Do It With Drupal

Do It With Drupal 2011 is Over -- But See the Session Videos on Drupalize.Me!

marybeth — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:21:31 +0000

Thanks to everyone who participated in Do It With Drupal 2011! We had a blast, and hope you did too.

Relive the magic of this event with session videos on Drupalize.Me. If you're not already a subscriber, sign up today and you'll be able to start watching the videos immediately. You'll also get access to videos from the previous Do It With Drupal events, as well as our entire library of awesome training videos (more than 200 hours worth!).

For more Do It With Drupal 2011 goodness, check out the wrap-up blog post and podcast on the Lullabot site.

To stay up to date on future Lullabot events and news, sign up for our Lullabot email list.

Get Connected at Do It With Drupal

marybeth — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:00:26 +0000

One big focus of Do It With Drupal is connecting people. It's about connecting with our expert speakers, awesome sponsors, and other attendees to answer your questions and better understand strategies for Drupal success. It's about connecting problems with solutions. It's about connecting people who are looking for work with those who are hiring. It's about connecting businesses with potential clients. It's about connecting people with the resources and information they need to create successful and powerful Drupal websites.

This is why we include breakfast and lunch as part of the conference. This is why we plan parties and social events in the evening. This is why we plan a smaller, more intimate Drupal conference. This is why we book a block of discounted rooms at the hotel for attendees - so they can stay close to the action, and participate as much as they can endure. Drupal! Rest! Repeat! We want to create a lot of casual interaction so that people can have fun, connect with others, and come away feeling energized with a wallet chock-full of business cards and scraps of paper with ideas, connections, leads, and resources.

Sounds exciting, right? Are you attending? Want to make the most of the conference for yourself? Here's some suggestions:

Let people know you're attending via Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. Not only will you get to brag, but you might encourage a friend or two to come - or find out that a friend is already coming.
Decide ahead of time which sessions you want to attend. Check out the schedule or download the iOS/Android app. Check this out: the iOS app will remind you 5 minutes before each session you've chosen. Pretty cool!
Looking for work? Looking for help? Bringing lots of business or contact cards - or just a notebook and a pen. You're going to want to make notes for later.

Our goal is to educate and excite people, watch the lightbulbs ignite over their heads, and set them on the path to success. Want to be part of it? Register today while seats are still available.

Download the Free Do It With Drupal App!

marybeth — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 21:00:12 +0000

If you're attending Do It With Drupal be sure to download the free conference app for your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, or for your Android!

With the Do It With Drupal app, you'll have the list of sessions, speakers, map and more at your fingertips. You can also choose which sessions to attend to build your own schedule, complete with automated reminders about where to go and when.

Oh, and if you haven't registered yet, be sure to do so soon!

This Week: Our Apress Book-A-Day Giveaway

marybeth — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 15:28:46 +0000

Our friends at Apress -- New York-based publisher of high-quality technology books -- have generously donated 5 great Drupal books that we're going to give away to celebrate a high-quality technology conference that's going to be in New York in less than three weeks...you guessed it: Do It With Drupal!

Every day this week the @diwd Twitter account will post a message that you can retweet in order to be eligible for that day's book. One (1) winner will be selected at random from all the retweets each day. Be sure to follow @diwd, and we'll direct message winners with information on how to receive their book.

Check out the awesome books that are up for grabs:

Monday: The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7

Tuesday: Pro Drupal 7 Development

Wednesday: Pro Drupal 7 for Windows Developers

Thursday: Beginning Drupal 7

Friday: Foundation Drupal 7

All retweets as of 11:59pm Eastern Time will be eligible for that day's book drawing. Winners will be notified after all of this week's giveaways have ended.

Keep your learning going with Do It With Drupal and Apress. We hope to see you in New York on October 12-14. If you haven't registered for Do It With Drupal yet, be sure to reserve your seat today!

Sponsor Spotlight: Rackspace

marybeth — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 20:14:37 +0000

We're thrilled to announce that Rackspace Hosting is partnering with us as the lead Manhattan level sponsor for Do It With Drupal! Rackspace is a global leader in hosting and cloud computing, providing solutions to more than 152,000 customers around the world, including clients like NASA, Blackberry, and Ironman. The company also proudly offers Fanatical Support® -- their preeminent customer service and technical expertise (they're so serious about their support, in fact, they've trademarked it!). The folks at Rackspace are also educators, providing their CloudU program and webinar series to help people learn about topics like the economics of cloud computing and running a business on the cloud. The "Rackers" work hard, but they play hard, too (that's another thing we like about them) -- check out their "Party Rock" vid on their blog.

