Do It With Drupal - 3-day Conference | New Orleans, LA | December 10, 11, 12, 2008

Build your schedule!

walkah — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:47:24 +0000

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 20:32:49 +0000

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 19:44:03 +0000

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 15:26:01 +0000

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 16:58:43 +0000

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 14:53:00 +0000

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 12:41:20 +0000

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.

Hotel room discount in New Orleans!

lizak — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:52:22 +0000

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.

Just About A Week To Save On DIWD

jjeff — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:31:49 +0000

The last early-bird discount for The Do It With Drupal Seminar will be ending at the end of next week on November 1st. After that time, the registration price jumps up from $995 to $1195 for the 3-day learning conference.

If you're looking to save some money on the registration fee (and who doesn't want to save money?), we suggest that you register today.

Registration price includes attendance to all sessions as well as a catered breakfast and lunch at the Marriott for all 3 days of the event. Discounted rooms are available at the Marriott as well.

Thanks to the Knight Foundation!

walkah — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:10:51 +0000

We are pleased to announce our latest affiliate sponsor for Do It With Drupal!

The Knight Foundation is working together with the Drupal community on the Knight Drupal Initiative to provide powerful tools for digital publication and encourage people to improve their communities by supporting the free exchange of information
and ideas.

Many Drupal projects are part of the Knight News Challenge, a yearly $5 million contest to find innovative digital information ideas. To help applicants strengthen their ideas, Knight built a Drupal site called the Garage that launched in September.

Knight will launch a new community site (built in Drupal) for discussion about information needs in November. Knight Foundation Online Community Manager Kristen Taylor is delighted to attend Do It With Drupal and answer questions about Knight's interest in Drupal.