Tagged with 'Drupal'

In the month of June Duo Consulting sent me out for 6 days of speaking at 5 events across 4 states!

The month kicked off with the Web Content Conference which is chronicled in a previous blog.

From there I went to the SouthEast LinuxFest where I had the privilege to address a good sized crowd of Linux lovers. This was an opportunity for me to do a whole new topic, “How Drupal is Expanding the Role of OpenSource in Government, Private Industry and Beyond.” The presentation started off with a brief boasting about how the community and the software has grown exponentially in the last few years. 600% growth in DrupalCon attendance from 2008 to 2010 and a 35% growth in contributed modules (defined) from 2009 to 2010 were among the impressive numbers I demonstrated.

I then spent some time showing off the Drupal-based WhiteHouse.gov site and its many interactive features. I explained how these features were in keeping with the recent Open Government Initiative (defined). After showing off more government, entertainment, and other sites I closed with some Q & A which showed that the room’s interest level in Drupal was high.

The following day was a Drupal Camp using the same facilities as the LinuxFest. This was an awesome opportunity for the LinuxFest attendees to sit in front of Drupal Ninjas and learn from the pros. I polled the audiences a few times and it was clear that many of the attendees were at their first-ever Drupal event. We attracted people from SC, NC, and Georgia, and beyond. One thing I have certainly noticed is that Linux users love Drupal, but the sites they build are rather bland and often void of any of the cool functionality that Drupal affords. Hopefully the DrupalCamp has sparked some creativity!

The following week I landed at our nation’s capital to help organize the first [hopefully, annual] Drupal LibraryCamp. We chose the DC area because the American Library Association Annual Conference was being held there the following day. We had 16+ people join us in the Arlington Central Library as we enjoyed presentations from experts in the field of how Drupal is serving libraries across the country. After lunch Cary Gordon and I took the group through a crash course on Drupal as a community and a Drupal primer. What I really enjoyed most about the event was seeing the people connect. I’m not in any way associated with the Library world of Drupal, but I did get to see these dedicated individuals sharing their stories and growing their skills and understanding. Much appreciation was shared for Duo Consulting who sponsored my involvement in organizing and attending the event.

Two time zones away to the West, DrupalCamp Colorado was calling me. Oddly enough, this camp was the same weekend as the Chicago DrupalCamp. Since other Duo folks were attending the Chicago event,  Duo elected to dispatch me to the mountains! Luscious scenery aside, DrupalCamp Colorado was a win on many levels. I gave my usual Advanced CCK+VIEWS session where I was honored to have over 33% of the camp attendees join me! I had lower expectations for my second day session. I wasn’t sure how many would show up for “Getting Street Creds / How to be an active Drupal Citizen!” But sure enough, I had 30ish people listening to me rant about how to be a Drupal Zealot.

I broke down the Drupal Community Involvement model into three alliterations as I encouraged the group to be Visible, Valuable and Volunteer. Some took my Twitter advice before I had even finished. They started tweeting about being at the camp and listening to my session! Many came up afterwards very thankful that they now knew that they could be valuable members of the Drupal Community. Being the first time I’d given this session, I was way stoked at the results! I look forward to giving this presentation in Dallas in August for the hybrid OpenCamp and DrupalCamp Dallas.

Sonny & Doug kick off the Drupal Workshop at Web Content Conference

Delivering Drupal, in a BIG way! Some attendees of the 4th annual Web Content Conference took advantage of an amazing, educational opportunity via a POWERHOUSE team of Drupal experts. The session titled, “A Drupal Immersion for Non-Profits and Small Businesses,” was a well attended, high octane experience for all.

Sonny and I started off with a brief overview of Drupal. Sonny discussed Drupal basics, the meaning of OpenSource software, and Drupal as a business tool and business model. I gave Drupal it’s human touch as I waxed poetic about Drupal as a community of people. I mentioned how often we get together in large groups and stressed how important it is to us to educate each other.

After that Jeff Eaton took the stage to WOW the audience with an impressive showing of well built and often famous Drupal sites. Whitehouse.gov received top billing as did the New York State Senate site and Sony and Warner Brothers. Jeff also showed off some impressive magazine and newspaper sites. We were all Inspired!

