Blog

Build your schedule!

walkah — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 09:47:24 -0800

Well, it's almost here! Team Lullabot is busy putting on the finishing touches for Do It With Drupal and speakers and attendees are en route.

One very important pre-conference task is always picking your sessions and planning your schedule. We'd love to help you out. Under the Schedule, there are two tabs "All Sessions and "My Schedule" (you need to be logged in for the latter). For any of the sessions listed under "All Sessions" that you would like to attend, click the "attending" link and it will be added under "My Schedule". You can then get either list (or both!) in iCalendar format.

Load up your laptops, your PDAs and your iPhones and let's have a great three days!

Marriott Discount Extended!

haley — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:32:49 -0800

The Marriott hotel has extended our group rate until Thursday, December 4th! If you haven't yet booked your room, do it now! Call the Marriott at 1.888.364.1200 and use the group code "LTCLTCA" to get the discount rate of $149/night.

The Marriott is where the event is happening and where all of the speakers and most of the attendees will be staying. They've got several restaurants and a big common-area in the lobby and this will be a great opportunity to connect with speakers and other attendees, makes some friends, rub some elbows, and exchange some business cards.

Habitat for Humanity Sign-Up

lizak — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:44:03 -0800

As you probably know, we're doing a volunteer day for Habitat for Humanity on Saturday, December 13th for anyone who can join us. For everyone who will be attending, we will need you to sign up online. Once we know how many people we will have attending, we will be assigned our location and times for the day.

Do good! Impress your friends! Laugh at hammer-wielding Lullabots! Sign up here today!

Brian Oberkirch Stirs Up The Internet

jjeff — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 07:26:01 -0800

DIWD speaker Brian Oberkirch caused me embarrassment and ultimately made me change my Twitter password.

Now don't get me wrong. Brian is a great guy. But with Twitterank gaining popularity and thousands of Twitter users (myself included) accepting the disclaimer "I'm not out to steal ur twitterz" as confidence enough to enter their Twitter passwords into a 3rd party site, he never should have joked that "Twitterrank is a vast conspiracy I created to steal all of your passwords and shame Twitter into OAuthing. And to make you look vain.". And Tantek Çelik should have never retweeted Brian's post prompting Oliver Marks to write an article on ZDNet entitled, "Gullible Twitter users hand over their usernames and passwords - did you get your Twitterank yet?!.

Sample Chapter From Our O'Reilly Book Now Available

webchick — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 08:58:43 -0800

We're pleased to announce that O'Reilly's first Drupal book, Using Drupal, is now finished. It's being sent to the printer and should be available at your favorite book stores soon. In fact, you can pre-order from Amazon.com right now.

But you want a sample chapter, you say? Well you've come to the right place! The sample chapter is entitled "Event Mangement" and covers some of the most sticky aspects of handling time-based information in Drupal. The chapter talks about how to use the Date, Calendar, CCK, Views, and Flag modules to create a simple events site in which users can sign up to attend an event. The download includes the table of contents for the entire book, so you can see what you'll get when the entire book is ready.

Karen Stevenson Puts the K (and the S) in CCK

jjeff — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 06:53:00 -0800

Karen Stevenson joined the Drupal community in 2006. Within a year, she was a maintainer of the Content Construction Kit (better known as CCK), and author of both the Date and Calendar modules. With such amazing credits on her resume, you might expect Karen to be some hot shot kid with a crisp computer science degree in hand. But this is her second or third career depending on how you look at it.

Karen worked for 20 years as a certified public accountant and started her first website in 1994 as a hobby. She taught herself HTML and eventually starting the award-winning ElderWeb (http://www.elderweb.com), an immense directory of elder care information. The success of this site in the late '90s lead to many website development opportunities and Karen began to teach herself PHP. Over time she wrote several "home grown" content management systems (CMSes) before deciding "there must be a better way" and discovering Drupal.

These days, Karen does some work as a freelance Drupal developer, but she contributes an immense amount of time to improving CCK, Date, Calendar, and several other modules which she has authored. And she has been heavily involved in the efforts to move CCK into Drupal core.

For those unfamiliar with CCK, in it's simplest form, it allows administrators to customize the fields associated with a type of content. Add a job title field. Add a photo field. Add a department select list. And all of these fields become available to the rest of Drupal, so it becomes easy to float the photo to the right in each post and show a listing of everyone in the same department.

