Well, I had a great time attending the Introduction to Drupal training yesterday at Advantage labs! Not only was it a great starter on how to get into Drupal, the group was diverse on CMS experience, careers, gender and race!

Barry led the training and covered a lot in the 2 hour session.

I took the photos.  View (and use them) them on Flickr.

What is Drupal?

It’s a safe and fun website platform that can be customized to bring your message to your audience.  It doesn’t look so hot out of the box but with a “Trusty Drupal Guide” you can have a fantastic, powerful and flexible website solution that grows with your organization.  Now of course, I have experience with other CMS’s as well like Joomla and Wordpress so I feel this statement can be applied to CMS’s in general but that there is one thing that Drupal just kicks butt on; Applying permissions within the function of a module.  This is lacking in Joomla and Wordpress.

How he fell into the Drupal crowd

Barry used to be a consultant for nonprofits and would help them select appropriate technology.  It then made sense once he bumped into Drupal (and loved it after hating it), that he helped people understand the power it could bring to them.  He has a design background.

Well known sites using Drupal

• The Emmys – Prime time television awards show
• Mother Jones – Nonprofit news site focused on political and social justice
• The Onion – Uhm, you know! Crazy funny, fake news site that pokes fun at the human condition
• Mattel – toy maker

Multi-site management with Drupal

Barry said that the ability to duplicate site structure, share content between a distributed set of affiliate sites.  Anne, who was sitting to my left, worked for American Public Media I believe (Minnesota Public Radio’s parent company) and found this part especially interesting

Ecommerce with Drupal

Ubercart is quickly becoming a favorite in the Drupal community now that modules have been created to tie the ecommerce solution into the Drupal database.

How Drupal works compared to flat HTML

Just like other Content Management Systems (CMS), Drupal relies on a set of files and a database.  This allows for seperation of the content from the design allowing people without programming expereince to quickly jump in and create a site rich with compelling text, interesting photos and captivating video.

Drupal likes Social Media

This was mentioned but since Barry didn’t cover the actual functionality provided through modules in the Drupal CMS, I’m unable to comment on this one.

Design and style consistancy with Drupal

There was talk and great questions about stylesheets, CSS and helping users to maintain a uniform look and feel on the website.  We also got to see a great “Before and After” example of HonorTheEarth.org

Roles and Responsiblitites to build and maintain a Drupal site

You’ve got your developer, your designer, the administrator, the content or community manager and the writers.  I would also suggest folks who manage advertising for the site, do SEO analytics and complimentary content outreach.

Resources for learning more about Drupal

• Lullabot - Training, podcasts, articles and creator of Do It With Drupal 3 Day Seminar
• Lynda.com – recorded training series
• Tom Geller – He’s done a series at the Lynda training site

3 Tips for organizations who are considering Drupal

1. Don’t drown would be solution providers with lengthy RFP’s (Request For Proposal)
2. Look for a developer who contributes to the Drupal Community
3. Hire a CSS designer to complement the developer

Service offerings from Advantage Labs for Drupal

I’m curious about the developer labs offered and plan to contact Barry and Allie about coming in to “shadow” one of these.

• Hosting – They take care of it all.  You get a safe, optimized hosting environment for Drupal with specific modules selected by Advantage Labs.
• Training – There is both a group/community training option and custom training
• Development – They offer services to evaulate existing websites, help you fix your Drupal site and/or migrate to to their hosting platform and do direct development.

Allie is the founder (co-founder?) of Advantage Labs, an active contributor on the main Drupal site and a developer. She came in toward the end to help with the QnA. I asked her about the ACL permissions that Drupal offers as it’s been something that has come up when working with other consultants.

Summary

Advantage Labs did a GREAT job of presenting a website development platform they are passionate about.  I liked the energy of the room, the location, the presentation (whoops, already said that), the focus on educating people and the diversity.  There were 3 other women besides me and 3 other Brown people like me too!  I felt comfortable, engaged and will certainly continue to explore Drupal as something I could learn to love.

Photo Credit: matt.farina