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GVS has had a busy December and great start to 2011!

NYC and Denver Drupal 7 release parties

The NYC Drupal 7 Launch Party, hosted by Growing Venture Solutions, Treehouse Agency, and ThinkDrop took place on January 7, 2011.

We were delighted at the turnout and enthusiasm for Drupal 7!

Happy crowd!

The speakers were Rob Purdie (Economist), Todd Ricker (New York Stock Exchange) and Thomas Turnbull (Zagat). The organizers were Lisa Rex, Claudina Sarahe, Ezra Gildesgame, Amy Cham and Ben Jeavons.

Yesterday was the Denver Drupal User Group Meetup. In the holiday spirit, we decided to do something a bit different - DrupalGames. It all started with a conversation in our local IRC channel, #drupal-colorado. After some discussions about possible rules and game play, we decided on taking some inspiration from the Food Network's Chopped TV show.

The evening started the same as always, with beer and pizza provided by Aten Design Group. We had attendees introduce themselves by name and drupal.org user id. We took this information to create the teams - spreading out the veterans and those who joined drupal.org last week equally. We ended up with 5 teams each with 4-5 team members.

Drupal-games rules

• Each team was assigned three random modules from a hand-selected list of about 20.
• Teams were then given a little over an hour to find a creative way of combining those modules into a functioning site.
• You are allowed to download any additional modules, but the three selected modules must be the focal point of the site.

At the end of the hour, teams presented their creations to the group. Most teams ended up writing a few lines of custom code. It was really quite amazing to see how each team combined the three modules creatively.

Monday, October 18, 2010 was a historic day for Drupal when the updated code and Bluecheese theme were launched on Drupal.org. The Redesign project began a couple years ago, and its success always depended on the dedication of active volunteers.

I got involved with the redesign when I volunteered to "help with QA" in June 2009. I must have shown some initiative or something, because by September 2009 I was assisting Kieran Lal with project management duties, and Chris Strahl pitched in to help us in early 2010.

My sincere appreciation goes out to everyone who made this launch happen, particularly the infrastructure team, our awesome contract team, the Bluecheese contributors, and my fellow project managers, Kieran and Chris.

Not Your Typical Project

What does it mean to be a project manager on a major volunteer-driven site redesign?

First of all, this was not your typical project, or project management gig. When there's no pay, no budget, no schedule, it means very little can be controlled but everything still has to get done!

I look back at the project and think of it terms of phases. In Phase 1, we were relying entirely on volunteer implementers, infrastructure folks and others. Those were difficult times. There were lows. We were doing the best we could to move things forward but without the technical leadership we needed ("Please, just tell me how this should be done!").

In Phase 2, the Drupal Association decided to fund a significant amount of money to clear the blockers and get the redesigned site live. Not long after this, I joined GVS (June 2010), and one of our company benefits is that time spent on normal work tasks creates 20% paid time to work on Drupal community tasks and/or training. At one point, my "available community time" was negative 107 hours. Thankfully, my awesome teammates allowed this.

Drupalcamp Atlanta recently launched their new site for the 2010 Camp. I reviewed some of their features and found it to be a solid site. As the GVS team increases our focus on selling events with Drupal, I wanted to hear more about the backend of the site. So, I got in touch with Brent Ratliff who was the lead developer on the site, to find out how the site was built.

Adding Signups and Payment to an Event Site: UC Signup

In 2009, the site was a standard build relying mostly on Views and content types. For 2010 they needed all of the features from the previous year but also needed to charge an entry fee for the event, for individual sponsorships, as well as the ability to submit and vote on sessions. The Atlanta Drupal Users Group decided to base their 2010 site on the acclaimed 2009 Drupalcamp LA site that was released as a zip file. The LA code, updated with new module releases, handled the voting, some nice Views, helpful theme functions, context, and some of the "attendee logic," but not the e-commerce portion. Brent was familiar with using the UC Node Checkout module for building an event site, but ultimately decided to go with the Ubercart Signup integration module along with Rules and custom hooks to handle workflow. UC_Signup allows them to collect profile information from users during checkout and helps keep track of attendees using the Signup module. They also grant roles to users based on which products they have purchased.