Drupal

Well, Drupalcon Boston 2008 is now over. I had a blast, enjoying my time there immensely. There were some fantastic sessions that provided great motivation for me. As I declared a few posts ago, I would like to focus this blog on helping the newcomer to Drupal.

So, yesterday was the first day of DrupalCon, a bi-annual conference for the Drupal content management system. Never before have there been so many Drupalers in one place. Ever. Over 800 people here at this conference, we hit the maximum registration capacity about two weeks before the conference started.

For me, this means that I get to experience the community first hand. I've not ever participated in anything like this before...

Have you ever wanted to get more involved with the Drupal community, but not known exactly how or where you should start? After talking with a couple people, I realized that a general notion is that Drupal (or any CMS for that matter) is just something you download to create websites.

Wrong. Dead wrong.

Drupal is a living, breathing, active and vibrant community. Drupal is a way to communicate that is easy if you don't complicate things, pleasant if you would like it to be, and damn near foolproof if you just want to post some content on the intarwebs. Drupal is becoming more like an API that just happens to have a pretty good (and getting better daily) CMS built on top of it. Drupal, and what it represents, is putting power back in the hands of the people.

Drupal 6.0 finally arrived today in a flurry of good will and great timing. Right around the corner we have DrupalCon Boston. In a Job's-like statement from Gábor Hojtsy, we now have the easiest version of Drupal ever. But seriously... it is!

Right now my site is running Drupal 6.0 (just upgraded a few minutes ago), and has been since Beta 4...

So, I still haven't heard back from FreeCSSTemplates in regards to my porting their themes to Drupal and the related licensing issues. I'm kind of torn about that, but oh well, what can ya do? Because of this, and my lack of working knowledge regarding the Creative Commons and GPL licenses I have decided to make up my own theme.

So I am in the process of creating a new theme for myself. I've been working on the concept for a bit now and still haven't quite got the mechanics down yet. However, while I'm working on this theme, I need something up on my site other than Garland. That is not to say that Garland isn't a good theme. The Drupal team wouldn't have chosen something to be default if it weren't good. :) But it is not for me.

So, I have been working in the web industry for over a year now.

I started out freelance with a couple of clients, just as a side project while still working my regular job as a cook... trying to feel it out and see if I enjoyed it. I found that I did, so I started looking for something more. I got a small taste with JR Custom Cycles and the Blue Flame Tattoo and I felt immediate gratification and knew that I needed to make the push to get more involved.