As the explosive growth of Drupal continues, so does the eco-system of vendors and products around it. Included is the plethora of Drupal books that continues at a somewhat unbelievable pace. It seems that there are at least two to three new releases each month. Unfortunately, in the rush to quench the tech community's thrist for Drupal knowledge, sometimes less-than-stellar books are being served up before they're fully baked (cooking pun #1).
Florida DrupalCamp 2012 , held on the truly scenic Rollins College campus in Winter Park, Florida was another great gathering of the growing, and ever enthusiastic Florida Drupal Community . Rather than the typical blog post of all the great sessions (of which there were many), or the great networking (which there was), this post will focus on the some of the planning, logistics, and lessons learned from the organizers’ viewpoint. This was central Florida's fourth annual camp, which has grown sequentially in size and scope, with more than 300 people, 40 volunteers, and 7 tracks of sessions (thanks Don Vandemark ). A few highlights included our full-day beginner track, which proved extremely popular (thanks Gaelan Adams ) with more than 60 attendees. Building on the experiences we’ve gained from past years, we once again held Coding for a Cause day where we attempted to build three sites for local non-profit organizations. Our partner in the event, the Central Florida Computer Society ( CFCS.org ) was as always instrumental in our success, acting as our fiscal agent as well as providing numerous volunteers throughout the day.
In part 1 of this post I shared how I got started on the line of thinking that we as a community are planting a lot of seeds, spreading the fertilizer, but not doing much tending to the Talent crops. In the second part of this post, I’ll share just how some of the numbers support the ideas behind why newbie developers are having some issues crossing the gap, or, to go with the opening theme for this second post, blooming...
In an interview with TechRepublic , Dries Buytaeart said, "In some ways Drupal is a victim of its own success with demand for Drupal experts to build and support sites using the CMS currently outstripping supply. The biggest challenge that we have right now is scaling.
The fourth edition of Florida DrupalCamp is rapidly approaching - Drupalists from Florida and beyond will be descending on Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida on February 11 and 12, 2012 for the largest Drupal event Florida has ever seen. Registration is currently open at fldrupalcamp.org at the low cost of $20 per person - the cost will be going to up $25 on January 11, so be sure to register soon to get the lowest possible price. Admission will include a t-shirt, drinks, snacks, and lunch and access to the entire session program. Session proposals are still being accepted as well - the deadline for submitting a session is January 12, so if you're interested in sharing some of your Drupal knowledge, be sure to submit your proposal soon.
As part of a Drupal workshop that I'm teaching (the Drupal Career Starter Program ), we've been discussing Acquia Commons . Our discussions led us to decide to have a local meetup specifically to learn more about it. Since we expect a number of newbies at the meetup, I figured I post a quick video showing how to get Commons up-and-running using Acquia Dev Desktop . I found it to be a little bit tricky, mainly because the memory requirements for Commons are a bit higher than for core Drupal. The video shows how to tweak a couple of memory setting in the php.ini file. NOTE: If you're using the Windows version of Acquia Dev Desktop, you can ignore the "apc.shm_size" change - it isn't used in Windows!
The first DrupalCamp South Florida will hit the campus of Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale on October 22, 2011! The event is a community-organized, attendee-driven day designed to bring together and grow the South Florida Drupal community to learn, network, and share ideas.
Over the past few months since DrupalCon Chicago, I've spent some time working with other members (bhosmer, greggles, coltrane, christefano, lisarex, marguerite) of the community in reorganizing and rewriting the first version of the Drupal Camp Organizing Guide. Along with a new title (signifying the inclusion of other types of events such as sprints, summits, and hackfests), the guide is greatly enhanced with a lot of new information.
Let's face it - anyone with anything more than a passing interest in the Drupal community is probably aware that we're in the midst of embracing Git , "the fast version control system". As with just about everything else in our community, we are continuously jettising outdated technology and replacing it with modern solutions.
While we're fresh off the heels of Florida DrupalCamp 2011, it's a good time to take a look back and see how we did as well as try to figure out how to make next year's camp even better. Using results from our post-camp survey as well as feedback from my fellow organizers, here's a closer look at some specifics.