Guest Post

Conference, Content Management Systems, Continuing Education, Guest Post, Open Source
Drupal Day (Guest Blogger, Deb Bergeron)
February 7th, 2008 | Permalink | 4 Comments
On a cool Sunday morning on January 27, several folks lined up next to the elevators in the Science Museum well before 10am, looking through the locked gate to see if anyone inside the museum noticed the line beginning to form. I thought the museum would be open and I could get a cup of coffee. No such luck. Drupal Day was to begin at 10am.

At 9:45am the gate opened and we were escorted to the 2nd floor into a room that can best be described as a work in progress. It’s really a lab for kids to work on projects, with several Mac workstations. We signed in, paid our $10.00 and found seats.

Again, looking for coffee, I was told the coffee pot was broken. I couldn’t believe it! I asked to see the coffee pot. The problem was he hadn’t put the top on it, thus causing hot water and grounds to spew all over the counter. We cleaned and made more coffee. At last, the morning was looking up!

At 10am Drupal Day got underway. There were close to 50 participants–all ages, all geeky. For the fashionista’s: Geekwear includes a hoodie, t-shirt, jeans that are too big, squared-off glasses, no make-up (for either sex), and worn sneakers. Other options included retro polyester, circa 1970, tights with knee-hi’s.

Okay, so what’s DRUPAL? Drupal is an Open Source CMS (content management system) that enables users to create elaborate websites contained within a systematic content framework. The framework allows multiple users to develop, create, collaborate, and edit the entire website without having to really know html or any other web development applications.

I wanted to attend Drupal Day because CLIC is investigating whether Drupal will meet our consortial office needs. We have 8 libraries that make up the CLIC Consortium with many library committees who have several documents, manuals, agendas, and minutes that require posting and editing to the CLICwebsite each month. A CMS like Drupal will enable us to provide library staff members to edit their own documents, manuals, etc., thus further developing the consortial environment as well as providing a venue for collaboration and instant editing.

As an added bonus, as an added bonus, since Drupal is Open Source , there’s no cost to use the software. The cost of using a hosted Drupal provider is about $120.00 per year. I don’t know about you, but I spend at least that amount on coffee!;-)

Now, back to Drupal Day:

Drupal Day was part of TCOpenCircuit, a relatively new organization. The 6 members that organized and orchestrated Drupal Day had an agenda that included:
- Getting everyone a Drupal Account. Everyone got a 30-day free hosted Drupal account compliments of Sundays Engergy! Did I mention the whole day was $10.00?!
- Create a Drupal site
- Divide into 2 groups: beginner and advanced. I was in the beginner. The advanced was filmed for webcast later–how cool was that?!
  The beginner section was given instruction on how Drupal works and some of the modules.
- Lunch was provided. Did I mention the entire day was $10.00? And included lunch?
- Embedding and customizing Google Maps
- Discussion of Open Source
- More work on themes and modules and working with the server

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Guest Post

Conference, Content Management Systems, Continuing Education, Guest Post, Open Source

Drupal Day (Guest Blogger, Deb Bergeron)