Next came Ryan Szrama to show off the ecommerce side of Drupal. Ryan revealed functionality that will be available as Drupal Commerce becomes a reality when Drupal7 is released within a few months. Emanuel London armed the audience with a powerful tool that he stated is underused. He showed how the CiviCRM system integrates with Drupal to expose tremendously powerful and useful features. Lastly Josh Ward took us through an SEO trip making sure that the attendees knew that any site built in Drupal CAN be Search Engine Optimized easily. Josh stressed that Drupal has the technology and the tools but that it does take effort on the part of the stakeholders to use the tools to get the best results for their site.

I spoke with many of the attendees at lunch to get a sense of what they received from the small army of Drupalers on the stage. What I heard was that the people enjoyed the very well rounded expose of Drupal. Everyone heard a few things they already knew but they heard far more that they had never heard before. The SEO portion was the most common source of new information for the attendees. Jeff’s stellar list of Drupal sites shocked some people who had no idea that the music industry was in love with Drupal. I got a lot of questions about CiviCRM.It’s clear to me that some more training is needed on that topic.And lastly, few of the people that I spoke with had need for Drupal to act as an Ecommerce platform. The few that did express the need  said that adding payment processing would be a future addition to their projects and that Drupal-Commerce looked like it would satisfy their needs completely.

The old saying goes, “Always leave the audience wanting more.” Well, we accomplished that. Many attendees would have loved to spend hours going in to the backend of Drupal and showing off the admin screens and configuring settings etc. A Site-Building workshop is what they’re asking for. And this makes sense too. Some of these small institutions, nonprofits, clubs, associations, etc. are not going to hire a firm for $50K to build the site. They want to hire someone to train them how to build their own. I explained to one person that I have done just this very thing and that, with the exception of a few custom modules, the client was able to build the project herself. I even heard a phrase for this kind of business model. I heard it called “Product Management.” I wonder if we’ll see more and more of this as time goes on. I think we will.

An old project in the Drupal community has begun to  shine again. Years ago the Drupal community enjoyed a regular offering of live broadcasts coupled with the lively interaction among people in the Dojo chat room. For reasons far too complicated to get into here, the Dojo quietly slipped away. But, thanks to the tireless efforts of Gus Austin, it is now rejuvenated.

Today, Duo Consulting sponsored the 5th Drupal-Dojo session. I took to the “airwaves” and did a very detailed presentation on the DEMO module. Video available here In short, the DEMO module allows the administrator of a Drupal site to create backups on the database then reload those backups at any time. The backups are stored within the Drupal files and an easy to use administration page shows all available backups.

At Duo Consulting I instituted a practice whereby developers would create backups each morning before they started working on the site. We would even create one in the middle of the day if we were about to do some rather heavy rework on content-types or major restructuring of VIEWS configurations. This way if we got unexpected results, we could either retrace our steps OR just revert back to the state of the site as it was before we made the dramatic changes. Pretty handy huh?

The Dojo sessions are weekly and open to any who want to present. This is actually a great opportunity for some of the “Silent Soldiers” to stand out and be heard. Landing a chance to present at a DrupalCamp or DrupalCon can be difficult and, for some, standing in front of an often huge audience can cause nerves to the point of nausea. The Drupal-Dojo is the chance to make a name for yourself and get some promotion for either the individual or the company for which they work.

The plan is to invite as many sponsoring organizations as possible to join the Drupal-Dojo initiative. Acknowledgment on the Dojo site at  as well as in tweets, and blogs will be among the many methods of exposure that the sponsors will receive. Those with an interest in sponsoring the Drupal-Dojo can contact Gus Austin (signin required to contact Gus).

So far, I’m already involved in a number of capacities to assist the Drupal-Dojo. Wrangling sponsors and presenters and being an all purpose Dojo-Evangelist are among my main duties. The Drupal-Dojo CoffeeTalks, ad-hoc Podcasts, are another one of my duties. Here we get some Drupalers together on a conference call and run through a short list of topics. New modules released, upcoming or recent events, and other news worthy items are discussed. This is going to be loads of fun! I look very forward to participating in this and presenting other sessions for the Drupal-Dojo.

