Freeflow Digital

Contract Web Producer

admin — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 08:48:51 +0000

Freeflow Digital is seeking a contract Web Producer. Freeflow Digital is a registered B Corp dedicated to helping non-profits take control of their data, integrate their systems and improve information access without compromising their budgets. We founded Freeflow on the premise that enterprise solutions for nonprofits don't have to break the bank and that open source and vendor solutions can work together. If you feel the same we would love to meet with you.

We feel that skills mastered are more important than years worked, but we expect most candidates who are a good fit will have been working with CSS and JQuery for 2+ years and have been actively working on CMS theme development for at least a year. Experience with major Open Source CMS them development is required.

About the position

Our Web Producers are responsible for Drupal theming and Drupal site and module configuration. Other responsibilities include participating in researching optimal solutions for Drupal implementations, as well as day-to-day support of client issues using Firebug, image production, CSS and JQuery skills. Your job will be to understand the simplest solution and promptly deliver it. Key ingredients for success in this position include punctuality, careful tracking of work and hours, and regular communication with the Freeflow team.

Important skills:

CSS mastery
CMS Theming (position involves Drupal, but experience with other systems like Wordpress or Joomla is fine)
Photoshop or Fireworks skills
Excellent Javascript/JQuery skills
Comfortable working in a shared development environment (either locally or on a remote virtualmachine)
Firebug

Nice to have skills:

JQuery UI
Experience building Drupal sites using ""Context", "Views", and/or "Features"
Familiarity with version control systems such as Git or SVN
Familiarity with DIA, Convio, Sphere, or other nonprofit software vendors

We prefer that you be in Eugene, Portland or Austin, but we're happy to consider exceptional candidates from other locations. Apply for this position

Drupal Developer

admin — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 16:55:55 +0000

Freeflow Digital is seeking a Drupal Developer. Freeflow Digital is a certified B Corp dedicated to helping non-profits take control of their data, integrate their systems and improve access to information. We founded Freeflow on the premise that enterprise solutions for non-profits don't have to break the bank and that open source and vendor solutions can work together. If you feel the same we would love to meet with you.

We feel that skills mastered are more important than years worked, but we expect that most candidates who are a good fit will have been working with Drupal for 2+ years and will have been actively developing modules on Drupal for at least a year.

About the position

Our Drupal Developers are responsible for module/feature development in Drupal, technical implementation of client sites, R&D of existing solutions and customizations of existing solutions where it best fits the client's need. Other responsibilities are participating in original product development and maintenance and support for client sites.

Important skills:

Familiar with version control systems such as Git or SVN
Comfortable working in a shared development environment (either locally or on a remote virtual machine)
Understand and follow Drupal development best practices
SQL experience - good understanding of functional SQL - CRUD operations, JOINS, etc
Experience with Web Service technologies
Familiar with Drupal theming, CSS, Javascript/DOM
Able to create a Drupal module from scratch with Administrative options
Understanding of CRM concepts and data structures
Comfortable with Linux - particularly RedHat/CentOS

Nice to have skills:

Ruby/Python experience
Drupal "Features"
Drupal "Context"
Apache SOLR
Memory caching - particularly memcache
Involvement to the Drupal community
Ubercart

We prefer that you be in Eugene, Portland or Austin, but we're happy to consider exceptional candidates from other locations. Apply for this position

DrupalCon 2010 -- Plenty of Innovation for Nonprofits

rowan — Sat, 01 May 2010 02:32:57 +0000

DrupalCon 2010 -- plenty of innovation for nonprofits

By Rowan Price May 01, 2010

Drupal is an important tool for our clients, so Freeflow sent a delegation to San Francisco in April to DrupalCon 2010, the annual Drupal conference. My colleague Chris Clark and I were the lucky delegates.

