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matt's picture

Fun and Games at Denver Drupal Meetup

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.

KIPP Colorado - Encouraging Community Involvement

KIPP - the Knowledge is Power Program - is a network of free open-enrollment college preparatory public schools in under-resourced communities throughout the United States. KIPP Colorado opened its first Colorado school – Sunshine Peak Academy in 2002, and it’s second, KIPP Denver Collegiate High School, in August 2009. With the addition of a second school and plans for more in the future, KIPP Colorado needed a new website to help further its mission, with an objective of increasing support from the community in terms of volunteers and donations.

First, the theme

With a beautiful new design in hand from Bainbridge Studios, KIPP needed a Drupal shop to bring it to life. The site design consisted of a unique homepage layout, and a one and two-column sub-page layout. We started by creating the Drupal theme as a sub-theme of Zen. One of the more time-consuming aspects of theming this design was the implementation of graphic elements for the menus, including different colors for the rollovers:

We used the nice menus module for the drop-downs, and the menu class module to facilitate theming each menu parent individually.

Image links vs. text links

As is sometimes the case, design does not always serve functionality. When the site was themed and ready for the KIPP administrators to start adding content, KIPP realized that they needed to have control over the menu names, and that having to make new graphics for the menu text was not going to be feasible. We removed the graphics and styled the text as best we could, with the following results:

Greg's picture

Drupalcamp Colorado 2009 Videos - View of the Camp and People Present

The folks at SDRNews.com sent Kara Karsten to Drupalcamp Colorado to take video interviews with different folks at the event.

It's a lot of great footage and I hope you'll take the time to watch them.

History of Drupalcamp Colorado

Interview with Greg Knaddison about Growing Venture Solutions and the Camp

Ryan Szrama of Commerce Guys and Ubercart project


Commerce Guys and Ubercart

Chris Fassnacht of TopNotchThemes

TopNotchThemes is a GVS Support Client.

Aaron Winborn of Advomatic Talking About Media in Drupal


Aaron Winborn

Brad Bowman of Aten Design Group Talking About Drupalcamp Colorado


Aten Design Group

Jon Stacey, Google Summer of Code Student and Media Fan

Greg's picture

Denver/Boulder New Tech Meetup - August 2008

This was my second New Tech meetup (review of July meetup) and it was much better than last time, which is saying a lot because last time was pretty good. Perhaps that was because this was the 2 year anniversary, perhaps it was because all the demos were from TechStars, perhaps it was because I got there earlier so I could partake in the beverages and announcemens (like the wifi username/password).

Once again I'm keeping track of presentation software, browser, operating system, and this time I'm also keeping track of any software used to build their website and what their YSlow! rating is for their homepage.

EventVue Providing "community" Features to Conferences

Used Keynote and Firefox on mac osx. Blog: WordPress. YSlow: "C" (73).

EventVue participated in TechStars2008 and presented about a year ago at the NewTech Meetup. 2 weeks after they presented at the NewTech Meetup, they closed $250,000 in venture capital (they were very proud of this and challenged this year's crop to do the same).

In the past year, they've supported 28 conferences with their software (~2 conference signups per month). They signed up 9 new conferences in the last month.

The point is to make your time spent at the conference more valuable by helping you connect with conference attendees you already know or should know. They did a demo on the Defrag 2008 site where you can click on "who from my network is going" and also "invite people who aren't going" based on your LinkedIn network.

Greg's picture

The Dao of the Drupal Community

Greg Knaddison

Growing Venture Solutions

July 2008

Greg's picture

DrupalCamp Colorado - Welcome!

Greg Knaddison

greggles

2008/03/05 9:00

DrupalCamp Colorado

Best DrupalCamp Colorado Ever!

The bathrooms...

Big thanks to Denver Open Media.

Big thanks to Aten Design Group.

Do-ocracy
Drupal(Camp) is what you make of it.

tag it: drupalcampcolorado

drupalcamp

(on monitor upstairs)

Lightning!

S5 Presentation Layer.
Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System
(no, it's not SSBSSS nor S2BS3)
(because Eric Meyer said so)

<!--pagebreak--> + words = presentation!

Where are the slides?
Oh...they're already online in a shareable format.

Greg's picture

Goodbye DrupalCamp Colorado 2008

Greg Knaddison

greggles

2008/03/05 13:30

DrupalCamp Colorado

Thanks Sponsors!
aten design group
CMS Website Services
Remy Corporation
New Media Denver
Monarch Digital
A Mountain Top
Denver Data Man
Integrated Alliances
Growing Venture Solutions

Thanks In Kind Sponsors
Denver Open Media
Active State
pingVision

Thanks Volunteers
* Paul Coughlin
* Kevin Reynen
* Brad Bowman
* Kevin Bridges
* Tony Shawcross
* Al Steffen
* Matthew Saunders
* John Fiala
* Brian Choc
* Don Hajicek
* Amy Tremper
* Laura Scott
* Brian Hiatt

Best DrupalCamp Colorado Ever!

* 4 (or 3?) times more people
* 6 times more sessions
* 100000 times more bofs
*

Favorite Moments?

Feedback
Input...number johnny 5 need input.

Stay involved...

State of Drupal Survey
http://groups.drupal.org/denverboulder-colorado-user-group-dbug

Help Next Year
Please.

Greg's picture

Hive Live Podcast Transcript - Social Publishing for the Enterprise

This is a pseudo transcript I took of the Hivelive podcast from ColoradoStartups.com. When I read about HiveLive I was really curious because they are basically a hosted provider of a "social publishing platform" and it just so happens that I'm a developer who uses an Open Source "social publishing platform".

John Kembel's history:

  • design consulting firm (like ideo)
  • dodots - thin client browser/widgets before Dashboard was cool
  • hivelive: "enterprise social software"
    • tap into power of social networks
    • marketing communication vehicles
    • amplify lead generation, insights, support
    • flexible, cost effective, on demand, platform

2006 Founded Hivelive

  • Existing solutions are social software packages (blogs, wikis, forums)
  • They were either overly generic or inflexible
  • They didn't allow sharing
  • HiveLive is a unified platform - permissions and content richness "not just blogs/wikis/forums" for sharing

Existing Solutions vs. HiveLive

  • One common approach is to stitch together lots of technologies
  • People take a blogging platform, a separate wiki, a separate forum, social networking and try to build build unified package
  • The results are not good
  • So, don't staple together a bunch of solutions
  • HiveLive: Start with social networking, add on "hives" to share information

Why is social networking important to businesses?

  • humans are social
  • communities where socialization is part, but rather than being the focus, the business is the focus
  • tie business to customers - delivers lead generation, loyalty, insights, support all in one trust based relationship

HiveLive Competitors?

  • Hivelive is different in that they use building block rather than integrating point solutions
  • Configuration is via "clicking not coding"
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