Blog
As some of you may have already noticed, we re-launched our Web site right before Thanksgiving last week. This has been a long-overdue project for us; our existing site design dated back to 2005, and received its most recent major update in early March of 2008, when I took responsibility for porting it to Drupal 6, which had only been released only two weeks earlier.
At that point, very few of the major contributed modules, like Views and CCK, had been ported to Drupal 6, so my only choice at the time was to build the site almost entirely from core modules, like the built-in Blog module. Now, there’s nothing wrong with using those core modules for basic site-building, but as the site grew, and we wanted to do more with it, their limitations soon became apparent. Also, the fact that I had put the site together very quickly in a decidedly non-sustainable manner meant that it was very difficult to extend or add new functionality as time went by.
This time around, we decided to approach our own Web site like we would any other project at Palantir, employing our full iterative development process.
As I write this, I am sitting on a boat in the Stockholm harbor, listening to Johannes Wehner of information.dk discuss how their newspaper transitioned to Drupal. Johannes is presenting as part of the Media Track at DrupalCamp Stockholm. The camp is part of the international Drupal community and its efforts to reach out to new members, to discuss new ideas and to share best practices. (If you couldn't make it to Stockholm, remember that DrupalCamp Chicago is next month.)
Everyone knows the top-tier Drupal modules, but with over 4,000 5,000 modules available for Drupal it's no surprise that many useful ones go unnoticed. As part of its mission to raise awareness of these unsung heroes, Palantir is presenting this series of articles on modules that carry more than their weight in code.
In part 2 of our 5,046 part series, we present: Suggested Terms
Drupalcamp is coming to Chicago December 12 and 13! After attracting a sellout crowd last year, this year’s Drupalcamp has been expanded, and will be held at the Hotel Orrington in downtown Evanston, located just steps from Northwestern University and only a couple of blocks from the Davis Street CTA and Metra stations. Two dozen pre-scheduled sessions will be held on Saturday, along with BoFs, hands-on training, and other “unconference” activities on both Saturday and Sunday. The camp is being put on by the Chicago Drupal community and the Chicago Drupal Meetup Group, with generous assistance from the event's sponsors, who include Palantir.
The site for the camp was built by Palantir using the Drupalcamp L.A. 2009 codebase as a starting point. The site's Chitown theme was designed by our own Steve Fisher, and has already been released back to the community (it's just a dev release right now, but as always, patches are welcome!). The theme incorporates the Chicago Druplicon logo designed by David Hwang, one of the Field Museum's Drupal gurus.
Register now, and once your registration has been paid and confirmed, don't forget to submit a session proposal - we'll only be accepting them through November 13, at which point we'll be asking registered attendees to cast votes for their favorites before announcing the full schedule by November 25. And of course, it's not too late to get in on the sponsorship action - we've got a variety of packages at all price points, allowing you to get your name in front of several hundred Drupalers and support the community (any profits from the event will go to benefit the Drupal Association).
We're looking at this as a warm-up event for Drupalcon Chicago 2011; we might not have won the Olympics, but Drupal's the next best thing!
