’s final conference call to prepare for DrupalCamp Orlando 2010. We’re ready for 150 people to partake of one full day of Drupal training followed by a day of Code for a Cause. Out of the many nonprofit applicants, Junior Achievement of Orlando was selected. They will work with the DrupalCamp attendees on day2 as we build a fully functional site for them in one day!

Distinguished Presenters
There will be many fine Drupal experts presenting at this event. We’ll mention a few and here’s a list of all the presenters. Damien McKenna has launched a number of Drupal sites for various Bonnier Corporation’s publications. Ryan Price and Michael Anello, of DrupalEasy.com and the DrupalEasy Podcast are bringing their flare. Christopher Mitchell will be coming to work on his day off. Chris works for MindComet, who was gracious enough to share their facility for the DrupalCamp. Don VanDemark is a Delivery Executive for IBM who uses Drupal for personal projects such as open-stats.org.

Sold Out!
The 150 limit for attendees was reached pretty early. Yet another Drupal Camp growing out of control! Those who registered in time will walk away with more of the tools they need to develop their personal and company projects or land a job with a Drupal shop. Those who stick around to build the site for Junior Achievement of Orlando will get to put their new skills to work!

As usual, I’m pumped and privileged to be part of this DrupalCamp and Duo’s continued support as both a sponsor as well as sending me.

February 20 and 21 will see the largest professional Drupal event ever held in Florida. For two sunny days, Orlando (Altamonte Springs) will host the 2010 Florida DrupalCamp. Over 150 attendees are coming to network and learn more about their favorite content management system.  Multiple tracks on day-one, ensure that there’s something for everyone; from beginner to advanced. I will be presenting 2 sessions on Views.

This year day two of Florida DrupalCamp will feature Code for a Cause, a common element among DrupalCamps across North America. Code for a Cause is an opportunity for camp attendees to build a complete website while they attend the camp. A number of not for profit organizations have submitted requests to be considered for the one day, group-coding event. Drupal is a popular platform for nonprofits due to its zero cost entry and robust training environment.

Duo Consulting is among the many sponsors who are making the camp possible. The fee for attendees is a meager $5.00 for which attendees will receive the one-day multi-track instruction and the second-day Code for a Cause. Lunches and snacks are provided for both days.

A Word About DrupalCamps
Over the past few years the Drupal community is witnessing smaller Drupal camps return and occupy larger facilities. Such is the case in Orlando. At the same time cities that have never had a Camp embark upon their first. For example, Atlanta DrupalCamp 2009 was an excellent showing for an inaugural camp. Last year’s Chicago DrupalCamp saw packed rooms and some attendees missing out on their preferred session when the aisles and doors were crowded with attendees trying to catch the session (Adjustments have been made for 2010 Chicago DrupalCamp.) The Drupal community is growing and this is never more evident than at these events that draw people in from around the country. For now, we’re looking forward to the Florida DrupalCamp, which strikes me as a great place to spend a few days in February.

In making our plans for San Francisco DrupalCon this April, I mentioned to Michael Silverman, our CEO, that the upcoming conference had the feel of the early MacWorld’s he and I had attended at the Moscone Center in the early days of Macintosh.  Years ago I would have been hard pressed to imagine that there would be huge conferences of content management system groupies who paper their laptops with industry stickers and actually write songs about their software. Don’t smirk. It is no less geeky than doting over the aps on your iPhone.

As interesting as San Francisco DrupalCon promises to be, it is only one, albeit the main event, among a lot of Drupal conference activity in the U.S. and the rest of the world. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the regional activities in which Duo is directly involved:

Florida Drupal Camp is right around the corner, February 20 & 21 in Altamonte Springs, Florida. This second year conference features Coding for a Cause where volunteers among attendees will collaborate to develop a Drupal website for a not-for-profit organization.

Nashville Drupalers is planning their one-day Drupal Camp on March 13.

The roving big daddy of Drupal events, DrupalCon, is in San Francisco this year, April 19 – 21. We’re sending a team to participate. Both Doug Vann and Brandon Morrison have submitted proposals to do presentations. Additionally we’re an event sponsor so we’ll have an exhibit and, yeah, probably stickers!

Duo will be running its 4^th annual Web Content Conference June 7 & 8. This year’s new twist includes a pre-conference ½ day Drupal symposium. The focus of this event is not-for-profit and government organizations as well as small businesses.

