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Announcing the "Do It With Drupal" Seminar!
August 1, 2008
Lullabot is proud to present its first large-scale event, the Do It With Drupal seminar. This three-day event focuses on teaching examples, techniques, and best practices for building successful Drupal projects. Join us December 10 - 12 at the New Orleans Marriott Hotel, where you'll learn from top experts, both within and outside the Drupal community.
- Come to scenic New Orleans
- Examine and dissect successful Drupal sites
- Discover new site-building strategies
- Learn from Drupal's top developers
- Hear from community-building experts
- Connect with other Drupal professionals
- Expand your Drupal knowledge
We're really hoping to make our first large-scale event a success. Join the Facebook event, follow us on Twitter, and help spread the word!
Come learn Views tricks from its author, Earl Miles. Learn about CCK from maintainer Karen Stevenson, or Organic Groups from its creator, Moshe Weitzman. But of course, there's more to building a successful Drupal site than just understanding Drupal's inner workings. And Do It With Drupal focuses on this area, too. Learn about building and nourishing an online community from Flickr's community manager, Heather Champ. Learn about information architecture and usability from Razorfish founder, Karen McGrane. Learn about managing a successful Drupal project from Nicole Lind, project manager for Fast Company and Lifetime Television. And our speaker list continues to grow.
Our sessions will assume very little knowledge of Drupal (so it's perfect for those new to Drupal, or companies currently evaluating Drupal as a solution), but they will still have a lot to offer for those experienced with Drupal who want to learn more about the techniques that the pros are using to execute their projects. Come and ask your questions! Additionally, we'll have lots of social opportunities for attendees and speakers to connect, network, and generally hang out.
Registration for Do It With Drupal opens on Tuesday is open and the first 100 registrants get a big discount off the normal rates.
Go to http://www.doitwithdrupal.com for complete information about the event.
We look forward to seeing you in New Orleans!
Angela Byron wins the Best Contributor award at OSCON
July 24, 2008
photo by James Duncan Davidson
On Tuesday night at OSCON, Lullabot's Angie Byron was inducted into the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Hall of Fame for Best Contributor. It's great to see Angie's contributions be recognized not just within the Drupal community, but the larger mindshare of the Open Source community as well. When Leslie Hawthorn, Google's OS Team Manager, stood at the podium to introduce the award, she said: "The recipient of this award is always a source of inspiration". And she is right. If you've ever uttered the words "How do I contribute?" to Angie, you see a wave of excitement come over her as she moves in a little closer, cracks open her laptop and before you know it you're writing your first patch, your first documentation, your first simpletest. It goes on and on.
Angie is a Best Contributor because she inspires countless others to take that jump into Drupal when the first step is otherwise feeling too scary to take. Congrats Angie, you totally deserve it.
Understanding Drupal DVDs are now shipping
July 21, 2008
The Understanding Drupal DVDs are pressed and we have received them at our shipping facility! All pre-ordered DVDs have been shipped out and should be arriving this week. You can choose between a DVD, a High-Definition digital download, or the "Grab 'em both" option, which gives you both the immediacy of the HD download and a physical DVD that you can use to introduce Drupal to clients, friends, and family. You can order your copy today from the Lullabot store.
Understanding Drupal is designed to serve as a fundamental foundation to people new to Drupal by providing an introduction to Drupal's concepts, capabilities and terminology. It's the first video in the Lullabot Learning Series. Future tutorials will cover topics such as Administering Drupal, and intensives on the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views modules, Theming, Drupal APIs, and more.
And for those of you have yet to acquire a Lullabot t-shirt, we're also selling shirts in the store. Pick one up and wear it while you watch your DVD. The DVD will make you smart. The t-shirt will make you sexy!
A new Drupal theme, and a peek at Drupal Jumpstart...
July 4, 2008
With the release candidates of CCK and Views now available for Drupal 6, the assorted 'Bots are busy updating several chapters of the upcoming Drupal Jumpstart book with the UI and subtle functionality changes in Drupal 6. I'm currently putting the finishing touches on Chapter 8 -- it will walk readers through building a product reviews web site. Along the way, we've decided to use a different contrib theme for each chapter's sample site, to provide some visual flare and help readers quickly spot which site is which when thumbing through screenshots in the book.
For the Product Reviews chapter, I stumbled across an awesome new Drupal 6 theme named Nitobe. It was designed by Shannon Lucas of Four Kitchens Studios, and it's a clean, attractive theme with a lot of potential for customization. Among other things, it offers quick-and-easy selection of custom banner images at the top of the blog. While the release of the Garland theme with Drupal 5 brought us color customization, not many themes have made it easy for users to pick custom header images without doing their own CSS tweaks. Now I want to use it on all of my random sites...
