Planet Drupal

Drupalcamp Colorado 2009 has come and gone. The event garnered over 200 participants - at least half of which came from out of State. Over 40 sessions (if you include BOFs and the opening and closing sessions) occurred over the two days ranging from pure business to the highly technical. Ubercart was heavily presented with Ubercamp partnering with Drupalcamp. The camp was followed by a media sprint.

pingVision presented in quite a few sessions:

• Functional Interactive Design - Laura Scott
• Preprocess functions - the what, why and how - Matt Tucker
• How to Create a Module - John Fiala
• Drupal Security For Coders and Themers - Ben Jeavons
• Web Services With Drupal, or The Acronym Parade: A Dance With APIs - Ben Jeavons
• Studio - a bit more than a base theme - Matt Tucker and Al Steffen
• Project Management -- Agile is not "Cowboy" spelled backwards - Katherine Lawrence

I personally took photos and video in and out of sessions and drafted notes at the panels I attended. Poring over them this last week for posting online had me thinking how extraordinarily good the sessions were this year. The Flickr feed is filling up with photos from several of the participants as well. If you have photos from the event on Flickr, please tag them drupalcolorado!

The event has re-energized me, encouraging me to reengage my community projects head on. It has me getting excited for Drupalcon Paris and the opportunity to interface with a larger segment of our community. Finally it makes me think about where this event will be next year. Perhaps it will have 400 participants with worldwide attendance?

Thank you to the organizers and thanks to everyone that came. It was a great event that pingVision was delighted to sponsor.

Vivek Kundra, the CIO of the United States, unveiled the new IT spending dashboards at usaspending.gov earlier this week. Tim O'Reilly has all the details in his blog post titled Radical transparency: the new federal IT dashboard. In short, the dashboards are designed to help CIOs of individual government agencies get a handle on the effectiveness of government IT spending. The site was built with Drupal.

This is a fundamental change in the way government is going to be run, and it is great to see Drupal play a small role in that. Great stuff!

Your workspace is your castle eh? Just thought I’d share my workspace with you, mind you this is just the Summer office, but it ain’t half bad!

I've just released a new module (fanfare) which seems to work pretty well. I have a couple of silly bug fixes to put up tonight (knew I should've called it "beta") but other than that it works great. It's called Node Reference Variables:
http://drupal.org/project/nodereference_variables

All it does is present a load of stuff (depending on other contrib modules installed and some admin options) via the hook_preprocess_node() preprocess hook for themers to use to do cool theming stuff with Node Reference CCK fields. Main feature I'm using is the jQuery UI tabs it provides.

read more

Kat Bailey posted a very kind review of my Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery book.

From the review:

The book aims to get people with little to no knowledge of Drupal or JavaScript up to speed with creating really awesome functionality, really fast. In fact, its title almost belies the breadth of its scope: although the use of jQuery in Drupal 6 is the one topic that it covers exhaustively, it doesn't skip over any of the basic tools or concepts required to get going with Drupal, and so it would work pretty well as a first Drupal book for any aspiring front-end Drupaler. It covers everything from the ultra-utra-basic ("what is CSS?", "what is a Drupal block?") to Drupal JavaScript Behaviors (and everything else in drupal.js), to JavaScript Theming, to AJAX, to building modules with AJAX functionality, to jQuery syntax, effects, and even writing jQuery plugins!

I've spent the last week or so doing nothing but writing Drupal-centered JavaScript. Every time I reflect back on what JavaScript coding used to be like, I can't help but appreciate the hard work of the jQuery and Drupal JavaScript teams.

read more

Stephanie Pakrul and Chris Fassnacht from Top Notch Themes discussed Return on Investment and Ubercart. These are my notes from the presentation. I also took video that is broken up into four pieces at the end of this post. I was at the back of the room, so the sound is a little quiet. Hopefully it is still helpful.

They started out by talking about the strongest feature of Ubercart is its automatic integration with Drupal. That makes things relatively easy for the developer.

75% of users make a judgement about your company based on the design of a site. Business metrics can improve drastically with a good design. Quite simply good design can improve your conversion rate and improving you conversion rate is the investment that keeps on giving.

read more

Because of a bug in the Drupal 7 PostgreSQL chain (either in PDO or the database) BIGINT handling is not fixed in today's Drupal 6 release. And you wonder why I hate that database.

