Raincity Studios

Raincity Studios is listed along side 9 other companies in the current issue of WE. The West Ender Cover Feature:Made In Vancouver.

Our city is a hotbed of creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. From the fashionable to the ecological, here are 10 businesses — new and established — we think are at the top of their game.

We are honored and exited to be featured with some of Vancouver's greatest and most innovative companies.

Here's what they had to say about Raincity:

RAINCITY STUDIOS

What it is: trailblazing online-community host

Why them? Rising from the wreckage of 2002’s internet bubble bust, technologist Robert Scales was in search of something new. At the time, Vancouver’s open-source and Web 2.0 scene was very much in its infancy, and Scales set out to chart new territory in what was then known by his contemporaries as the Wild West of new media. He became the sole founder of Raincity Studios in 2003. Since then, the influential Gastown headquarters of the social media and technology consulting firm has evolved, becoming known as the pioneering hub of Vancouver’s new-media scene. True to the multifarious nature of open-source technology itself, Raincity Studios is difficult to define in one stroke — the company creates templates for websites built in Drupal (an open-source content-management system), delivers graphic-design services, and helps companies build websites which, in turn, build community capacity. Sounds like the future? Well, it’s all happening now. (RaincityStudios.com)

Also on the " Made in vancouver" list:

• The prominent Vancouver shoemaker John Fluevog
• Small Potatoes Urban Delivery, a personal favorite since 1998.
• Pyrrhais, jewelers to the stars
• Cheeky Umbrella supplying Vancouverites with dryness accessories.
• The Co-operative Auto Network, an awesome idea, catching on fast.
• Portobello West, Vancouver’s original fashion and art market.
• .. and a few more..

In our opinion, this list is only a small fragment of the amazing talent that is present in this city.

As Vancouverites, we are lucky to have an empowering community and amazing support to help us harvest the innovations and creativity that is found here.

Without this community and the support of our friends, employees, family and peers, perhaps we would be telling a much different story today... Thank you everyone for the support you have given us over the years.

We're excited about the re-design of drupal.com. Most of us who work with Drupal on a regular basis are very familiar with drupal.org - the home of the Drupal project, the contributed modules and all the amazing developer activity that makes Drupal such a great platform. But as Dries pointed out in his DrupalCon keynote this past year in DC, the Drupal.com page, until now just a simple placeholder page forwarding visitors to the project, is apparently getting a significant amount of traffic. Lets face it - lots of people just assume your website ends with a .com extension. And since people who are familiar with drupal are likely browsing directly to drupal.org, we can assume that most of the folks that end up on drupal.com are trying to learn about the project.

Now these noobies have a great place to learn about our favorite CMS and Drupal gets the slick showcase it deserves. The good folks over at Development Seed did a excellent job of designing the site and the images they've used make for a very compelling presentation. We can't help but notice the smiling face of Raincity's own Robert Scales (who is responsible for many of Drupal's tattoos) and our good friend and community hero Boris Mann (apparently responsible for Drupal's great haircut).  It's great to see the Vancouver drupal community so well represented!

Drupal.com looks great with this new makeover and it's another victory in battling Drupal's reputation for being "less pretty" than other platforms like Wordpress and Joomla. Efforts like the Design4Drupal camp held this past spring in Boston are trying to build the design community and proving that with a good designer and a solid themer, anything is possible. We already know that Drupal is powerful, but, like the at end of many hollywood teen flicks, the nerdy girl just took off her glasses on prom night and it turns out she's beautiful!

And more than just being pretty, drupal.com has a message for the Fortune 500 Companies: Drupal is enterprise ready. Many of us in the community have known this for quite some time after seeing Drupal deployed and scaled to serve high traffic sites and massive online communities, but large companies have been slow to embrace open source technologies. Now, with companies like Fedex, Nokia and Sanyo jumping on board and efforts being made by Microsoft to let their servers run PHP and MySQL, the future looks bright for Drupal and the Fortune 500. We're ready when you are!

And you may also notice the change in font on the drupal logo - this is another sign of good things to come. If you haven't seen it yet, check out the drupal.org redesign that Mark Boulton Design has been cooking up.