Sponsor Spotlight: NeoSpire

marybeth — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:51:52 +0000

We’re excited to announce that NeoSpire is partnering with us as a Queens level sponsor for Do it with Drupal! NeoSpire’s sharp focus on security, performance, and reliability keeps them working with some of the biggest names in business, entertainment, and the nonprofit sphere, including the Dallas Cowboys, the United Way, and OvationTix. NeoSpire folks are also involved in the Drupal community, speaking at and sponsoring numerous Drupal events during the year.

Sponsor Spotlight: Acquia

marybeth — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 17:54:24 +0000

We're very happy to announce that Acquia is partnering with us as a Queens level sponsor for Do It With Drupal! If you’re even remotely knowledgable about Drupal, you’ve heard of Acquia -- one of the biggest names in the community. And not only are they one of the biggest and most-well-known Drupal companies, they also work with some of the biggest names in the business, education, entertainment, non-profit, and technology fields. Adding to their library of resources for Drupal users, Acquia recently partnered with Lullabot to offer access to Drupalize.Me videos to Acquia Network members. Oh, and Acquia was founded by this guy named Dries...you may have heard of him. ;-)

Do It With Drupal Attendees Get Chance to Win 1 of 3 Komodo IDE 6 Licenses!

marybeth — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:50:07 +0000

We're excited to announce that one of our sponsors, ActiveState, has generously offered to give away three free Komodo IDE 6 licenses ($295 US value each) at the Do It With Drupal conference! New Komodo IDE features include multi-language Rx, database explorer, a smarter toolbox, and more. Everyone who attends Do It With Drupal is automatically entered, and three lucky attendees will go home with a free license. Wanna get in on the giveaway? Register today!

Rackspace

jponch — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 14:22:56 +0000

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Rackspace® Hosting is the service leader in cloud computing, and a founder of OpenStack™, an open source cloud platform. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support® to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing. Rackspace has been recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company and was featured on Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. The company was also positioned in the Leaders Quadrant by Gartner Inc. in the “2010 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting.” For more information, visit www.rackspace.com.

Learn to Build Meetup.com at Do It With Drupal!

marybeth — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 20:12:23 +0000

One of the fun fantasy site projects we'll be showcasing at Do It With Drupal this year is a clone of Meetup.com in Drupal. Karen Stevenson created the fantasy site, called "Groupal", and it's an exercise in creating groups using the shiny new Organic Groups module for D7.

There were challenges a-plenty to get this all working in a mashup that incorporates Organic Groups with events, locations, rsvps, photo galleries, and activity streams, all stitched together with Panels and Views. For example, one challenge was finding a way for each group to take over the site title and site navigation so a click on 'Home' takes you to the group home page rather than the site home page, and generally making sure the group context is maintained as the user moves around the group 'site'. Karen figured it all out, and will be sharing her knowledge with you -- so you can learn from her pain!

In the process of building this out, Karen had to analyze which of several alternative modules to use for location, signup, activity stream, photo gallery and other functionality. She will discuss why she picked the modules she did, and will note others that might work as well or better in other situations. She'll also point you to issues and patches that may be needed (many of the modules we use are still on the bleeding edge of Drupal 7) so you can help fix and polish the component modules to ensure they are production-ready.

To hear more and see the fantasy site in action, join us in the Meetup.com Fantasy Site session at Do It With Drupal.

If you're not yet registered for Do it with Drupal 2011, register now while seats are still available!

Win Emma Jane Hogbin's New Book Before You Can Buy It!

marybeth — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:32:26 +0000

UPDATE: Congrats to our winners: @jarodsmith, @modsunraveled, @mrytin, @ropsuh and @stephane_coue! Thanks for tweeting about Do It With Drupal, and enjoy your free book!

We got the inside scoop, and we're sharing it with you! Emma Jane Hogbin's new book, Drupal User's Guide: Building and Administering a Successful Drupal-Powered Web Site, will be available to buy ($39.99 retail value) later this month, but we're giving away 5 copies free!

As people who love to teach and train folks about Drupal, we're really excited about Emma Jane's book. And since Do It With Drupal is all about sharing tips and techniques for building awesome websites, we thought it would be fun to give some lucky Tweeps a jump start on their learning.

How to win!:

For a chance to win a free copy of Drupal User's Guide: Building and Administering a Successful Drupal-Powered Web Site, simply tweet about which DIWD session you'd most like to attend (chosen from the DIWD schedule), using the following format:

"The @diwd session I'd most like to attend is ____________"

Simply fill in the blank with a link to the session of your choice. For example, "The @diwd session I'd most like to attend is http://2011.doitwithdrupal.com/2011/sessions/why-open-source-matters." (obviously you'll want to use Twitter's URL shortening)

Five (5) winners will be selected at random from all the tweets that use the format listed above. Be sure to follow @diwd, and we'll direct message winners with information on how to receive their book.