There has been some discussion in recent days regarding Object-Relational Mappers (ORMs), Drupal, and why the latter doesn't use the former. There are, actually, many reasons for that, and for why Drupal doesn't do more with the Active Record pattern.

Rather than tuck such discussion away in an issue queue, I figured it better to document a bit more widely.

read more

A little over a year ago, as we were putting the finishing touches on the Lullabot Learning Series, we needed a quick-and-easy way to sell our video downloads and DVDs. We took a look at several of the options out there and Matt ended up stumbling across Shopify, who's tag-line is "E-commerce made easy". Their solution is fully hosted and they claim "setup within minutes". And sure enough, within mere minutes Matt had set up a working site. Within a few hours, it had a Lullabot logo and mostly worked the way we wanted. It took us another day or two to wire it up to our shipping warehouse, and to Fetch, the company which we used for our digital downloads. Overall, it was a quick-and-painless solution.

It served us well for over a year. But we really wanted more out of our store. We wanted better integration with our main site. We wanted to be able to offer coupons and special offers to people on our mailing list. We wanted to be able to create discounted product bundles. And we wanted options like affiliate links and Amazon-style ratings and reviews. And to be completely honest, we were a little embarrassed that we weren't using a Drupal-based solution. So over the past month, we've been toiling away at a brand new Übercart-based store site. And today, we're proud to announce that store.lullabot.com is all-Drupal all-the-time! It did not take us mere minutes to set up. But it's much more configurable, modular, and flexible than our Shopify site.

Incidentally, we'll be celebrating the Independence Day weekend by sending out some deep discount coupons to our mailing list. If you're not already subscribed, hurry up and get on the mailing list to get coupons, special offers, and the inside scoop on upcoming workshops and video tutorial releases... here's a hint: we know a thing or two about Übercart now!

read more

When it comes to search, Drupal seems to do OK by itself. However, there are a number of supporting modules which will make your Drupal’s default search even better. These include Porter-Stemmer (english only), Search 404, Search by Page, Similar By Terms and many others.

If you’re seekign to help an advanced user out, then modules like Search config can help with that. But what about the user who won’t dare go into the hidden area of ‘Advanced Search’? This is where the power is - right?

It sure is. This is where you tell Drupal what content types and categories you want to limit the search to. This is where a user, simply looking for a job on your site, which lists information about jobs, news, blogs and other items, can focus their results.

So, why don’t you stop expecting the user to figure this out, and just make it happen for them! That’s what this video is all about. Using the default Drupal search box and forcing it to focus on specific content types or categories. You control what Drupal searches for and you control where it shows up!

Search Related Modules

• Porter-Stemmer [issues] - [usage]
• Search 404 [issues] - [usage]
• Search by Page [issues] - [usage]
• Similar By Terms [issues] - [usage]
• Search config [issues] - [usage]
• Faceted Search [issues] - [usage]

The Apache Solr project is what is used on Drupal.org. You know, where you get the cool faceted results from a search request.

• Apache [issues] - [usage]

Of course, if you haven’t heard about it already, the Acquia Search service make it quite easy to take advantage of the Apache Solr coolness.

Related videos:  How To: Drupal Search using Acquia's Solr Service

Have you ever needed to remove a JS or CSS file in certain conditions such as a custom themed page? In Drupal 6 that has become a whole lot easier.

read more

We’ve talked through the ’strategy’ behind the proposed D7UX Information Architecture (IA), now let’s take a look at it in detail. What goes where.

Let’s go through each major section in turn:

Content

The ‘Find Content’ page, showing a searchable, sortable, filterable list of all the content on your site is the ‘landing page’ for the Content section of the site. From this page you can also choose to Add Content (although it is suggested that for Content Creators this also be shown as a Shortcut on the Toolbar).

Different types of content can be filtered into different tabs, as comments are, for example, on this page. You may also wish to provide separate tabs for content such as Products (if you have Ubercart running), or Events or Projects

Structure

This section of the IA groups together tools used to ‘build’ content for the website which both have and create a User Interface (UI), including:

• Taxonomy
• Content Types
• Blocks
• Forums
• Books
• Feed Aggregator
• CCK (Contrib)
• Panels (Contrib)
• Views (Contrib)
• Webform (Contrib)

Note that this page has not had a ‘visual design’ applied to it yet, the image above is wireframe only.

People

The People landing page uses the same content display and interaction patterns as the Find Content/Content landing page, providing a searchable, sortable and filterable list of ‘people’ on your website. As expected, this includes everyone with administrative privileges and registered users, however we also provide to extract lists of users from nodes and show them in this one location (with contextual links to/from the node of course), including even participants, group members etc.

