2 years ago I volunteered to help the Poughkeepsie Farm Project update their existing web presense and turn it into something more dynamic. There were lots of possibilities of how to do it, but at the end of the day I chose Drupal, an open source content management system. Over the past two years I have been learning quite a bit as I’ve used it to relaunch MHVLUG and Mid Hudson Astronomical Association websites.
CMSs are interesting beasts, especially Drupal, as they live in a space between a wiki with very little structure, and a web framework where the skies the limit. Out of the box Drupal does almost nothing, but has thousands of optional modules that add 1 feature each in a very Unix like way.
This talk is going to cover both the technology of getting your first Drupal site off the ground: things to watch for, basic modules that you can’t live without, and gotchas that you are likely to hit along the way. It will also cover the softer side, and share the experience I had working with the Poughkeepsie Farm Project on their web transformation.
Sean Dague is the president and founder of MHVLUG. By day he’s a software engineer in IBM’s Linux Technology Center, currently focussing on the NFS Ganesha project. By night he’s an open source hacker who is especially interested in web and mobile technologies. He’s presented in the past on numerous topics.
Lightning Talks
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