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