Day 2 of 2011 Sacramento Drupal Camp
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Nate Haug of Lullabot
Day 2 of the Sacramento Drupal Camp started of with a keynote presentation from Nate Haug (quicksketch) of Lullabot. He explained that the rapid growth of Drupal and its community is requiring changes in the way Drupal contributors, developers, and maintainers work together to continue to handle its growth. There are 400,000 installs currently, whereas only 2 years ago there were only 170,000. The way the community is growing it seems they we could use more people helping with bug reports and documentation requests, as well as lower-level translators to speak (as Jennifer Lea Lampton says) “human” to share the benefits of Drupal to the masses. I think the key issue at hand is how larger groups can be organized into smaller groups. Maybe after I get a handle on this Drupal stuff, I can start a Drupal users group in the Concord area.
Adam Kalsey of Tropo
After Nate’s keynote presentation I attended Adam Kalsey’s presentation on VoIP for Drupal. Adam works for Tropo, a VoIP service provider. Tropo is a powerful yet simple API that adds Voice, SMS, Twitter, and IM support to Drupal. Features include all the power you’d expect from an open source PBX system and more, including speech recognition, site integration, phone tree, call forwarding, text messaging, and more. Seems really cool and customizable. I am very interested in playing with this because I see a lot of value in web sites that have SMS and traditional telephone integration. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet, believes that voice-enabled applications is the next big wave of change for the Internet (can’t remember the quote Adam provided ~ Adam???).
Next, I attended the Drupal Sites without Custom Code by Charles Russell and Ron McClure. They demo’d a live site they built for the Sacramento Professional Network, a no-fee career resource center and job search networking group for business and technical professionals in the Sacramento area. They essentially had no budget and required a site that needed to be managed by a variety of volunteers that had a somewhat high turnover rate. In some way it is more difficult to develop site functionality without custom coding (you end up going through and testing module after module after module and still run into limitations), but the primary benefit is that the upgrade path and continued functionality is easier to deal with. Seems to me that any way you go, if you want to implement a Drupal site, you need to put in your time one way or another.
Growing a Drupal Shop with Susan Rust of Drupal Anywhere covered the different facets of growing a business from the perspective of a Drupal developer. Susan, a Drupal strategy consultant, is very personable and savvy on the business side of what it takes to run a successful business. Her talk covered a lot of pragmatic business basics, including outsourcing (outsource your lower value mundane tasks), insulating your personal finances through incorporation, the challenges in partnerships, the importance of business insurance with e-commerce sites, developing relationships, and knowing & referring clients to your vertical & horizontal markets, and more. Susan’s information is no-nonsense, pragmatic, and to the point. As Drupal geekoids, it’s easy to overlook the fundamentals of sound business practices are her talk addressed these essential fundamentals as well as touching on other creative strategies for growing your own shop.
Lastly, I attended Streamline Your Workflow with FillPDF, with Kevin Kaland of Wiz One Solutions. I walked into this session a few minutes late, so I felt a little behind from the beginning. What I did learn is the FillPDF + pdftk modules are responsible for populating a PDF document with the data fields entered into a web form. FillPDF works either with pdftk or with a service available with Wiz One Solutions. Use this promo code for 20% off ~ DCSA1120.
All in all, Saturday was full of great information but a little bit of a disappointment for me because the learning curve again appeared steeper than what Friday’s session may have led me to believe. Drupal has much promise for use in future projects, but as for me, I have been debating which way to go between Drupal 6 & 7. Drupal 7 has gained the ability for swappable back-ends and a lot better user interface but many of the modules that are available and mature in Drupal 6 are either not released or not ready for live production in Drupal 7. I think this question may be the topic of another article…
