Roland Tanglao's Weblog

[Cross posted from my Bryght Blog)

DrupalCamp LA was wonderful thanks to the incredible organization of Crystal (and others who I am too lazy to name here) and to the participants. Here are some thoughts on DrupalCamp LA and this part of California in general:

• People - loved meeting up with our close partners at WorkHabit (great to finally meet Earnest and Dominic) as well as meeting some new folks like Markus, Jen, Mike, Steve, the army from Achieve Internet (thanks for the drink and food on Saturday!) and many others
• Drupal Install Profiles - not only do you want one, but if you are a consulting shop, you need one, watch for Boris's follow-on presentation at DrupalCon Barcelona
• Deployment - as ably presented by Jonathan of WorkHabit and Mike - What happens if you have hundreds of sites and need to upgrade them? What do you do if you have a popular social media Drupal site with content being added continuously and users being added continuously and you want to upgrade it? Bryght and WorkHabit have been dealing with these issues since 2004, it's now hitting other big time firms in the Drupal ecosystem like Lullabot, Warner Brothers and Achieve Internet. DAST, AutoPilot, and Hostmaster 2 are the keywords to watch.
• Theming - I enjoyed the beginning of Milind's Drupal theming presentation. I wish I had time to synthesize all the Drupal theming presentations I have seen into one Godzilla kick a*s one :-)
• Venue - AOL Beverly Hills was spectacular. Great conference rooms, kitchen and lots of places to sleep, recharge and hold informal meetings and the bandwidth rocked. I uploaded many many photos at consistently at 100KB/second!
• Cars - shiny, big and expensive (many many Mercedes and BMWs) seems to be the order of the day. I drove brother in law's Andy's 2001 BMW 330 for 20 minutes; I am not into cars but if I was it would be BMWs - I'll stick to cheap, cheerful and economical Japanese cars like Hondas. The Armenian taxi drive who took me to meet my Mom was thankful to his Filipino doctor and when he heard I was of Filipino heritage and meeting my Mom, he drove very fast and very safe in his big American taxi.
• Mirror World (à la Gibson's Pattern Recognition) - LA seems to be a subtly different mirror of those days in Vancouver when it's sunny: every street is big and wide unlike Vancouver, the sun shines perpetually unlike Vancouver which bizarrely had the same weather as LA but a few degrees cooler, there are freeways everywhere unlike Vancouver (which could have gone down that path but through hard work and accidents of history did not)
• Food: My brother in law took good care of me: delicious Japanese organic food at Fukada in Irvine, great coffee at Abbot's Habit, great Mexican food, yummy retro Italian American at Andre's with my Mom who happened to be in town and my aunt, can't wait to go back to Glendale and eat some seriously delicious and inexpensive Filipino food
• Capitalism: 15 million people with lots of entertainment meant great shopping: Samy's rocks for photo stuff (bought a FireWire 800 Compact Flash Reader to replace my broken USB one) and I went to two Apple Stores and Fry's

Have you ever built an awesome Drupal website or webapp and wanted to share it with others or clone to save you config time? Then Drupal Install Profiles are for you! I'll be leading a session called Anatomy of a Drupal Install Profile at DrupalCamp LA (organized by super organizer and super everything Crystal Williams) this Saturday September 8, 2007 in Los Angeles at AOL in Beverly Hills. The presentation is already available (I reserve the right to drastically modify it :-) !) on our public wiki page, AnatomyOfADrupalInstallProfile as a Keynote, PDF and PowerPoint attachment. Feel free to edit the wiki page with your thoughts, etc.

Calling all Drupal people of all skill levels (newbies, themers, site admins, developers, users, consultants, Nancy Whites :-) , documentation writers, etc.). It's a total bargain ($20 suggested donation) and lots of Drupal experts will be there to get you into the Drupal conversation. See you at Richard Hugo House. Sign up today (join the site (or use your drupal.org username), login and signup). See you in Seattle!

FROM Drupal Camp Seattle Agenda | groups.drupal.org:

QUOTE

June 28 & 29, 2006
Location: Richard Hugo House

Drupal-Camp Seattle is an opportunity to learn about the Free and Open Source Drupal Content Management System (http://www.Drupal.org). This community driven event will focus on the PHP Theme Engine theming system, theme-able functions, Drupal 4.7 modules, module development and CiviCRM.
Who Should Attend:

If you are a php programmer, or a css/xhtml programmer looking to increase your ability to rapidly deploy websites for clients, work with other people doing interesting things, and generally spend less time re-inventing the wheel or maintaining your own proprietary or single source CMS, this event is a perfect introduction to Drupal. You'll leave with a comprehensive understanding of deploying a Drupal website out of the “box” and a foundation on which to build your Drupal knowledge.

If you have started to dabble in Drupal, either as an application specialist type (installing and configuring but not hacking on code) this is a great opportunity to learn more, and learn tips and tricks from others.

If you are a webmin, online director or organizer for your company or organization and are looking to move away from a static HTML site, add interactive features, blogging, events calendars, forums or other community building functionality, this is a great event to learn about Drupal's capabilities and even come away ready to build your site.
Why?

Drupal rocks! Drupal is Free (capital “F”) and Open Source. Hundreds of developers are constantly making it better and extending the functionality. You can leverage the work of these multitudes!

If you are looking for more regular work, there are over a dozen firms working in the United States deploying Drupal sites and many of them have openings for developers familiar with Drupal. The demand for Drupal powered websites is outstripping the community's ability to build them. Developers with Drupal skills have ample opportunities to work in the field.

Drupal Camp is free, but donations are appreciated. A suggested donation is $20. You can also buy a shirt to support the event soon at http://www.goodstorm.com (we'll provide the direct link as soon as we have it)

END QUOTE

Really enjoyed my chats with Miriam at the very productive :-) after DrupalCamp session at Tortilla Flats (our conversation about design, art, etc. was much better than the food!) and the dialogue and perspective that Miriam brought to the BlogHerCon and Designing for Novice Users sessions at BarCamp. Check out Miriam's notes on the 2 camps for something more insightful! See you in Vancouver, Miriam!