As for Date and Calendar, the short version is that these allow CCK and Views to handle event information. Add date/time information to content and sort it any way you like. Place categorized events on a calendar and subscribe with an iCal feed. If you've ever tried to build your own event management system you know how difficult it can be with virtual websites living across timezones and the international date line. Date and Calendar make event management (almost) easy.

We are honored to have Karen leading two sessions at The Do It With Drupal Seminar. On Thursday, she leads an overview session on The Content Construction Kit providing both an introduction and insight into advanced uses. On Friday, Karen will be talking about Date and Calendar and getting us set up for event success!

As usual, you can find these and all of the Do It With Drupal sessions on the schedule page.

Earl Miles' Point Of Views

jjeff — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 04:41:20 -0800

Earl "merlinofchaos" Miles is the author of several amazing modules including Views, Panels, Nodequeue, and Advanced Help. He is responsible for major improvements to Drupal 6’s theming system and install system. And he was recently selected as Drupal's Most Valued Person 2008 by Packt Publishing.

It is no exaggeration to say that Earl single-handedly revolutionized the Drupal community when he released the Views module late in 2005. Views' ability to quickly create custom listings of just about anything in Drupal has opened up a new world for site admins.

We're pleased to have Earl joining us in New Orleans for The Do It With Drupal Seminar next month. On Thursday, he will be leading a session entitled Basic Views for those still trying to figure out the best ways to use Views on their sites and wrap their minds around the capabilities of this powerful module.

On Friday, Earl leads Advanced Views where we delve more deeply into Views tips and tricks and show some of the more advanced ways that Views can be used to organize and present content, users, and other types of information on any Drupal site.

Come learn Views from the man who wrote it. Check out the schedule for a complete look at the sessions being offered at Do It With Drupal.

Want to learn more about Ubercart & e-commerce for Drupal?

kentbye — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:47:22 -0700

Ubercart is a Drupal e-commerce solution that has quickly gathered a lot of buzz within the Drupal community over the past couple of years. The folks over at Top Notch Themes have eloquently listed the seven reasons why Ubercart has been the right e-commerce choice for them, and one of the most compelling ones is the community momentum behind the project.

There are a number of beautifully designed and robust stores that have been coming out such as Transformetrics Fitness Products, Fleurville Parenting Products, Rifftrax Digital Downloads, H. JLYNN jewelry, Mint Bags and Nutriprima Health Products.

Top Notch Themes even started selling custom themes for Ubercart, and wrote up a great handbook write-up for Creating an Online store with Drupal where they talk about how Ubercart leverages Drupal:

Unlike shopping cart-only systems, Drupal allows you to combine a fully functional community, business, or news website with your e-commerce. This adds powerful options for blogs, forums, social networking, custom displays of content, newsletters, and much more. These features can help your bottom line, as studies show the longer browsers stay on a site the more likely they are to purchase.

They also go on to talk about some other ways that Ubercart benefits from Drupal's power such as the Search Engine Optimization benefits, built-in taxonomy and user systems and the flexibility of other contributed modules such as CCK & Views, userpoints and fivestar ratings.

This community momentum is certainly one of the reasons why Lullabot chose to use Ubercart for the "Do It With Drupal" conference registration system. And we're definitely excited to have Ubercart's lead developer Ryan Szarma come down to New Orleans for DIWD to share more of his insights for how to best get up and running with Ubercart.

This is the last week for early bird discounts, and so register for the "Do It With Drupal" conference today!

Hotel room discount in New Orleans!

lizak — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 06:52:22 -0700

Heya all DIWD-ers! The hotel has dropped the rate for rooms for the event by $10, to $149 per room. Anyone currently booked will get the new rate, but if you haven't booked your room already, be sure to do so before our block is fully booked.

CNET says: Get into Open Source!

lizak — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 11:41:28 -0700

In an article yesterday, 14 things to do if you are laid off from a tech job, CNET offers this piece of advice (their top pick): get involved in an open source project.

In these uncertain economic times (who else is sick of hearing about that?), open source is a great bet. There will always be a demand for free software, and as such, there will always be a demand for the people that know how to use it.

Go Drupalers!