Last week, Geoff Butterfield of the George Lucas Educational Foundation and myself went to Google and gave a tech talk with an overview of Drupal, who uses it, and how it works, and then specifics about how it's implemented in the site Edutopia.org. Geoff went into details about how extensive use of Taxonomy, Views, and CCK helped make the website possible.

Check it out!


Many thanks to Cat Allman from the Google Open Source Programs Office for hosting our talk, and to Rok Žlender and Simon Hobbs for coming along and keeping us company. :)

See also Leslie Hawthorn's post at the Google Summer of Code blog.

Comments

BryanSD’s picture

This is very cool on many fronts:

  1. First Drupal video in a long time with great sound quality.
  2. Webchick still seen during slide presentation via the PIP.
  3. Edutopia looks great and a great resource for education professionals.
  4. The man who gave us Obi-Wan Kenobi is involved!

Bryan

JohnForsythe’s picture

Worth viewing just for the impressive overview of sites using Drupal.

PS: You can Digg this video here.

--
John Forsythe
Need reliable Drupal hosting?

bonobo’s picture

It's great to see what happens when folks doing great work use the right tools --

Thanks for sharing this --

Cheers,

Bill

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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

Sree’s picture

nice video to see abt how people are using the powerful tool ....

-- Sree --
IRC Nick: sreeveturi

marknunney’s picture

Really enjoyed all that, the details of the edu site and webchick's overview.

One thing surprised me though: as Geoff described it, his field for search terms (he wants search engines to index but aren't in the article) sounds a bit like (or exactly like) a search engine spamming tool. Knowing he was at Google, I spat my coffee out as he described it. I was waiting for the spam team to raid the presentation. Perhaps the description (or my interpretation of it) is misleading.

butterfi’s picture

The field only applies to Drupals built-in indexer, not to any external crawler.

To clarify, we often publish articles that might be totally appropriate for a certain subject, but don't contain the actual term within the body of the article, i.e. an article about robots in the classroom would also be appropriate for anyone searching on the term 'project-based learning.' So, I wanted a keyword field that would augment the text of the article.

BartVB’s picture

Besides that, as far as I understand it putting keywords in the meta data of a document is perfectly legal as long as those keywords are actually related to the content. You're only helping users find relevant information, you're not trying to mislead them by entering a 'free porn' keyword on a page about mortgages :) So there is a big difference between aiding the user with extra keywords and keyword spamming...

themegarden.org’s picture

A quite big Drupal video, but it's really worth of viewing (every single byte).
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Drupal Theme Garden
Drupal Hosting Article

seaji’s picture

Very nice, clean, presentation by webchick. Clever jokes.

Second part of presentation is a bit complicated, not so clean.

Different admin theme may lead to misunderstanding.

And many unnesesary details.

But, I like this video. The quality is good.

Viatcheslav Joukov

ximo’s picture

When people will ask me to describe Drupal, I'll just link to this video. Being a Google Tech Talk video is not so bad for credibility either! Nice presentation, webchick and Geoff :)

Joakim Stai – Kollegorna

najibx’s picture

Must be interesting.

But my internet connection is not that good, so the video break here and then. It's annoying.
Where can I download the video? torrent maybe?

TQ

-najibx-

najibx’s picture

tonyn’s picture

webchick gives a pretty good presentation. pretty useful for people who want to learn more about drupal. :) Worthy of being put in our ever growing video section.

cosmicdreams’s picture

I must have been in my cave for too long. That was the first I'd heard of the plans for Drupal 7. I'm excited AND scared about the drop of < php 5.2 support. But I'll ignore that for now, because I'm too excited about easier theme-support on a the module level in Drupal 6 to care. Oh, yea, and web services support in Drupal 7 is going to be awesome.

I think we will look back at drupal 6 and 7 in a few years and remember those were the releases that brought Drupal to the next level.

JStarcher’s picture

Very nice presentation. It was informative to non-technical and the technical audience, which is a hard thing to do.

Any chance there is a HD version though so I can read the screens?

Marat’s picture

It's really a nice explanation, I like it. BUT do you think guys it is a good idea to talk about v7 while v6 has not finished yet? The last version should include the latest updates.

If the v7 will come with something that is really different from the previous ones, it should be named with different name start from v1, may be.

Anyway, Drupal is great, thanks for all people who work on it.

hass’s picture

i'd like to get this video in much much better quality... i cannot see any details explained in the video... everything is diffuse and pixelated.

dawehner’s picture

i want to held a presentation about drupal in my school
for this i would like to have the two drupal-icons filled with the CMS-Features and the API-Features
where can i find them?

Rowanw’s picture

Bendo’s picture

Only one word: GREAT !!!

Thank you.

Markwebuk’s picture

I really enjoyed watching the video. It's explained very neatly.

Web Hosting UK

mrwuzzy’s picture

Thank you, an excellent presentation!

I wonder if webchick or Geoff Butterfield can be kind enough to share which modules exactly are in use at edutopia.org -- the video was too blurry to see exact details. Although CCK and Views was mentioned, there are hundreds of submodules of both, some of which are probably more useful than others and it would be nice to get real-life know-how what is useful and what not.

webchick’s picture

I'm back from traversing the globe for awhile, so I had a chance to upload my slides over at the bottom of http://webchick.net/presentations/implementing-drupal-google. I'd prefer to upload them over here, but they're too big. :(