Drupal

This is my presentation for the event: "Building with Open Source: For Developers", and was presented today for the Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society Software Freedom Day events. Comments and questions are welcome. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. It is available in the OpenOffice format (naturally) and as a pdf. I apologize for not being able to finish the presentation on time. One hour is just too little to get me going on about Drupal.

Well that was certainly one of my greatest experiences ever! To all the 29+ organisers, and the Drupal Association, a big hefty CONGRATULATIONS and job well done on hosting a perfect conference. I mean, I expected it to be a good conference, but damnnn, it was far greater than my expectations. I think it was rumoured that this was one of the biggest and most successful Drupalcons ever. Certainly the biggest.

I am certainly looking forward to Drupalcon Paris, although I am not sure if that is financially possible as yet. Time will tell.

Wednesday March 4th - Day 1 of Drupalcon and I already feel like I have been here a week! That's because I attended seven (7) full sessions back to back. There was so much information to absorb, so many great people to meet and so much needs being satisfied. Dries' keynote speech was invigorating as was expected. He touched on showing pictures of one of the very first Drupalcons ever with an average turnout of about 30 people. Today, it's a whopping 1400+!! Three meetings rooms were joined together, 3 big white screens and over one thousand people jam packed into the room.

This semester, Drupalcon will be held in Washington DC. In case you don't know or you live under a rock, Drupalcon is THE event for Drupal developers. Right now, its sold out with 1400+ Drupal enthusiasts converging under one roof.

This is my first ever Drupalcon (and certainly will not be my last ever!). I am so anxious to meet fellow Drupal developers and finally put a name to their Drupal ID or IRC nick. It's so weird...you collaborate with these guys/girls all the time and yet I have never met them.

The Trinidad Guardian, one of 3 popular newspapers in Trinidad, re-launched their website on New Years Day 2009 using Drupal. The site has a simplistic design done by their in-house graphics designer Ms. Maxie Navarro. The Drupal developer behind it, Shivan Jaikaran, would like to share his techniques as a tech case study.

Well it has certainly been a while. My site has been neglected for far too long. It was running Drupal 5.9 (!!) for about a year now. So tonight I finally upgraded to Drupal 6 and installed some new spam fighting techniques and well as gave it a new theme.

The entire process took me about 2 hours. I made sure and took cautionary steps such as backing up my site in case anything should go wrong.