So, for example, if your site was running a series of events you would be able to click on the ‘events’ tab and see a list of published events and an overview of participants (eg. 46/100 attendees) and communicate with attendees in this location rather than having to to the node to perform this function (as noted above, you will also be able to access this list via the node if you prefer).

Appearance

This page is still a work in progress but would show the currently active theme, other themes available for selection and theme configuration options. Any tasks associated with selecting or managing the theme live in this section. As noted in the ‘Strategies’ post, this is not a common task however it is very important in the evaluation and ‘getting started’ process and requires this primary position for wayfinding and positioning reasons.

Config & Modules

Config & Modules (renamed recently from Modules & Config) is a hard working section of the site that houses the less used (on a day to day basis) functionality of the site, but some of the most critical aspects for site administrators.

The first of the two pages in this section is the Config page. There is a ’status’ message at the top for module updates but the majority of the site is dedicated to making the site administration tasks easily findable. We have approached this primarily by regrouping and sometimes renaming the individual items or their groups for clarity.

The propose content and grouping of the contents of this page are:

People Settings:

• Roles
• Permissions
• Emails (extracted from admin/settings/user for findability)
• Registration/Deactivation (extracted from admin/settings/user for findability)
• Personalisation (extracted from admin/settings/user for findability)
• Other Settings (because there were still a few odd settings left!)

Media

• Image Toolkit
• Image-Cache (example of contrib module placement in this IA)
• Image Field (example of contrib module placement in this IA)
• Image (example of contrib module placement in this IA)

Site Administration:

• Site Information
• File System Path (currently File System)
• File Upload Restrictions (currently File Uploads)
• IP Blocking

Maintenance

• Maintenance Mode
• Logging & Errors
• Performance
• Backup & Migrate (example of contrib module placement in this IA)
• Update Status (example of contrib module placement in this IA)

Development

• Testing

Search

• Search settings

URLs

• URL Path Settings (currently URL Aliases)
• Clean URLs
• Pathauto (example of contrib module placement in this IA)

RSS

• RSS Publishing

Workflow

• Triggers
• Actions

External Publishing

• Blog API

Internationalisation

• Translate Interface
• Regional Settings
• Languages

This page will also house a ‘launch pad’ to access the interfaces for major modules that do have significant interface requirements, for example Ubercart, Organic Groups, Projects, and Storm (Project Management). For site that use these modules extensively, the toolbar and dashboard will also provide more direct access into the module interface & functionality.

Reports will become accessible from the dashboard interface.

The other page in this section is the modules page:

This page essentially provides access to add new modules to your Drupal site, and to manage/configure your currently installed modules. Grouping them in with the other configuration functionality removes any ambiguity about where to go for configuration tasks, however it is important to maintain the term ‘modules’ in the global navigation as this is a keyword that people will frequently be scanning for. This modules wireframe is fairly new - to discuss this page in detail pls head over to the Modules page in the Project Framework

In addition to all of this there is a Help section, a Profile Page for the user, a Log Out link and the customisable task bar and dashboard that we’ll talk about in more detail elsewhere. But otherwise, that’s about it.

I know from what I’ve seen of (particularly new) users interacting with Drupal this can make a significant positive difference. I hope you feel the same and, as ever, welcome your feedback.

At last I can announce the release of my new six-hour video series from Lynda.com, "Drupal 6: Online Presentation of Data", which you can check out with a free one-day pass. (Of course it's also available to anyone with a Lynda.com subscription, starting at $25/month for all-you-can-stand training in over 600 topics.)

I first talked about this course in January and was able to implement at least one suggestion from your comments (about creating calendars). There are also videos about mapping, charting, and preparing data for tabular export, all built on a foundation of CCK and Views.

Since Lynda.com's audience is mostly graphic designers, the course starts out with an in-depth description of data structure: As you know, data planning is at least as important as implementation! And it's an essential subject whose subtleties elude most beginners.

One wag in IRC questioned the need for such a course. "Presentation of Data?," he said. "Isn't that what Drupal does anyway?" He's right -- in the same way that a car is a tool for going shopping. But I believe that many people who would benefit from Drupal's data-presentation features simply don't know about them, because their knowledge of it stops at Stories, Pages, users, and blocks. They need a bit more information to make the leap, and could become fierce advocates for Drupal when they see all it can do in this area.

