Drupal

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.

Palantir has had much to celebrate of late and many people to thank for it. So we threw a party!

We wanted to welcome folks to the new digs, introduce some new faces and thank our friends, family, colleagues and partners for their support and encouragement. Fun was had by all and we've got the pictures to prove it!

We have a brand-new writeup on the Art Institute of Chicago’s Collections site for your consumption at Drupal.org.

It provides insight on the steps Palantir took in creating their new Collections site.  In particular, it highlights how Palantir went about integrating the AIC’s vast existing collections data into their new Drupal platform.

It's official! Palantir is taking a vacation in Hungary this year. If you're planning to be in the Szeged area, look us up. Five of the Palantiri will be taking vacations this summer in Hungary, including George DeMet, Tiffany Farriss, Larry "Crell" Garfield, Ken "agentrickard" Rickard, and Sam Boyer.

Although we'll all be vacationing separately, we do plan to meet up in Szeged for a week. We hear there's some sort of Drupal event going on in Szeged in late August. Might be fun. Let us know if you want to meet up somewhere for a snack. If we have time, we may even see about giving a presentation or two.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we could be doing things better and not just in the Drupal way. But Drupal is what I’ve decided to focus on first. I’ve been wracking my brain over how we can improve our process, how we can build more efficient sites faster and better for the client, and how we can give ourselves a tool kit.  And then it hit me, we’ve been approaching designs in Drupal all wrong this last year. Don’t get me wrong, we didn’t do anything "wrong", we just didn’t make it easier on ourselves.

We’ve been a Drupal shop for over a year now and we are definitely still maturing our Drupal approach. We are still cutting our teeth, so to speak. And I think that we may be reinventing the wheel all too often.

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.

Earlier this week I checked in Palantir's latest module, Kiosk. It's a simple little module, and I was rather surprised to find the name still free, but it actually shows off some interesting tricks.

We're big fans of the Drupal content management platform, and proud to be sponsors of Drupalcon Boston 2008.