If the conference had one overriding theme, it was definitely innovation -- lots of smart people are pushing Drupal in multiple new and useful directions. Without a doubt, nonprofits will be able take advantage of these initiatives to get more bang for their buck out of their technology investments. These are few areas of Drupal innovation that stood out:

1. Mobile: Using Drupal as a Framework For Generating Mobile sites, and iPhone/Android Apps. The DrupalCon conference site itself is one of the most useful mobile sites I've used recently -- built on Drupal of course (visit it with your mobile web browser to try it out). It’s no secret that mobile usage is skyrocketing (it’s even projected to surpass "fixed" internet). Supplying mobile users with your organization's content, and tools, might become a strategic priority. There were two excellent sessions on Drupal and mobile: Developing Apps for iPhone/iPad/Android using Drupal as Base System, and iPhone, Drupal, and Web Services.

2. Cloud Hosting: Harnessing Drupal to the Cloud. DrupalCon made it clear that in the past year, Drupal's mad scientists, including people at Acquia, Phase II Technologies, and Chapter Three, have been figuring out many ways to endow Drupal websites and services with the benefits of cloud-based hosting -- scalability, affordability, and flexibility. Chapter 3's Josh Koenig presented a great overview entitled, A Match Made in the Cloud – How to Best Take Advantage of Cloud Technologies with Drupal Sites, while Acquia's Barry Jaspan presented an excellent session dealing with the specifics of hosting Drupal on Amazon.

3. Performance: High Speed, Scalable Websites. Speaking of cloud hosting, one of the most innovative initiatives in the Drupal community is the Pantheon Mercury project. Pantheon Mercury is a complete "LAMP" stack whose every component, from Linux, to Apache, to PHP, and of course, Drupal, is optimized for blazing fast speed and scalability. It uses Four Kitchens' Pressflow Drupal to help optimize for scalability and speed. As I mentioned earlier this year, when I gave the Pantheon AMI a test drive on my Amazon eC2 account, it is indeed ridiculously fast. Still looking forward to Chapter Three's public release of Panthon as a service, or as Josh aptly put it in his session, 'Drupal as a Service."

4. Search: Faster and More Powerful Site Search For Drupal Websites. Drupal's native site search is a good out of the box product, but Apache Solr takes search to the next level. Apache Solr is an open source, Java-based, "full text" search application that is fully integrable with Drupal. Apache Solr can be customized to search all kinds of content that exists in a Drupal database, from user profiles, to blog posts, to comments, to basic pages, to attachments -- all from a single search field. It's search results are also highly customizable and sortable. Best of all, it's extremely fast, even when searching huge Drupal websites (try it yourself on whitehouse.gov).

That's probably why the Pantheon project incorporates Apache Solr into its custom LAMP stack. Apache Solr also comes with Acquia's hosting and support services, and with Open Publish, an impressive installation of Drupal for newspapers. Sessions like Apache Solr Search Mastery, and an interesting session demonstratinghow to use Apache Solr to help build a job search site, made it clear that the product has established its niche in the Drupal ecosystem.

5. Administration: Creating, Managing and Updating Lots of Drupal Sites -- From a Single User Interface. One of the most innovative Drupal-as-an-Application projects is Aegir, a customization of Drupal that allows an organization to publish and manage many different kinds of Drupal sites (main site, blog sites, campaign sites, etc), from a single interface. As Aegir's founder demonstrated in his session, Aegir Hosting System - one Drupal to rule them all (Yes -- that is a Tolkien reference!), Aegir could be a very useful tool for larger organizations, such as Universities or large charities, who need program or campaign specific mini-sites, in addition their main website.

No matter what size your organization, Aegir should be help maintain and upgrade your website(s) without writing code or doing shell scripting. This alone could be a big cost-saver for nonprofits. The project looks as though it needs a bit more time to mature, but we're following its progress closely here at Freeflow.

