When: 19:00 for 19:30 Wed 9 Aug 2006
Location: Boxing Club, Old Limehouse Town Hall, 646 Commercial Rd, Limeouse, E14 7HA (Directions and map at http://www.bclub.org.uk/about)
London's Development workshops will take place on the 2nd Wed of every month. We will be looking under the hood and poking around what makes Drupal work.
The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) that has been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to www.PacktPub.com.
The new TWiT.tv has finally launched. Graphics by Arktyp and built by Lullabot, the new site is certainly a showcase that Drupal *can* be used to make beautiful sites. The site only uses a handful of modules, with a majority of it being just theming, CCK (for podcasts), and Views (for the episode guide).
Drupal has been criticized a lot for being "hard to install". As far back as the beginning of 2004, Adrian Rossouw began to work on the installer system (see Install system - requirements and Drupal install system) and after a lot of work by the fine CivicSpaceLabs folks (Kieran Lal, Jeremy Andrews, Nedjo Rogers, Angie Byron and others), Karoly Negyesi took over the patch this June. A month of further development (with quite some help from Jeff Eaton and, again, lots others), saw Steven Wittens taking the torch on July 12 and finally, on July 13, the biggest and most often requested improvement to Drupal core got committed!
The popular IBM developerWorks site has started a new series entitled "Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site". After reviewing numerous open source packages such as Typo3, Mambo, and the ever-hyped Ruby on Rails, they "decided to use Drupal", remarking that it "provided the right combination of framework and flexibility . . . to get the job done". They also echo many of our user's concerns about potential complexity: "There is still an apparent learning curve to the "Drupal Way" of creating sites, but significantly less compared with other CMSs.
I am working on convincing "managament" of a large non-profit organization to use Drupal for their next project. They are very open - just need the benefits explained. I need to make a presentation on why Open Source vs an ASP or (gulp) client-server install will better suit their youth-oriented Web 2.0 web project (multimedia, social networking etc). While the benefits seem obvious to me, I am having trouble articulating it and would love to know if any of you have any Powerpoints or memos you'd be willing to share. I'd be more than happy to give what I create back to the community.
