George DeMet's blog

Palantir is pleased to announce the recent launches of two new Drupal-based higher education Web sites: The Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame and the Northwestern University Alumni Association.

The last few weeks have been pretty busy ones here at Palantir, but I wanted to take a few minutes and let folks know what we’ve been up to lately:

First off, we’re very pleased to announce that we’ve teamed up with Acquia as a Platinum Partner to offer customized software solutions based on Acquia’s commercially-supported Drupal distribution. We’re looking forward to working with Acquia to continue to improve Drupal and enhance the strength of its supporting community.

Drupal Camp Chicago got underway earlier today, and a few of us will be presenting sessions there tomorrow afternoon. Matt Butcher will be talking about “JavaScript, jQuery, Drupal: Oh, my!”, Larry Garfield will get everyone up-to-speed on “Drupal 7 to Date”, and I will be giving a variation of my Drupalcon Szeged talk titled, “Yes We Can: Building Beautiful and Sustainable Sites in Drupal”. As a strong supporter of the local Chicago Drupal community, Palantir is one of the professional sponsors of Drupal Camp Chicago.

Palantir is also one of the sponsors of Do It With Drupal, a three-day learning seminar in New Orleans this December 10-12. Speakers will include some of the biggest and brightest names in the community, including our own John Wilkins, who will be talking about “Designing for Drupal”. This is a great opportunity for folks who want to learn more about Drupal, and there are still spots open if you register today!

We’re happy to announce that the Indianapolis Museum of Art Web site, which Palantir built last year, was selected as a Silver Winner by the International Academy of Visual Arts in the 2008 W³ Awards competition. The W³ Awards honor creative excellence on the Web, and recognize the creative and marketing professionals behind award-winning sites and marketing programs.

And last, but certainly not least, we want to wish a warm welcome to the newest member of the Palantir team, Nate Striedinger. In addition to his extensive XHTML and CSS development experience, Nate has worked with a number of free and open source content management platforms as well as Linux system administration. He’s also an accomplished drummer who can sometimes be found performing with a number of Chicago-area bands. Nate is already hard at work with the other members of our front-end development team on projects that will be launching by the end of the year.

The first round of panel selections for next spring’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival have just been posted, and I’m pleased to be able to announce that for the second year in a row, I’ll be one of the presenters!

The session that was selected is titled “Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny”, and it’s inspired by an idea that we came up with while planning this past spring's Content Management System Roundup session. While that panel provided a basic introduction to several widely-used CMS platforms, including SharePoint, Drupal, Expression Engine, and Serena Collage, this year’s session will be an Iron Chef-style competition where three teams of Web developers will build out an identical site for a not-for-profit organization in three different CMS platforms. The overall winner will be decided by the organization based on which site meets their needs best, and will hopefully provide a more in-depth look at the strengths and weaknesses of developing sites for each platform.

I’ve been following the Drupal.org redesign with great interest, and not just because of Tiffany’s involvement coordinating the project with the Drupal Association and designer Mark Boulton. To me, it’s fascinating because it’s unlike any Web design project that I’ve been involved with in my fourteen years in the industry.

Since my last post about Drupal at South by Southwest, there have been a couple of new developments to share:

First, the main SXSW Web site has been redesigned and relaunched as a Drupal site! Kudos to the festival organizers for picking Drupal to run the site for what’s probably the coolest music, movie, and interactive festival in the country.

Second, the Interactive Festival Panel Picker is now live. This site gives you the opportunity to review all of the more than 1200 panel proposals that were submitted for the 2009 festival and vote for your favorites. I’ve submitted two proposals:

The folks at South by Southwest (SXSW) recently posted the audio podcast of Content Management System Roundup, the panel of CMS experts that I hosted there back in March. Even though I was fighting a losing battle with the flu and pumped full of DayQuil at the time, I think the session went very well, and the feedback that we got was quite positive. Matt McDermott, Jeff Eaton, Mike Essl, and Tiffany Farriss all deserve a tremendous amount of credit for the work that they did to make it such a great session.

One of the things that really struck me about the experience was the tremendous amount of interest in Drupal among the folks who attended our session. Nearly all of the questions in the Q&A sessions were about Drupal, and when Jeff asked how many people in the audience had heard of the software, nearly everyone raised their hand. What’s significant about this is that there were close to 1,500 people who attended our session; we had just been at Drupalcon in Boston the previous week, and that entire conference dedicated to Drupal had an attendance of around 850 people.

This disparity in numbers is made more significant when you consider that the audience at SXSW is pretty different from the one at Drupalcon. While Drupalcon is primarily attended by programmers and Web developers who specifically work with Drupal, SXSW attracts a wider audience that includes people involved in all aspects of interactive technology. This tells me that there’s a whole lot of people who are interested in and using Drupal that are not currently part of the traditional developer community.

Following up on this post from a few weeks back, I'm happy to report that Palantir has now balanced its carbon emissions for all of 2007 and the first quarter of 2008 by purchasing 95 metric tons worth of CO2 offsets from TerraPass, a leading consumer retailer and marketer of greenhouse gas reduction offsets and consumer energy efficiency products.

Palantir is very excited to announce that Ken Rickard will be joining the Palantir team as of May 19. Ken comes to Palantir after more than a decade managing the development of new technologies, strategy, and innovation in the online newspaper industry. In addition to his community and project work, Ken will provide leadership, vision, and training for Palantir and our clients.

We just got in our copy of David Mercer's new book, "Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6", which has the distinction of having been worked on by our own Larry Garfield, who served as technical editor. I haven't had the opportunity to read the entire book yet, but at first glance it looks like it provides a great introduction to installing, configuring, and building sites in Drupal 6. And if you order your copy direct from the book's publisher, a portion of the proceeds goes to benefit the Drupal Association!

We're pleased to announce that the new Palantir-developed Drupal Web site for the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) is now live at http://www.herron.iupui.edu/.

The site was developed in collaboration with design partner Studio Blue, and features a unique design that showcases photography of the school's students and faculty, as well as dynamically updated stories about the school.

Look for a more detailed case study coming soon.