Extra bonus: For giggles, check out the Introduction video, which includes some live-action video of me looking goofy. :)

Thanks, as always, to the Drupal community for both helping me to understand these topics myself, and for making Drupal the Web development powerhouse it is.

I've been on the go so much that I haven't had the mental space to sit down and articulate a lot of the cool stuff that is going on. A few weeks ago I took part in a new open source conference, Writing Open Source (WOScon). The conference was born from conversations Emma Jane Hogbin and I had last fall, and she took the ideas and made it a reality in Owen Sound, Ontario. It was very small but packed with awesomeness, from people to ideas to food. There were quite a few exciting ideas for the Drupal community which will get written up and worked on down the road a bit. Lots of folks have written up summaries* of the event itself, but that single event has started something quite a bit bigger. The last day of the conference we transformed the conference website into a new community site and started a new Twitter/identi.ca hashtag for #wosdocs. We've started a new open source community to focus on documentation. That may not sound exciting to lots of people, but it is, even if you aren't a "writer" and here's why.

Open source growth

As a whole, open source has been gaining tremendous ground over the years. It is becoming more mainstream every month. Open source software is respected as a viable tool in today's world, but for most every project, the documentation lags behind the quality of the code. As people explore this "new" software, they need to feel like they can let go of the side of the pool and there will be a life raft in the middle if they need it. This generally takes two forms: paid support or community documentation. Open source is growing rapidly, but we are still a very small part of the bigger pie. To accelerate open source growth we need the coders to keep cranking with their bad selves, and we need to provide guidance and support for new users. Open source is an amazing model for making awesome software, there is no reason that we can't produce best of breed documentation with the same community passion.

Industry standards and quality

One of the big take-home points for me at the conference (amongst so many) was that we generally have a very high standard for the quality of our code, but we do not apply those same standards to our documentation. This is a disservice to both the docs and the code it supports. There are a lot of people out there who are documentation professionals; technical writers, editors, information architects, etc. and believe or not, a lot of them are using open source. We need to listen and learn from the pros, just like we do with code. One of the great things about documentation best practices and standards is that there is a whole industry that already looks at these things. We can learn from what is there, apply open source magic and share. The beauty of docs is that the same basic principles are going to apply to all projects, regardless of language (code or culture), structure, or size. Of course, each project will have its own resources and emphasis, but so much base ground can be laid down that is useful to everyone. We have started exploring this on the WOSdocs site by creating outlines for a sample open source style guide, documentation best practices guide and starting a persona library. This is just fricking awesome for everyone from single developer trying to write docs on their own to large teams wrangling complex projects.

Kicking ass

So basically this is good news for everyone and I truly believe that this new movement to make kick ass docs for all of open source is going to move us up to the next level in adoption around the world. As Paul said in one of his blog posts about the conference, I'm excited to know that I will be able to look back and say that I was "there when this began." If you want to be part of ass-kicking history, we are an open community, so head on over to WOSdocs, sign up and dig in. I also plan to be at WOScon next year and it'll be fun to see how much we've grown by then. Maybe we'll even share some of our insider jokes too. Where did that mammoth come from?

* Some posts about WOScon
http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/Community/Woscon2009
http://emmajane.net/node/928
http://emmajane.net/node/929

Designing an Information Architecture (IA) for Drupal is an incredibly challenging project - essentially you are trying to design an IA that allows just about anyone to do just about anything. Flexibility is very often the enemy of good design - people make good and fast decisions with fewer options not more - but how do you choose the right options so that they work for as many people as possible? Tricky stuff.

To give you a sense of the breadth of the scope - we need to design for both:

• people who use Drupal every day (efficiency & capability is key) and people who are brand new (evaluators & learners - does this make sense to me, does it appeal to me, will I be able to use it to do what I want?)
• Verity, the content creator (ref: Who Is D7UX for, very limited set of tasks but very frequent use) through to existing power users/developers (know Drupal inside out and don’t want the UI to get in the way)

In devising the proposed information architecture we have applied the following principles/philosophies/guidelines:

