Drupal Workshop Delivers 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.



