Drupal

I am teaching my Drupal 101 and Drupal 201 classes starting tomorrow night. It will be the third time teaching the classes. I keep thinking that once I get my slides set that teaching the next time will be much easier to prep for. But I'm always wrong.

The reason this time is that I've decided to move to using Drupal 7 for the class. when I taught it last winter it was just way too soon after Drupal 7 came out. I think it was released literally the week before class started. Now I think Drupal 7 is ready for primetime. I've got a few sites that I've already upgraded to 7 so I feel pretty comfortable with it now.

I'll be teaching these classes again in the winter and spring terms as well. If you live in the Chicago area go check it out!

Ah Drupal! How I think you are the most awesome! Well the White House thinks so too! As of October 25th, 2009 http://whitehouse.gov is now Drupalized!

Drupal! Its my favorite CMS and the only one that I use on the sites I setup. Chadarius.com is a Drupal site. In fact I'm so lazy with themes that I still haven't really changed the default drupal theme here since I upgraded to 5.3 over a year ago. One of these days I'll get around to it!

Chicago has its own great Drupal user group at http://cdmug.org. Those guys are putting on http://drupalcampchicago.org.

I had a great time at Flourish. My Dad has been learning about Drupal for a while and since a Drupal person (Hey Angela!) was presenting, I thought he might be interested in spending some good Father/Son time together. He really seemed to enjoy himself. On Saturday it was really all about meeting up with the rest of the Ubuntu Chicago Loco. What a great group of people! I really enjoy our enthusiasm for open source and Ubuntu. I enjoyed the Chris DiBona during his key note. It was interesting to hear more about Google's Summer of Code project. Especially after hearing Angela Byron's talk on Friday. She was, by far, the best speaker of the weekend. I wish everyone had the chance to listen to her talk. You might think to yourself... Women in Open Source? Why would I want to go to that? I'm not a women. Well duh! That is exactly the point. It turns out that women make only about 1.5% of the participants in open source projects. That is so much lower than I would have guessed. Her talk on tolerance and openness in a community really hit home. This is exactly why I think that Ubuntu is so successful. The Ubuntu community, much more so than other Linux distro's that I've dealt with, is so much more open to all kinds of people. The attitude from Ubuntu is everything. Linux is Linux. We are all using the same code more or less. What makes a distro for me is the community backing it. I think Ubuntu has a lock on community right now, and I want to make sure that it stays that way and even gets better.