Dooce: 20K+ Comments in 24hrs, Drupal Doesn't Break a Sweat
July 2, 2008
Yesterday, I heard from my friend Jon Armstrong about some nervousness he was having about Dooce, the site he maintains for his wife Heather. This incredibly popular blog migrated to Drupal recently and when I ran into Jon at South By Southwest, he was very happy with the move. However, on Monday, Heather announced that she was giving away a coveted Wii Fit, and that people could "enter" as many times as they would like simply by commenting on the post.
Bang! The starting gun went off. Later that day Jon posted Drupal is RAD to his blog about how impressed he was with Drupal: "In an hour, there have been over 1,200 comments." But word kept spreading around the internet about the Wii Fit giveaway and the speed of comments was growing exponentially. They're running on a single web server and haven't really "tricked out" their box with any special performance tuning or anything.
However, he wasn't going to be able to sleep with one eye open watching his server load and he messaged me on Twitter. Of course, confident in my Drupal sites, I was fast asleep.
Lullabot is #1 for Drupal Visitors
June 25, 2008
Google Trends recently added a new feature to allow users to see other sites frequented by visitors to a given site. Of course the first thing that we did was to go and see where Drupal.org visitors like to go. We were excited to find that Lullabot.com is the number-one "also visited" site for Drupal visitors.
We have certainly made an effort to provide as much useful Drupal information as possible here and it's great to know that people see us as an ongoing resource. Stats like this really gear us on to continue to publish new articles, videos, and our regular Drupal podcast. We've got a lot of exciting things on the horizon, so we hope that you'll keep coming back.
Thanks for visiting!
Providence Intensive Workshop Sold Out!
June 23, 2008
Our Drupal Intensive workshop continues to be extremely popular: the Providence Intensive workshop is now sold out!
There are still some seats available for the Theming and jQuery workshop and for both workshops as a package. Please hurry, though, as they're going fast!
We're working to finalize our fall schedule, please join our mailing list to be the first to hear when new workshops are announced.
An update on Lullabot's Understanding Drupal DVD
May 19, 2008
We've received a lot of email asking about the status of the first Lullabot DVD, and so I want to give a quick update on the progress of Understanding Drupal. It's taken a bit longer than originally thought since it is very much like a documentary style rather than the typical screencast training videos that tend to be slower paced and run a lot longer. I apologize for all of the delays, but I can assure you that they'll be worth the wait! There's nothing like asking seven different Lullabots the same series of questions and getting new and insightful responses from each and every one of them.
It's been a great experience to be editing together an ensemble articulation of the fundamental concepts and philosophies that drives the Drupal project. We're hoping that the Understanding Drupal DVD will provide the necessary context for interested users to form a mental map for the capabilities of Drupal as a content management system, web development framework, and social publishing platform.
Smashing Magazine Likes the Lullabot Podcast
May 17, 2008
Smashing Magazine's recent article entitled Useful Podcasts For Designers And Developers mentions the Lullabot Podcast, listing it as the top CMS podcast and saying:
Lullabot releases a fairly regular podcast on the Drupal content management system. A variety of Drupal-related topics is covered in more than 50 podcasts. Hosts often discuss the significance of technological changes within Drupal: system release issues, new significant modules and documentation projects. Both subjects for beginners and advanced users are covered. In each episode usually 3-5 people participate, discussing Drupal and related topics.
Thanks for the mention, Smashing! We'll keep on making 'em if you keep on listening.
Read the full article at:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/05/14/useful-podcasts-for-designers...
Hugging it out
May 7, 2008
Lullabot co-founder Matt Westgate with our good friend John Styn
The Sydney Morning Herald has a nice article about Lullabot that came out yesterday. James Walker and I did an interview with the newspaper as part of the media blitz surrounding Lullabot's workshops in Melbourne Australia last month. The article talks a bit about how Lullabot came into being, our philosophy, what we do, and (apparently) how much value we put in the hug. We try not to get too gushy about it, but I guess when it comes right down to it, I guess this really does separate us from most other companies.
By the way, the Melbourne workshops were fantastic! We're in the middle of another week of Drupal workshops in Minneapolis right now. And Toronto is coming up next month. Three countries in three months. I think that makes us global!
Read the whole article about Lullabot from the Sydney Morning Herald right here.