Quite a list -- was anything missing, for nonprofit organizations? It would have been nice to see a session or two focused on integrating Drupal with nonprofit CRMs -- Donor, Volunteer, and Member Management systems. We think for-profit businesses can also benefit from CRM integration with Drupal, so we'll have to work on that for DrupalCon 2011. In the meantime, there is plenty we can take advantage of now to help nonprofits communicate more effectively -- and easily -- with their supporters.

As Tim O'Reilly noted in his DrupalCon keynote (second video), an Open Source projects must meet the needs of not just today's market but tomorrow's as well. The innovation on display at DrupalCon 2010 indicates that Drupal is poised to meet the needs of the real-time, mobile, cloud-app future that many anticipate for the Internet.

For more details on DrupalCon 2010 San Francisco, read Drupal founder's Dries' wrap up post.

Tags:

drupal 7

drupalcon

solr

could hosting

enterprise deployment

application development

scalability

mobile software

Freeflow Digital Welcomes Newest Member, Aaron Dietrich

rowan — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 07:38:19 +0000

freeflow welcomes newest member, Aaron Dietrich

By Rowan Price April 13, 2010

Please join us in celebrating the newest addition to Freeflow Digital, nonprofit technology veteran Aaron Dietrich.

We're excited to have Aaron complement our team as a principal member. Aaron brings broad experience as an engineer, from Facebook applications, to CRM implementation, to custom AJAX development. In addition to Aaron's engineering experience, and his experience as a software project manager at Blackbaud, Aaron has experience running his own online community, www.gratefulweb.com, a music and social networking website with a dedicated membership and a long history. Aaron's experience as a community manager will be of great value to clients looking for strategic insight on how to build online communities of their own, to help engage membership and attract new interest in their cause.

Plus -- Aaron is a known quantity. Each of us worked with Aaron at previous companies, including CTSG, Kintera and Blackbaud, so we know exactly how lucky we are to have him on our team. He's an all around great guy and our clients like him already. You can read more about Aaron here. In the meantime, welcome aboard, Aaron!

P.S. Aaron will be joining founding principal Peter Davis at NTEN Atlanta -- keep your eyes out for them both.

Tags:

announcements

kintera

blackbaud

ajax

facebook development

friends asking friends

Free Flow Data is now freeflow digital

rowan — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 07:13:00 +0000

Free Flow Data is now freeflow digital (but we still love data!)

By Rowan Price April 05, 2010

Free Flow Data, we hardly knew ye. Free Flow Data is now Freeflow Digital -- and on we've launched our new site on Drupal 7..

Backstory: my colleague Peter Davis founded this firm four years ago because he saw a problem that needed a solution; he saw that organizations were spending far too much time and money managing databases, often multiple databases, without maximizing the value of the information contained within them. Free Flow Data was born. Four years later, newly renamed Freeflow Digital still tackles data needs for nonprofits and government organizations. But the solutions we offer extend far beyond the traditional data geek undertakings -- data cleaning, synchronization, and reporting.

To truly let organizations capitalize on their data, from membership info, to donation histories, to volunteer activities, we have focused on designing not just data architectures, but tools and user interfaces -- apps, websites and online applications. As a result Freeflow is now just as likely to do work with Drupal or Ruby on Rails, as with MySQL or SQL Server. As the firm has grown from 1 to 5 principals, and from 2 to 25 clients, Drupal, along with Ruby on Rails, has become an integral building block of the solutions we design for clients. As a technology consulting firm, we are vendor neutral, but we are happily biased when it comes to CMS software: Drupal is our tool of choice.

Which brings us to the fun part: as long as we're getting a new name, we said to ourselves, why not rebuild our website on a brand new version of Drupal -- Drupal 7? As it turns out, the mature release of Drupal 7 is not available yet, so we opted to go with Drupal 7 Alpha -- "Alpha" can be roughly translated as "Doesn't quite work yet." But somehow we got it to work, and we have a new website. And though data services are still close to our hearts, we also have a new name: "Freeflow Digital".

Tags:

blog

drupal 7

branding