The contest starts today and ends tonight, Friday, September 16, 2011, at 11:59 PM Eastern Time. All tweets must be tweeted before Friday, September 16, 2011 at 11:59 PM Eastern Time to qualify.

Good luck, and let the tweeting begin!

A little about the book:

The open source content management system Drupal offers amazing flexibility, sophistication, and power. The catch? Many first-time users find it difficult to get started, and most Drupal books don’t help with the initial stages. Drupal™ User’s Guide is different: easy to use, fun to read, practical, and complete!

Long-time Drupal site developer Emma Jane Hogbin guides you through every step of building sites with Drupal, from installation and site planning through launching your first site. Drawing on her experience teaching thousands of beginners, she covers both Drupal and Web design tasks, showing exactly how they fit together.

Drupal™ User’s Guide shows how to use Drupal 7’s newest improvements to build more modern, manageable sites for any business or organization. Hogbin covers crucial topics other Drupal books ignore, including search engine optimization and accessibility.

Add some DIWD bling to your site!

jponch — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:25:07 +0000

Are you coming to or even speaking at Do It With Drupal 2011? Wish you were coming to Do It With Drupal and want to let others know about it? Tell the world!

We've created a bunch of badges and banners to spruce up your website. To download, right-click (or Apple-click) on an image, then select "Save image..." (or similar) from the popup menu. Or, we've also provided a handy-dandy zipped file containing ALL of them. Have fun!

728x90

468x60

240x240

200x200

160x300

180x60

160x60

120x60

Want to collect them all?

Download the zipped version.

Speaker Interview: Greg Dunlap (heyrocker)

jponch — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 14:04:54 +0000

We've got some amazing Drupal experts slated to speak at Do It With Drupal in New York City, so we're continuing to sit down with them and ask them a few questions to help everyone get to know them a little better. Recently I (Jared Ponchot) got the chance to ask Greg Dunlap (heyrocker) a few questions.

Jared Ponchot: How does one become the lead of a "core initiative" in Drupal and how has that gone for you thus far?

Greg Dunlap: I don't really know how it happened. I have been blogging, speaking, and coding around the topics of configuration management and content staging since I started in Drupal 4.5 years ago. However, a lot of my ideas seemed kind of stalled as modules like Features gathered steam. At DrupalCon Chicago I gave a core conversation talk on what I felt was wrong with our approaches to this problem, and it caused a very lively discussion to happen. Afterwards I was talking to Dries and I said that I would love to lead his initiative for configuration management in Drupal 8, and after I got back he asked me to do it. So I guess the requirements to become an initiative lead are having a big mouth, but lacking the common sense to know when to shut it.

So far it has gone pretty well--we had a very successful code sprint in June that inspired some productive discussions, and we are about to embark on the next phase of coding. We now have UUID support in core thanks to the efforts of Dick Olsson and Dave Hall, which is a key piece of the puzzle for content staging. Personally it has been really challenging. This is not the kind of role I'm used to playing and it has taken (and will continue to take) some time to figure out how best to do things.

Jared Ponchot: Are there any example Drupal sites you can point us to that are servicing mobile counterparts?

Greg Dunlap: One of the best examples is called BeerCloud. It is an iPhone and Android app for the website Great Brewers, which is a social networking site for beer brewing enthusiasts around the world. The site is built on Drupal and serves their mobile content through the Services module. The app is really amazing, it does everything you would want a mobile app to do. You can find brewers near you, add beers to your favorites list, you can even scan the barcode on a bottle and find the pub nearest to you that serves it.

Here in Sweden, IKEA is also providing an iPhone app to interact with their Drupal-based social site, LivetHemma. This is currently only available in Sweden but will be expanding to Austria and Norway by the end of the month.

Jared Ponchot: What does it mean to call Drupal a "mobile application platform"?

Greg Dunlap: "Platform" is a word that is starting to be used more and more in the Drupal community to represent the way that Drupal straddles the traditional roles of pure framework and pure product. Obviously it is a strong and robust content management platform, but with the use of a couple additional modules it can also make that content accessible via APIs that mobile applications can read and use. This is great for content publishers, because it means that simply by publishing data to their website, they are also making it available to mobile applications or potentially even other desktop applications or web applications. This ability to bridge use cases with a single publishing system is really powerful and compelling.

Jared Ponchot: Which modules come into play in making Drupal a platform for mobile projects?

