George DeMet's blog

If you’re interested in learning more about Drupal, there are two upcoming events that you may want to check out: DrupalCampWI, which will be held June 5-6 on the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, and Drupal Design Camp Boston, which will be held at the MIT campus from June 13-14.

Palantir is sponsoring both events, which are “unconferences” being put together by motivated volunteers to help spread knowledge and allow Drupal users and developers to share information, tips n’ tricks, and case studies. We’ve prepared a number of session proposals for both events, ranging from “What is Drupal?” to “Making Drupal Dance: Techniques for Non-obvious Theme Manipulations”.

Regardless of whether you’re a complete newbie or an experienced core developer, Drupal Camps offer something for folks at all experience levels, and are a great way and approachable way to learn more about this open source Web content management platform and get involved in the community. Hope you can attend!

The winners of the 2009 Horizon Interactive Awards were just announced, and we’re happy to report that no fewer than five Palantir-developed Drupal Web sites were honored in this competition recognizing excellence in interactive media production.

Silver Award winners:

Graycor - Working with design, editorial, and strategy firm SGDP, Palantir utilized sustainable theming techniques to build this site for one of the leading providers of construction, maintenance, and facilities services throughout the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

Herron School of Art and Design - Developed in collaboration with design firm Studio Blue, this visually stunning site for the art and design school at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis was also nominated for a 2009 Webby Award.

Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies – Located at the University of Notre Dame, the Kroc Institute is one of the world’s principal centers for the study of the causes of violent conflict and strategies for sustainable peace. Designed by Lipman Hearne and built by Palantir, this site provides a wealth of information targeted at researchers, students, and alumni.

Bronze Award winners:

AIGA Chicago - A 2009 Webby Award Honoree, this site was developed by Palantir in collaboration with the AIGA Chicago board, including Steve Ryan from VSA Partners, Mark Drozd at SGDP, and chapter director Alicia Maes.

Art Institute of Chicago: The Collection – Palantir seamlessly integrated Drupal into the Art Institute’s existing Web site to allow them to display tens of thousands of items from their collection not previously available online.

Springtime is conference season, and this year has been a pretty busy one for us at Palantir. We just got back from Museums and the Web in Indianapolis last week, and it’s already time to start getting ready for next week’s CMS Expo.

Fortunately, we don’t have to travel too far this time – it’s being held in Evanston, IL, which is only a few miles from our north Chicago office and also happens to be where a few of us live. CMS Expo is a training and business conference focusing on Drupal, Joomla!, Alfresco and other open source content management products.

Along with our friends at Acquia, Palantir will be one of the conference’s sponsors, and a number of us will be presenting sessions as well:

Sustainability has always been one of Palantir’s key values. It informs everything from the way that we build Web sites, to our employment practices, to the impact we have on the global environment.

Not only is today Earth Day, but this week also marks the one-year anniversary of Palantir’s move into our Elston Avenue office space. I thought it would be appropriate to mark the occasion by sharing some of the ways that we’ve tried to act in an environmentally sustainable way over the past year.

We are super-psyched to announce that one Palantir-developed Drupal Web site been nominated for a Webby Award and another has been recognized as an Official Honoree! The Webby Award is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet, and has been hailed by the New York Times as the "Internet's highest honor”.

The Herron School of Art and Design Web site has been nominated for Best School/University Web site. As one of only five nominees in its category, the site is eligible for two of the Internet industry's most sought-after awards: The Webby Award and The Webby People's Voice Award. The Herron Web site was developed by Palantir in collaboration with Chicago-based design partner Studio Blue. Built in Drupal 5, the site features a unique design that promotes the institution’s place, not just in its local community, but also the larger world.

Vote now!

While the 650-person International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences are responsible for selecting the winners of the Webby Award, the People’s Voice Award is selected by the global Web community, which includes you!

From now until April 30th, you can show your support for the Herron Web site by voting for it in the Webby People's Voice Award competition. The Herron site is all the way down at the bottom of the Website ballot, in the School/University category under Society.

The address is: http://pv.webbyawards.com

Winners of both the Webby and the Webby People’s Voice Awards will be announced on May 5th, 2009 and honored at a star-studded ceremony in New York City on June 8th hosted by Saturday Night Live‘s Seth Meyers.

But wait, there’s more!

Palantir is also proud to announce that the AIGA Chicago Web site was recognized as a Webby Official Honoree for its outstanding caliber of work and standard of excellence. The Drupal 5 Web site was built by Palantir in collaboration with the AIGA Chicago Board, including Steve Ryan (design) from VSA Partners and Mark Drozd (editorial) at SGDP as well as chapter director Alicia Maes.

As a distinction bestowed on fewer than 15% of the entries in the Webby Award competition, Palantir is privileged to have had several sites recognized by the Webby Awards over the past few years, and we plan to keep the trend going!

The last couple of weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind for us here at Palantir, full of site launches, module releases, and more! We barely got our feet back on the ground here in Chicago after DrupalCon DC before it was time to head off to the next event, South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) in Austin, TX.

Tiffany Farriss, Colleen Carroll, and I had a great time, got to attend some really good sessions, and hang out with friends, including some folks from Lullabot who helped throw the awesome 32 Bit party. Colleen and I were even interviewed by Zadi Diaz for PBS about open source Web development and Drupal.

Of course, the biggest event for us was the Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny panel, which featured Colleen, Steve Fisher of Idea Market, and Matt Mullenweg of Automattic talking about how they led three teams of all-star developers from the Drupal, Joomla!, and WordPress communities to build out the same Web site in each of their chosen platforms to benefit community leadership programs. I served as the moderator.

Palantir is proud to announce the launch of the new Web site for Foreign Affairs, the bi-monthly journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. The site was built by Palantir in Drupal 6, with design and information architecture provided by Concentric Studio.

You can read more about Palantir's work on this project on our Web site; a more detailed technical case study is coming soon.

It’s been just over a week since the Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! teams uploaded their entries for the “Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny”, and with less than a week to go before our panel presentation at SXSW Interactive on March 16, I’m really excited by all the conversation and debate that this project has already generated on various blogs, message boards, and social networking sites.

While I don’t want to say too much here because I’m intentionally staying out of the discussion about the project for now, I did want to take this opportunity to clarify a couple of points about the goals of this project and the judging process for the competition.

Yesterday, I released the project specification and design concepts for the Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny panel project that I’ll be presenting at South by Southwest Interactive in just one month.

For those who might not have read or remember my last post on it, the project is essentially an “Iron Chef”-style competition pitting three teams of all-star Web developers from the Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress communities against each other to develop the same Web site in each of their chosen open source content management platforms.

It’s hard to believe, but it’s only been about two years since Palantir launched its first Drupal Web site for the University of Washington in St. Louis.  Since that time, we’ve built dozens of sites using Drupal, and adopting it as our preferred platform for content management and Web application development has led to a lot of positive changes for our company. 

Dries Buytaert, the creator of Drupal, recently noted on his blog that he was surprised at how many companies don’t contribute back to Drupal or participate in the Drupal community because they haven’t figured out how to make it work for them financially.   While I can’t speak for the experience other firms might have had, I can say that at Palantir, we’ve found that becoming part of the Drupal community and contributing back to it has been not only been good for business, but it’s allowed us to grow in a way that wasn’t possible before we became a fully “open source” company.