Drupal

Hoo baby, they got a big crowd for the Drupal Camp Chicago. Easily over 100 attendees!

We had so many people at the Library BoF -- most of whom weren't librarians -- that I had to shift into "presentation" mode -- with a wonderful assist from PLA Webmaster Doug Dawson, Brian Smith from Palsnet.info, a librarian from Brookfield Public and the owner of a development shop creating a website for one of the regional library organizations in Washington State.

If I missed anyone, please forgive me. We really could have gone on for another hour.

Kyle and Matthew along with a few others from the CDMUG are putting together a Drupal Camp Chicago.

It's a two-day event running from Friday (10/24) to Saturday (10/25). Location is the UIC Innovation Center at 1240 W. Harrison in Chicago.

Tracy Sutherland gave us a sneak peek of the new site, then under development, at the Drupal4Lib BoF at ALA Anaheim in June.

Now it's been launched for the whole world to see:
https://www.amherst.edu/library

Nice job and Congrads to all!

We got a great crowd of around 20 people for our Drupal 'Birds of a Feather'. The above is a shot of everybody in the BIGWIG Bloggers' room -- just before we got kicked out by some group from YALSA (bums, we'll get even)!

(We then proceeded to the next available empty room and had our get-together there.)

First up on the agenda was setting up the Drupal IG, making sure we have enough signatures and asking for volunteers to serve as Chair and Co-Chair. For the first year, Leo Klein (i.e. me) graciously volunteered to serve as chair and Ian Chen as co-chair.

A couple people from LITA have helpfully suggested that we set up a Drupal Interest Group (IG).

I think this is a great idea since, as I understand it, IG's get a slot at one of the officially sanctioned meeting rooms come convention time.

Aaron Dobbs, Mary Taylor and our friends at BIGWIG have been very supportive in allowing us to have our Drupal4Lib BoF in the Bloggers Room but by having the IG, we can do a couple of things more, including as I said, maybe getting a room of our own next time round.

I've got a neat job building a community site for one of the library organizations here. I'll talk more about it at our Drupal4Lib BoF in Anaheim but basically the idea is to promote online collaboration. Needless to say (for those in the know), I'll be making great use of Drupal's Organic Groups.

I got a number of enthusiastic and helpful suggestions on the Drupal4Lib list as to when and where we could hold our Drupal4Lib BoF.

It's increasingly looking like it'll be Sunday after the LITA Top Technology Trends in the LITA Bloggers' Room.

I'll be doing a follow-up to my talk on Drupal at UIC on Friday, 5/23 5/30 (1:30p-3pm) in Burnham Hall 308. The title of the Talk is: "The Wonderful World of Drupal Modules". Basically I'll go into some of the more important modules: CCK, Views, ImageCache, Panels, etc.

More info here: http://tinyurl.com/6exfs9

UPDATE: I had to postpone the talk by one week -- to 5/30.