Greg Dunlap: In most cases the Services module will provide the mechanism through which your mobile apps will communicate with Drupal. Services allows you to specify a URL your API is accessible from, and provides functionality to interact with typical Drupal objects like nodes, users and taxonomy. It also provides the ability for developers to create their own functionality through a simple API of its own. Perhaps most importantly, it provides the ability for external applications to use Drupal's own login and permissions mechanism to control access, so you don't have to recreate the wheel. Typically our projects will use some of the functionality provided by Services combined with some custom code of our own for functionality specific to our use case.

For simpler apps, where users will not be submitting data or authentication is not needed, we will often use the Views Data Source module, which provides the ability to return results from the Views module as XML or JSON. It is easy to setup and allows us to simply leverage the Views we've already built for the site anyway.

Jared Ponchot: What mobile development suites do you recommend when working with Drupal? Do you suggest that developers work in a mobile framework like Titanium, or write native applications?

Greg Dunlap: I think it really depends on your situation and skill sets. For the demo I will show at Do It With Drupal we used Titanium, but this was mainly because one of my co-workers BJ Wilson had experience with it and so it was the easiest way to go. If you have internal experience with Objective C, then maybe writing a native iPhone app is the way to go. For the kinds of applications that would interact with Drupal, I'm not convinced that any of these tools have a significant advantage over another.

Jared Ponchot: What attracted you to do the type of work you are doing?

Greg Dunlap: I've been fascinated with the potential of sharing data online since I got my first shell account in 1993, and so it's no surprise that I have become really interest in open data. Mobile web APIs are just another extension of that. My interest in Drupal stems from its ability to democratize website creation. In this day and age, a fully functional and interactive website is not just a luxury, it's a necessity. Drupal allows smaller publishers with normal budgets to bring up sites on par with the big guns. I think this is really important and it is what initially drew me to contribute.

Jared Ponchot: Where do you see the technology and tools you use in 5 to 10 years? Will the tools/platform evolve quickly enough to keep pace with other technologies or will something new spring up?

Greg Dunlap: We in the Drupal community will need to really be on the ball to keep Drupal at the cutting edge of technology. We currently run on three-year release cycles, which is an eternity in the modern age. I have no idea where the tools will be even five years from now. I mean, five years ago the iPhone didn't exist. It is crazy to think about that now! I do know that we in the Drupal community will have to figure out a way to deliver a quality product while still keeping pace with new technology and trends. That is going to be a real challenge going forward.

Jared Ponchot: What do you do when you're not working on Drupal?

Greg Dunlap: I am an obsessive pinball enthusiast, and I spend a lot of time going to local pinball competitions and parties here in Stockholm. We have an amazing pinball community here with an obscene number of talented players, including one former world champion. I also go to a lot of punk and indie rock shows, especially while traveling. It is really fun to be in a new city and go see a band you like in new surroundings.

Speaker Interview: Ryan Szrama

marybeth — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 17:51:15 +0000

In the latest Lullabot podcast, Jeff Robbins interviews DIWD 2011 speaker Ryan Szrama. Ryan is the VP of Community Development at Commerce Guys, and discusses Drupal Commerce -- what's included in core and what's not, the complications of tax and shipping calculations -- as well as the importance of flossing. Check out this entertaining interview, and if you want to hear more about Drupal Commerce from Ryan, be sure to sign up for the Do it with Drupal conference today! At Do it with Drupal, Ryan will be showing, step-by-step, how to build something identical to the Apple store using Drupal & Drupal Commerce.

Learn to Build Your Own Netflix at DIWD 2011!

jponch — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 18:12:13 +0000

Many people (myself included) began to REALLY learn to do cool things with Drupal through the "Fantasy Site" sessions at Do it with Drupal. In year's past we've built (meaning cloned with Drupal) sites like Basecamp, Etsy, Twitter and even Youtube with Drupal in these fantasy site sessions. Well, this year you can come learn how to build your own Netflix™ with Drupal!

If you've not yet heard of Videola, it's an open source distribution of Drupal (built with Lullabot love) for powering IPTV websites. Come join Blake Hall in the Petflix™ fantasy site session at DIWD 2011 and learn how you can use Videola to make money on your cat videos!

Petflix™ has been built as a completely unique and revolutionary platform, creating a synergistic monetization platform for pet lovers everywhere. Okay, but in all seriousness, it could be used to make money from stupid cat videos. Blake will give you a quick look at the configuration Videola provides out of the box. He'll then show how you can tweak the membership product settings, and how you can do more customization to suit your particular use case. By the end of the session you'll have an idea of how some of building blocks provided by Drupal and Videola can be stitched together to suit your needs, however strange they may be. Don't miss it!

If you're not yet registered for Do it with Drupal 2011, register now while seats are still available!