• less clicks is not necessarily better: some of the early feedback we have had to the IA has been along the lines of ‘but I can get to this in one click using the Admin header now - this means I’ll have to make 3 clicks, therefore the IA is not as good’. The number of clicks to content is actually a poor metric of information architecture usability. Much better is the number of mistakes made - people don’t mind clicks if they are not lost, if they are confident that they are getting closer to the content/functionality they seek. Our information architecture is designed to support wayfinding and reduce errors in a system that can grow incredibly large.
• few options shown = more decisions made: at the moment, Drupal tends to show all of its options all of the time, this is incredibly overwhelming for many users. Generally speaking, as humans we do really well at choosing between say 3-4 options, and very badly at choosing between 24 options. We want to ‘break down’ the decision making as much as possible by grouping things together well and using good (human friendly) labels.
• group & order by frequency of use & complexity - tasks that are performed with high frequency/repetition are very different to tasks that you do only occasionally, especially in Drupal.There are many differences between ‘adding content’ and changing the file path for uploaded files.The more frequently I perform a task the more familiar I become with it, the more I become interested in efficiency (being able to do it more quickly), the more skilled I am at performing that task. So, for adding content, what we want to do is move anything out of the way that will impact on efficiency. If I make a mistake adding an article I can very quickly recover that mistake without significant systemwide impact.Tasks that I perform infrequently (like setting the filepath for uploaded documents) are very different. I am going to have to find the location of this task again (as I won’t ‘remember’ where it lives most likely), if I get it wrong it could have a significant impact systemwide. Accuracy is very important.We have placed the very frequently accessed tasks at one end of the IA (Content) and the less frequently at the other end (Config & Modules) to aid both findability and to support the different ‘postures’ that users have for these different tasks.

Walking through the top level navigation:

• Content: This is where you Add/Edit and Find content, including comments.
• Structure: This is where the ‘builder’ tools live - things that both have and create UIs, for example Blocks, Menus, and contrib modules like Panels and Views will live here.
• People: Similar to Content, this section allows you to Add/Edit and Find People on the site. People includes registered users and admins, but also lists of people extracted from content types (event participants, group members) - this is a kind of new concept so stay tuned for more details to follow.
• Appearance: Themes & Theme Config. This link is largely designed for ‘evaulators’ and new people to Drupal, as we know that Theme management is not a regularly accessed but is one of the first things that people look for and explore when ‘getting started’ with a content management system so we need to make it very findable (and also to send the right messages about Drupal and our attitude to design)
• Config & Modules: This is where you’ll find the configuration functionality that you access once in a blue moon (or possibly only the once when you set up the site) - we’re going to pull things like ‘roles’ and ‘permissions’ out of ‘people’ and put it over here (this is an example of the group & order by frequency of use & complexity principle). You’ll also get a full list of the currently installed modules, link to install new modules and ability to update/configure modules as well as a jumping off point for some of the major modules that require their own signficant interface, for example Ubercart.
  

Hack Your Own Experience:

There are so many different kinds of Drupal end users and Drupal sites that we need to provide an easy way to configure the interface to support your particular use case, and the way we are doing this is by allowing you to configure a set of ’shortcuts’ on the taskbar (the icons below the header) and to configure a set of widgets for your dashboard (the first screen you see when you log in and accessible from the dashboard). So, for example, if your site was an online store, you might have dashboard widgets showing your latest orders, and a taskbar shortcut to your catalogue.

Next: I’ll be posting a detailed section by section analysis of the information architect and what goes where.

This is the first in a series of posts discussing the proposed information architecture (IA) for D7UX.

Before we get into too much detail, be sure to check out this great video that Roy Scholten (Yoroy) posted recently that helps explain some of the key features and rationale of the IA and how it relates to the current Drupal information architecture.

Yesterday we took the beta-wraps off of Acquia Search, and I followed up with a post about why Acquia Search matters for site visitors. We're still having some good discussions in the comments and the Twitter-sphere, but today I want to talk a bit more about the technical details. How does Acquia Search work, what does our infrastructure look like, and why is it a great deal for site owners?

Acquia Search is a hosted search service based on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The way it works is that Drupal sites push their content to the search servers hosted by Acquia. We index the content, build an index, and handle search queries. We provide the search results, facets, and content recommendations to your Drupal site over the network.

Your site's data is protected in transit by SSL and by HMAC authentication in the Acquia Network. Plain english? The data is encrypted so anyone snooping in the middle can't read it and the request is authenticated which means that the Acquia Network knows you sent the request you claimed to, and you know that messages received from the network are legitimate.

Acquia Search is built using the Open Source Lucene and Solr distributions from the Apache project. If you want to install, run and maintain Lucene and Solr yourself, and you have the resources to do so, you can. All the code, including our contributions to the Apache Solr integration modules for Drupal, are available as Open Source.

