Drupal

We'll be having a get-together of the Chicagoland Library Drupal Group on Mon., Dec. 7 (9:30-12noon) at the Oak Park Public Library.

I'll be doing a presentation that's been near and dear to my heart recently: incorporating WYSIWYG into Drupal. It's called, appropriately enough, "The Joys & Sorrows of WYSIWYG".

Russ Bomhof and Geoffrey Hing from CRL (who recently launched their site in Drupal) will also be presenting.

Announcement from organizer Mick Jacobsen (Skokie Public) after the jump...

It's nice to see Drupal mentioned in the context of "cool thing to do" but I don't think Cindi Trainor in her piece on Sacred Cows in Library IT gets exactly what you can do with it:

Experimenting with low-cost or no-cost tools like Twitter will only cost staff time, but implementing expensive (think federated search) or complex-but-free technologies (think Drupal) because it's the cool thing to do can be a very costly lesson for a library to learn, in terms of budget, staff time, morale and user satisfaction.

First, there's no impediment to 'experimenting' with Drupal any more than there is to experimenting with Twitter. The first implementation I ever dealt with was on my own laptop. I didn't even need a network connection!

Also, as far as complexity goes, what are we comparing it to? I mean, you can't run a website on Twitter so that's not an option.

It just so happens that an institution's website is a fairly complex organism. It's going to involve a considerable investment no matter how you choose to go about it.

The fact that Drupal can potentially make it less costly in terms of budget, staff time, etc. -- while being far more effective as a tool -- that's what makes it "cool" and why people choose it. Not the other way around.

P.S. It's kind of ironic that the above quote fell under the Sacred Cow, "Cutting-edge is better; bleeding-edge is best" -- considering that the piece grew out of a discussion on the oh-so-bleeding-edge "Google Wave".

Whitehouse.gov, the official website of the POTUS, has gone Drupal. Here's the news from the AP. Tim O'Reilly (of O'Reilly Books fame) has some thoughts on the development as well as Drupal founder, Dries Buytaert.

We had a great turn-out with about 20 librarians representing a good cross-section of both institutions and areas in and around Chicago. The discussion was so engaging that I totally forgot to take a picture!

Just got word that 26 people have already signed up for the Chicagoland Drupal4Lib BoF that we're having next Friday (9/25, 2p-4p) at the offices of the Metropolitan Library System (i.e. across the street from the Art Institute). This is great news.

Wow, the big Drupal Convention for North America is coming to Chicago in 2011. Here's the announcement from the Drupalcon North American Regional Organizing Group:

...the [Drupal Association] Board has preemptively made a decision on the location and team for the 2011 North American Drupalcon, tapping Chicago for Drupalcon 2011.

We'll be having our Chicagoland Drupal Library BoF on Friday, Sept. 25, 2pm-4pm at the Offices of the Metropolitan Library System (224 S. Michigan) in Chicago.

Cost is free but we need people to register at:
http://www.librarylearning.info/events/?eventID=5356

I'm delighted to report that we had a wonderful Drupal4Lib BoF with maybe 25-30 people (agenda here). You know it's a good sign when after the thing is over, you wish it had lasted maybe another half an hour or more!

Round Robin of Participants

Usability is a major objective for Drupal 7, the new upcoming version -- so much so that they've set up a site entirely devoted to it called, 'Drupal 7 User Experience Project' -- or 'D7UX.org' for short.

You've got to love a site which wears a declaration like this on its sleeve:

"Our UX Principles: 1. Make the most frequent tasks easy and less frequent tasks achievable. 2. Design for the 80% 3. Privilege the Content Creator 4. Make the default settings smart"

Okay, it's official: thanks to the wonderful help of our friends at ALA, we have a meeting room for our Drupal4Lib BoF on Sunday, 7/12.

DATE: Sunday, July 12 (3:30p-5:00p)

LOCATION:
McCormick Place
West Building, Level 1
Conference Center Rm #11b
Chicago, IL.