webchick.net

By popular demand, here are the slides from the Google Tech Talk I gave with Geoff Butterfield of the George Lucas Educational Foundation back in October.

This talk consists of an overview of Drupal, who uses it, how it works, and what some of its killer modules are, and then specifics about how it's implemented in the site Edutopia.org.

Here's the video:

And here are the slides: http://webchick.net/files/presentations/2007-10-08-google-implementing-drupal.odp

Note: This is something new I'm playing with, called the "Contributor spotlight." I spend a lot of time on the Drupal.org site (no, seriously. A LOT. ;)), and in doing so, often come across individuals who are doing an incredibly awesome job. I sometimes send off a little personal e-mail to thank them, but this is an attempt to be a little more public with the praise, and to help draw some more attention to these folks and their efforts. So, without further ado, meet catch.

catch is a web developer hailing from the United Kingdom, and has used Drupal since the 4.5.x era.

In order to help get familiar with some of the changes in 6.x, catch has taken it upon himself to go through the core issue queue and really help things clean up: marking duplicate and fixed issues as such, moving new features to the 7.x queue, and testing patches that need review, then marking things "ready to be committed" or "needs work" as appropriate. This is a tremendous contribution, as it helps the core development team to focus on the truly important issues, and his work will directly help Drupal 6 ship much sooner. And it's worth pointing out here that issue queue clean-up is an area that pretty much anyone with just a little spare time can help with.

I asked catch a few questions via e-mail, and this is what he had to say...

So webchick.net is finally a Drupal site. It was a bunch of never-updated static HTML files for a very long time, mostly because I didn't really have a reason to start up one of these "blog" things. Well, I found a reason: the incredible Drupal community.

As people may or may not know, my trusty MacBook Pro was stolen from my car in a "smash and grab" on Saturday night while I was having dinner. While I was out drowning my sorrows with Marci at a coffee shop the next day, Jeff Eaton started a fundraiser to help replace the laptop. And within 72 hours, $1,500 USD had been raised!! Enough to replace the window, pay the insurance deductible, cover the difference in coverage, and so on. This outpouring of support is overwhelming; you all are so completely amazing.

So I'd like to use node/1 to personally thank each of the people who contributed.