However, many organizations simply lack the Java expertise to deploy, manage and scale Java applications -- or their hosting environment may not accommodate it. Because Acquia Search is a hosted service, it takes away the burden of installation, configuration, and operational duties to keep the software fast, secure and up-to-date. That's our job.

As a reference, we've spent the last 9 months developing Acquia Search with the equivalent of three full-time employees. This also included setting up a billing system, integrating our support system, connecting it to the Acquia Network, performance testing and tuning, and more. Other Acquians helped out with the infrastructure, quality assurance, product management, design, and documentation. It was a non-trivial amount of work.

The result of these efforts is that we can launch any number of Solr farms on Amazon EC2. For high-performance and high-availability, each farm has a master Solr server and one or more slave Solr servers. A load balancer pushes content changes to the master Solr server, which are replicated by the slave servers. The load balancer makes sure that most regular search queries are done against the slave servers. Because multiple servers can handle your site's search requests, Acquia Search is fast and can scale, but it also means that Acquia Search is very robust because it can survive a server failure. As I wrote yesterday, Acquia Search is faster that Drupal's built-in search -- especially for large sites.

In most scenarios, several Drupal sites share a single Solr farm -- by sharing resources, we can offer a high-performance and high-availability search solution to small sites at relative cheap price point. For really big sites, we can provision a dedicated farm and scale out Solr so that it can handle millions of search queries.

Once you begin to use our search service you'll be able to disable Drupal's built-in core search. When you do this you reduce the amount of memory and processing power needed by your own infrastructure. As we've learned with big sites like drupal.org, Drupal's built-in search can bring a large site to its knees. With Acquia Search, you can avoid the drain.

On the front-end, we made significant contributions to the Apache Solr Search Integration modules on drupal.org. We helped add new features, improve the usability, and iron out a legion of bugs that cropped up during the beta period. The top-3 most active maintainers of the Apache Solr module are all Acquia employees, respectively Peter Wolanin, Robert Douglass, and Jacob Singh. As a result, Peter, Robert and Jacob are sometimes referred to as Acquia's three Apache Solr Musketeers.

Peter Wolanin (pwolanin), Robert Douglass and Jacob Singh work on Apache Solr integration as part of their job at Acquia. Peter and Jacob are part of the engineering team, but Robert can provide professional services related to Apache Solr.

All things combined, Acquia Search makes it staggeringly simple and low-cost to get better search on your site. You can get started in minutes and you don't have to worry about installing, upgrading, monitoring, or scaling the software. In short, we built an enterprise-quality, highly-available, secure, scalable, and fast indexing search solution that we believe Drupal was missing -- especially for the enterprise.

Update: #D7CX pledges are for all, not just top 40 module maintainers. all modules should pledge. non maintainers pledge help w/ docs, QA. there is a pledge for everyone.

Drupal 7 is going to be a phenomenal release. The code is miles ahead of Drupal 6, and the D7UX work is poised to bring us a giant leap forward. I really think we are going to make a major difference in CMS land and in the world in general with this release.

#D7CX

In order to make the biggest possible impact, we need most of the top 40 Contrib modules to have full Drupal7 releases on the day when core Drupal 7 is released. Our failure to accomplish this for Drupal 6 was devastating. So, let's turn our attention toward #D7CX - Drupal 7 Contrib Experience.

I want to collect pledges from maintainers to support the #D7CX effort. A pledge consists of writing a statement like below at the top of your project page on drupal.org. Here are my three pledges ...

read more

Jono Shuster, the ED of the Entrepreneurial Standards Forum (http://es2f.org) did a session on Entrepreneurs and Drupal. These are my notes from that session and the marginal video I took during the presentation.

Jono started his comments by making an observation about the Denver Boulder User Group (DBUG) - half of them are entrepreneurs. He made the connection that Drupal and entrepreneurship is a natural fit. That led him to propose this presentation.

read more

I've submitted a proposal to Drupalcon Paris. It is titled Build A Community Site - No Coding Required and is focused on new-comers to Drupal. When a person is looking to create a small community site or blog, there are different options out there ranging from Wordpress, to Joomla!, to Blogger, to Drupal.

When a new user approaches Drupal, there is often a sense that the software is overwhelming. In truth, when you break Drupal down, much of it is fairly simple and straight forward to develop a basic site.

read more