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Drupal Ingredients for your Website Dish, or Modules You Should Use on Every Site - Drupalcon Paris

Posted Wed, 2009-09-09 00:18 by matthew

Greg Knaddison (Greggles), Ben Jeavons (Coltrane) and Brad Bowman (beeradb) gave a session on modules you might consider using when you build a Drupal site. This was kind of the followup to the session at Drupalcamp Colorado. The first set of videos can be seen on the Camp post - and I had a tripod there so the video is quite a bit more steady - but the presentation in Paris was a little different.

Posted below are the videos from that presentation. I hope they are informative.

Part I

Designing Grid Systems Does Not Begin And End With 960 - Drupalcon Paris

Posted Mon, 2009-09-07 21:32 by matthew

Mark Boulton gave a great presentation at Drupalcon Paris on using grids for design covering his design process.

This series of videos covers the session. Sorry, no tripod - the videos were taken with my iPhone.

Hope you enjoy them.

Part I

Dries' Keynote Drupalcon Paris

Posted Thu, 2009-09-03 01:39 by matthew

Here are the shaky videos I took yesterday from Dries' "State of Drupal" keynote. Most are on YouTube - one ended up on BlipTV because it ended up being 17 seconds longer than the 10 minute mark.

I hope you enjoy them!

Keynote 1

Keynote 2

Keynote 3

Keynote 4

Keynote 5

Keynote 6

Keynote 7

Pre-Drupalcon T-2 days

Posted Mon, 2009-08-31 00:30 by matthew
The past two days have been very long ones. Saturday morning I got up at about 6 am getting my last plans in place for travel from Denver to Paris for Drupalcon. I arrived at the airport about an hour earlier than I really needed to, but due to checking a bag and making sure that the name on my passport was the same on my ticket, that extra time was most welcome. I flew to Charlotte NC and then from Charlotte onto Paris. Both flights were easy, although I wasn’t able to sleep on either. We arrived in Charles De Gaulle at about 6:00 am on Sunday local time.

Getting Ready for Drupalcon Paris

Posted Thu, 2009-07-30 23:01 by matthew

It seems every 6 months or so I'm writing a post similar to this one. A contingent of us from pingVision will be making the trek over the pond to attend the conference. We have, once again, rented a flat near a metro stop rather than getting hotel rooms.
There are several benefits to this kind of arrangement.

  • It is cheaper per person.
  • Given that we are away from the office for a week, it is helpful that we're able to use the flat as a surrogate office, at least a little bit.
  • We can purchase food from the local market rather than always eating at restaurants.

If you have a group, consider looking for an apartment or flat before finding a hotel. They are good value.

I generally use Vacation Rentals by Owners when looking for a place, but there are other services as well.

Beginners Can Use Drupal Too! A Paris Proposal

Posted Tue, 2009-06-30 20:02 by matthew

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.

Pregnancy.org -- A Casestudy at Drupalcon DC

Posted Sun, 2009-03-22 22:40 by matthew

Ben Jeavons, Mollee Bauer, and I put our heads together and talked about the Pregnancy.org project during a session at DrupalconDC. The slides and video from our presentation are below. You can see the case study on Drupal.org in the News and announcements section.

Usability Testing of Drupal - Drupalcon DC

Posted Mon, 2009-03-09 21:52 by matthew

This report was done on the latest usability testing from Baltimore this past week.  I don’t think that there were any real surprises, but it sure underlined how much work we have to do to make Drupal more intuitive and accessible for the average user.  These are my notes from that presentation.

“I won't release Drupal 7 until I crossed off at least 90% of the problems they identified” – Dries

The Case for Drupal in the Enterprise: DrupalconDC

Posted Sun, 2009-03-08 22:11 by matthew

Matt Westgate and Michael Caccavano explored Drupal as an Enterprise Application.  These are my notes from that presentation.

Defining Enterprise – How important is your site to your company?

  • If you are working on a flight navigation system in Drupal, it is different than what Sharon Ozbourne would need for Enterprise.
  • How important is your Website to you?  If you will be fired for the site going down, that is enterprise.
  • Revenue
  • Security
  • Traffic

In short, the definition depends on your business

People are scared of using Drupal for Enterprise.  Should they be?

  • YES!  It is a different paradigm than closed source
  • Who do you go to if there are issues?  Who wears the pager?

IS Drupal Enterprise?  First Matt says no. 

Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress - Drupalcon DC

Posted Sun, 2009-03-08 21:52 by matthew

The last session I attended at Drupalcon DC was a comparison between Drupal, Joomla!, and WordPress.  Christine and Hagen Graf helped explore usage, features, and usability of Drupal, Joomla! and Wordpress.  The questions that they sought to answer included":

  • Who is using it
  • what are they looking for
  • comparison
  • cultural differences
  • project competition and collaboration
  • community engagement

Christine and Hagen used Google Trend as the yard-stick of Drupal “volume”.  I personally question the over-all validity of using the number of searches made for the words Drupal, Joomla!, and Wordpress as an accurate metric of use/flexibility and so on.  However, it did reveal that Joomla! is queried 3.5 times on Google than Drupal and Wordpress 2.85 times more often.

They went on to compare Insiders and Outsiders. Creators and consumers.  Finally, they defined “Normal” users in a non-technical way.  Those are the people who would just pick up the software, install it, and use it.

Joomla! is designed to be easy to install and set up even if you’re not an advanced user.  Many web hosting services offer a single click interface to make the process even simpler.