The Southeast Linux Fest (SELF) takes place June 19 & 20. To the organizer’s credit (Duo is not the event organizer) the event is fully sponsored and being held for FREE.  Duo Consulting was invited to produce a Drupal Camp in concert with SELF.  We are beginning to fill the presenter roster.

CMSExpo returns to Evanston, IL May 3 – 5 and will have its Drupal track.

There’s a certain breathless aura to all the events being planned. This is fueled in part by the much anticipated release of Drupal version 7.x.  The excitement is well-placed as it reflects improved functionality that is being incorporated into progressive websites. We’re looking forward to being a part of it and we hope you are, too.

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.

While most of us have been involved in Important Stuff like our Thanksgiving menu or the disastrous UMich football season (sniff, sniff), a small cadre of techno geeks have been burning up the bandwidth about a major development in the Real World.  It seems that the Obama administration which is under fire for not resolving every injustice since the birth of Christ in the last nine months, has quietly (I love using this phrase “quietly”) launched their new website using the Drupal web content management system.

Drupal is software that helps website administrators manage content on their website. It’s also free. But Drupal is also a movement. It’s got an icon: Eyes of infinity in a drop.  And a song, which our own Doug Vann performs.  I’m sure somewhere there is a flag.  So it is not surprising that the already partisan Whitehouse is going to also attract a partisan crowd of Drupal supporters and detractors. Or,as I like to think of it, just another religious war.

There are few things uglier than a technology argument among the technorati.  Sarcasm and put downs abound.  I’ve been monitoring this matter on Slashdot.com (“News for nerds. Stuff that matters”).  The biggest concern is that the whitehouse.gov site is going to be cracked or “exploited” for some sinister purpose. The sincere concern suggests that whitehouse.gov is a tunnel into our national security and not just a place where you can see First Mom, Michelle Obama, working the hula hoop.  Or as yelvington (8169) observed, “If your security beliefs are based on Googling ” exploit” I hope you’re not in charge of anything important.” Oof, I’m so injured.

Anyway, while all this noise is happening a really important point is being missed. When you visit whitehouse.gov, your pages are actually being served to you through something called a Content Distribution Network. In this case, this is Akamai. Moreover, the old whitehouse.gov website was also being served to you by Akamai. Nothing has changed.

Now this little fact seems to escape everyone’s notice. The closest that anyone has come is this comment from Kifoth (980005), “You’re assuming that the site’s pages aren’t served via a third party ‘dumb’ caching server, with the actual Drupal server locked down and disconnected from the internet.”

Bingo! Kifoth (980005) seems to have nailed the matter. While Drupal is the content management system, another layer, the content distribution network exists between the site and its visitor. I think this is cool. But I’ve heard from some quarters that claiming that whitehouse.gov is a Drupal website is “disingenuous.”

I don’t agree. At the core, the Drupal CMS permits rapid deployment and re-use of content to serve a rapidly changing environment. This is something Drupal does exceptionally well. If, in fact, it needs a little help from friends to push that content to a global community, it takes nothing away from what Drupal does well. It just proves that, even on the Internet, sometimes it takes a village.

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.

This year marked 40 years of Unix, the operating system originally developed by a group of AT&T Employees at Bell Labs in 1969. Twenty-four years later Linus Torvalds developed the Linux kernel based on the Unix kernel. Shortly following that, the Free Software Foundation was established and created the GNU General Public License; under which Linux operates.

Duo Consulting, IBM, many major universities, the United States and other governments and corporations of every size utilize web servers operating on some version of Linux. Linux is also a free and popular substitute for Windows on many PC laptops and desktops. MAC OS users have enjoyed using Linux commands and programs for years. BSD-Unix has been under the Mac hood since the release of OS-X.

Duo Consulting was among the many companies who sent staffers to the 2009 Ohio Linux Fest. The Columbus Hyatt played host with the main events happening in the adjacent Columbus Convention Center.  I was among the 1,100 attendees at this year’s event.

Members of the Indiana Drupal Users Group and I staffed the Drupal exhibit. We garnered a tremendous amount of attention. Our exhibit had 2 screens showing slide show of famous Drupal sites. These included  GreenPeace, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Amnesty International, MTV – United Kingdom, Warner Bros Records. Visitors to the Drupal exhibit listened to me explain how Duo uses Drupal and Linux servers to provide value and solutions to our clients through rapid deployment, scalability, a modular framework, and leveraging the large development community that exists around Drupal.