Blogs

DrupalCamp Dallas has launched their website.

This is going to be an awesome opportunity to find out more about drupal.  You don't have to be a drupal pro to come.  In fact, you should come even if you are trying to figure out if drupal is right for you.   It is going to be a two day barcamp which means it is about whatever you want to talk about.  There will most likely be beginner and advanced tracks so no matter what your skill level is, there will be a place for you.

When I started doing web development in the mid 90s, I did most of my development in Notepad.  I just wanted something that did simple text editing and nothing more.  What I didn't know was what more was possible.  Since then I've bounced around between a bunch of different IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) which are essentially Notepad on steroids. 

Open Source is going beyond just software and web development.  There are some philosophies behind it that deal with collaboration and community, and even some paradigm shifts on how we work.  I'm not sure if everyone would group all of this together, but there are commonalities between social media, open source, agile development (e.g., SCRUM), Barcamps, and now "co-working" that are changing not just the way websites and software is development, but even how we work. 

We are helping organize the upcoming DrupalCamp Dallas coming up in Dallas in July.  Location TBD and as far as we know this is the first ever DrupalCamp in the state of Texas!

Some of the topics people are saying they want to hear about so far include...

• Semantic Web

• Agile vs. Waterfall

• Theme Development

• Development Processes

• JQuery

• Module Selection

• Understanding Organic Groups

I have been a project manager on website and software projects for much of my career over the past 12 years, but only last year became aware of "agile" methodologies.  Success of companies such as Google have helped make project management using more flexible agile methods more popular, especially with open source software and web development.

There are always lots of buzzwords floating around the internet these days.  Web 2.0, Social Networking, AJAX, Semantic Web...

On our recent project MyFaith.com, we made extensive use of the YouTube API to allow users to  upload videos from MyFaith into their individual YouTube accounts and also add videos to MyFaith from their existing YouTube videos.  Why re-invent the wheel when YouTube already provides free video hosting and has over 100 million monthly users? 

What is in a node?  Everything!

What is the basic structure of a blog post?  There is a title and a body.
What is the basic structure of a comment? There is a title and a body.
What is the basic structure of a forum post? There is a title and a body.
What is the basic structure of a webpage? There is a title and a body.

Drupalcon Rocked!  Randall and I talked with our friends at LevelTen about some of the highlights from Drupalcon 2009 on this podcast.  Listen and find out the latest Drupal has to offer including OpenCalais, Solr, and other highlights from the conference.

I've worked with many different CMS systems for the web.  I spent a lot of time in Dotnenuke and have worked with Typo3, Joomla, Mambo, Wordpress and many others.  I like to descibe them as 80% solutions.  Meaning it is really easy to make an "80%" great site in a very short amount of time.  The problem comes when you try to do something really amazing.  It is incredibly hard if not impossible.