The first session at the Chicago Drupal SpringJam was essentially a walk-through of the new Drupal 7 (the whole day was focused on Drupal 7). There are lots of changes to the user interface  of the administration — it’s been cleaned up a lot, and they’ve tried to put things in more logical groups. Although I’m not sure I’m a buyer of all the changes. For example, “People” says bios to me, not user management. But then maybe I’ve been looking at too many law firm sites. There are also lots of additions to the Drupal core (CCK, etc). Functionality that was in modules is now incorporated into core.

For my money, the most interesting part of the talk was in the Q&A section, when the conversation came around to the database layer.  They’ve clearly spent some real intellectual energy in trying to make that more of a focus, which is all to the good.

And now the bad news: so far, Drupal 7 is consistently slower than 6. It’s more memory intensive and definitely needs beefier environments.  Perhaps in compensation, 7 has lots of additional caching options, so we’ll definitely plan on using them moving forward. When the Duo Consulting crew goes to San Francisco DrupalCon, we’ll have to  dig into these options.

And when is Drupal 7 coming out? “When it’s ready.” Which means, when they’ve got the critical issues list down to zero — right now it’s at 137.  And as the speaker admitted, now they’re starting to hit the hard ones. My gut tells me (and it’s only my gut, nothing more) that we’re looking at Q4 for this.

Oh, and on a more important note: the UIC Pavilion was advertising that Slayer and Megadeth performing there Aug 20!

We recently completed a website for Leonard, Street & Deinard which is built on the Drupal content management system (CMS).  At launch the site includes some effective functionality which was enabled largely due to the CMS.  Although Drupal-based sites are propagating rapidly on the Internet, to our knowledge, this site is one of the first enterprise law firm Drupal websites.  BigLaw, it seems has Drupal constipation. In fact, based on our own experience, do-it-the-way-they-did-it-yesterday (because it is safe) law firms continue to build new sites on proprietary content management systems for twice the price and half the functionality that is available to them.

Not surprisingly, the innovation in law websites comes from the entrepreneurial companies – both law firms and the professionals whose clients are law firms. In particular, we recently learned of Simplicity Law, a Littleton, Colorado based law firm with a differentiated set of services focused on small business. Their creative business model is represented by a forward looking site built on Drupal.

Most important for the Simplicity Law site is the effortless content presentation.  For example, a page featuring small business law articles includes a “most popular” list generated by Drupal’s ability to incorporate visitor behavior. Content is “tagged” for organization by the site administrator and access by the site visitor. And, bless their souls, site visitors are invited to add their comments to the articles presented. You can call this Web 2.0. I just think it is a site that initiates the client relationship by inviting engagement. You know, client centric.  BigLaw are you listening? No. I don’t think so.

I was discussing this site with one of my strategic partners in the LiftOff Law consortium, John Hellerman of Hellerman Baretz Communications. I was excited when John told me his firm’s new website was also built on Drupal CMS.  And indeed it was good to note his site features integrated social media and social forwarding capabilities. Additionally, one of my favorite practices Hellerman Baretz embraces is featuring (like, to the home page) recent posts headline from their blog. What I also especially liked was the seamless integration of the blog into the site.  Unlike some BigLaw firms who hold their blogs out at arm’s length (because they might bite? … or smell?) or call them not-so-clever things like “blawgs” (ha, ha, ha, uh, not funny) or simply bury them in a link from an attorney bio, the Hellerman Baretz blog is just another way of presenting content. The blog is prominently accessible through the site’s top level navigation as “Knowledge” Knowledge. How accurate. And useful.

It’s great to see this kind of website execution from professional services firm like Leonard Street & Deinard, Simplicity Law and Hellerman Baretz. We’re not claiming Drupal CMS is the Holy Grail. And we also know some of the things we and others try aren’t as effective as we thought they might be. But at least we try, revise and try again. In doing so we endeavor to share a common plane with our entrepreneurial law firm clients who are also evolving their client services to serve their market.

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.