I've been on the road a lot lately, touting the opportunities that Drupal offers to workforce and economic development efforts of regions and states. Thing is, before we can get to all the advantages for regions to develop a Drupal-talented workforce, we have to educate a lot of government leaders, commissions and committees on what Drupal is and does.
The fifth annual Florida DrupalCamp is now open for registration! DrupalEasy is proud to be a sponsor for this year’s FLDC as well as being involved in the planning and execution of the camp through not only myself, but also through our network of contractors and graduates from our two local DrupalEasy Career Starter Program sessions.
Doug Hercules ( dhercjr on drupal.org) is a graduate of the 2012 class of the DrupalEasy Career Starter Program and currently working as an intern with DrupalEasy. This week I was tasked with learning how to automatically close comments on a node two weeks after the node is created. We initially looked into a couple modules that did this well, Comment closer and Comment commander , but since neither is quite ready for Drupal 7, we decided this would be a good opportunity for me to learn more about the Rules module. Maintained by Wolfgang Ziegler ( fago ) and Klaus Purer ( klausi ), this module allows you to define actions that are triggered automatically on various Drupal events as they occur. This blog post will walk you through how I accomplished this task.
Doug Hercules ( dhercjr on drupal.org ) is a graduate of the 2012 class of the DrupalEasy Career Starter Program ( http://drupaleasy.com/dcsp ) and currently working as an intern with DrupalEasy. This week I had the opportunity to clone a website from a git repository using Quickstart . Quickstart is a really quick, pre-made PHP Drupal development environment in a VirtualBox , which allows you to install a virtual machine to run Linux on your Windows PC. I've only gone through the process of cloning a site into Quickstart once before, and this time I thought I’d document it in my blog for myself and anyone else who might want to do this in the future. The general idea is this - there’s a site that I need to work on that is stored in a remote git repository. I want to get a copy of the site up-and-running inside Quickstart. To get started, I downloaded Quickstart, installed VirtualBox, then imported the Quickstart file into it.
The beginning of the New Year seems like a good milestone to provide a progress update on the DrupalEasy Career Starter Program Work Experience (WE) Drupal. Eleven DCSP grads are interning with Drupal organizations all over the country, engaging their new-found Drupal knowledge and abilities in a variety of tasks, and gaining critical experience every day. Most of the interns are between one-third and one-half complete with their Work Experience, and reviews are super encouraging. Some amazing organizations from far and wide stepped up to serve as WE Drupal Hosts, and help the eager 11 jumpstart their careeers, including the Drupal Association , Lullabot , WebEnabled , Radiant Blue Technologies , Cloud Nyne , Urban Rethink , Orange County Library System , Proctors , and DrupalEasy. Overall, the feedback from the hosts has been extremely positive, while the general reaction from the interns has been...overwhelming.
This weekend I participated in the Brevard Code Sprint for the MediaFront Module . I must admit, being new to Drupal, it did cross my mind that I’d be more of a hinderance than a help. I couldn’t have been more mistaken! The dozen folks from the Drupal community were great to work with.
The first-ever Brevard County Drupal Code Sprint took place on Sunday, December 16, 2012 at the Cocoa Village Civic Center. A total of 12 sprinters attended in-person, along with 2 virtual attendees who joined in via IRC and a Google+ Hangout. The sprint was in support of the MediaFront module, a front-end media solution that provides HTML5-based media players for supported browsers and falls back to a Flash-based player when necessary. The MediaFront module maintainer, Travis Tidwell ( travist ), could not have been more accomodating and helpful, as he participated in the sprint for 10 straight hours. The sprint was a success; we were able to improve the MediaFront’s documentation, fix some bugs, perform some structured testing of the module in various operating systems and browsers, and make some progress on several other issues. DrupalEasy was proud to sponsor the sprint, providing the facilities, drinks, and snacks for the participants.
3.. 2.. 1.. and lift-off of a new career!!! Here I go off to explore a new world that just 6 months ago I’d never even heard of! The strange blue teardrop world of Drupal! For the past 20 years, I have been blessed to work my dream job as an engineer in the Space Shuttle Program, what a ride! The retirement of the shuttles meant a new direction in my life, and since there’s not a huge demand for rocket scientists these days, it meant seeking some new doors to open up and see what’s out there. I happened upon a chance to enroll in a 10-week web development course called DrupalEasy Career Starter Program , so I dove right in not having any computer background, but realizing the web is the future! I successfully completed the class and am now starting an internship and an introduction into the community of Drupal. With all the helpful support in Drupal, it’s not a program you learn - it’s a universe of mutual relationships you join... so here’s my first step towards growing in the community.
Git’s a ripper Version Control System, and considering its growing adoption, you can’t afford to be a drongo when it comes to leveraging it. No worries though, just head on over to Sydney the day before DrupalCon kicks off, take DrupalEasy’s action-packed Blue Collar Git training, and Bob’s yer uncle! The Yank (that’d be me) from DrupalEasy is putting on this fast-paced workshop that’ll help you master Git and get gobsmacked at how much more effective you get as a Drupal developer, themer or project manager.
The DrupalEasy Career Starter Program (DCSP), a one-of-a-kind 10-week, multi-modal Drupal training program is proud to announce the graduation of all 20 of our students from the class of 2012. This is the second year of the DCSP in Brevard County, Florida and we’re excited to watch this year’s graduates become (even more!) active Drupal community members and developers. Through a grant from Brevard Workforce, the DCSP’s goal was to retrain 20 unemployed IT professionals and turn them into Drupal professionals. With the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet in 2011, approximately 8,000 skilled workers lost their jobs at Kennedy Space Center in Brevard County. Our available pool of talented IT professional was HUGE. This year’s DCSP effort received 202 applications for just 20 slots. The vast majority of the students selected had zero Drupal experience coming in. The rest of this post will give you an idea of how much Drupal knowledge and experience they have going out...