Tri ang u lus

Triangulus was there at DrupalCon in Barcelona September 14th through the 18th. There were more than 400 Drupal developers, fans, geeks and gods from Europe, The USA, India and Africa at the conference at the Citilab technical school.

The Conference had lots of great presentations on where Drupal is going, the latest improvements and developments, high profile Drupal sites, and much more.

There was much geek comraderie, consumption of fine Spanish beer and partying at the Festival of Merced. The metro ran 91 hours straight for the festival and bands were starting off some morings at 3 am! See the Barcelona photo gallery here soon.

People are excited about Drupal and the Drupal community is thriving. Preparations are in the works for the next DrupalCon and folks are planning on 1000 attendees!

We are happy to be working with the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) in Burlington as they move their web presence to a Drupal based system. The Center for Media and Democracy runs Chittenden Community TV, the Channel 17 public access television station, CyberSkills Vermont, and CCTV Productions.

Triangulus has been involved in an ongoing Drupal development project with CCTV to come up with a system for building TV schedules, generating airtime and production reports and much more. This work forms the basis of the Pegevent module.

Go to WisdomHunter.com for a look at a great Drupal site that Triangulus helped develop. We designed the overall CMS architecture and custom content types for this site. As the project developed, a clean and organized system based on Drupal taxonomies and an understanding of the Drupal way helped keep things flexible and easily accessible. For everything to roll out in a smooth organized way on the site, we developed simple standardized content types for authors and books listing detail fields for each.

Triangulus was the trainer for "content enterers" who would be entering books, authors and reviews via the CMS back end. We participated in several brief phone conferences to help explain the system thoroughly to users, answering any questions they had. We were also involved in writing policies and procedures for this site to help clarify workflows and responsibilities.

Drupal is one of the best of breed content management systems (CMSs) out there: if your site is complex and needs to be updated regularly, you should be looking at Drupal. It's great at connecting people and communities online and it's open source: get organized, get connected, get Drupalized. Foreign Policy could have chosen any platform for organizing and presenting their blogs: they chose Drupal.

Drupal is running some great sites, Warner Brother's Records is the latest high profile site to make the switch to Drupal. Drupal also powers Air America Radio, The Onion, Next Billion, and the highly respected Foreign Policy Blog, to name a few. Vermont sites running Drupal include Vermont Commons.

This site is run on Drupal and experiments with different Drupal functionalities and pieces. The look of the site may change over time and different features may pop in or out as they are tested.

Drupal bills itself as "community plumbing." Drupal is a great tool to present content with regular updates and allows community input to a site. Drupal manages and updates dynamic sites and facilitates interaction between users and the site. Drupal helps make a site the online focus of a community.

An important feature of any solution is its ease of use. A great system with lots of features that confuses users isn't a great system. IBM notes this when comparing Open Source CMS solutions. We keep this in mind constantly and listen to clients and end users. Simplicity, ease of access to information and intuitive structure often trump new features, more add ons and glitz.

We enjoyed working with the Vermont Peak Oil Network and helping them consider options for energizing their community through their website. Their website is intuitive and easily navigable and has a wealth of useful information for their networking members. They were interested in bringing in an interactive component to allow their users to synthesize, cooperate and share to build ideas and connections online.

The VPON Regional Groups have a lot of folks with great ideas who have done valuable research and thinking on the topic of Peak Oil. Allowing their groups to share ideas and viewpoints online helps VPON members accomplish their goals and will provide valuable information to others around the globe. Some of the initial consultation on the site and the underlying architecture was done in collaboration with the Post Carbon Institue, of Vancouver, British Columbia.

Some of the local groups of VPON are affiliated with PCI and we wanted to be able to maintain connections between their site the new VPON site.

See a letter of endorsement from the VPON Editor here.

We wish VPON all the best in their endeavors.

IBM evaluated a number of content management systems recently in their Open Source Developer Series before deciding on Drupal for their collaborative web site implementation. They stacked up, compared and test drove Drupal, Mambo, Ruby on Rails, Typo3, Movable Type, Word Press and Text Pattern.