Growing Venture Solutions - GVS - Theming

MeeGo 2010 and 2011 Conference Sites

Ezra — Fri, 27 May 2011 20:55:00 +0000

MeeGo has come to rely on the COD platform as a cost-effective way to spin up event sites with a familiar set of features, which is then customized for their event, including a dynamic session schedule that supports streaming and personalized attendee schedules.

GVS built the MeeGo Conference site and the Quango Design + Marketing agency contributed the design. The MeeGo project is an active sponsor of the Conference Organizing Distribution (COD) and funded many important early COD features, including initial design and implementation of the schedule view.

The 2011 conference site included integration with the Etouches hosted registration system, which resulted in the Etouches Drupal integration module, developed by Ezra Barnett Gildesgame of GVS.

Background

The MeeGo Conference 2010 was the first global MeeGo developer community conference. The conference took place on November 15-17, 2010 in Dublin, Ireland, and was held again 23-25 May 2011 in San Francisco, California.

The MeeGo community includes application developers, platform designers, and open source enthusiasts. The conference included keynotes, presentations, BoF (birds of a feather) discussions and product/idea showcases around hardware support, platform development, app development and the MeeGo project itself.

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Certified to Rock

lisa — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:33:31 +0000

CertifiedToRock.com was created to allow community members and employers to get a sense of someone's involvement with the Drupal project.

Certified to Rock (aka CTR) uses a custom algorithm that gathers publicly available information from drupal.org, which is then distilled into a score on a scale from 1 to 11. The algorithm produces scores for site builders, developers, documentation writers, themers and anyone else who is active on drupal.org. We've also designed the algorithm to consider how successful the person is at engaging with the Drupal project.

The only barrier to entry is involvement on drupal.org: once you have a computer and internet connection, you can start contributing work that will increase your CTR score: patches, code reviews, documentation, modules, themes and support.

Why Certified to Rock works

CTR scores don't get stale. As long as one's participation continues, their score will eventually go higher.
Unlike other certification programs, CertifiedToRock.com's scoring is free and doesn't require any time commitment beyond normal interaction with the Drupal project.
Someone with a higher score is more likely to be respected within the community, and this usually means they are more likely to get assistance from the Drupal community via IRC or issue queues when they need it.

The implementation

Ben developed the code, Evelyn worked on the design and Carl implemented the custom theme. CTR was built in early 2010 on a Drupal 7 alpha release.

Updating Certified To Rock

As the project matures, we are developing more frequent score updates and adding new individuals.

Another area that has required some iterative improvement is the secret algorithm used to calculate scores.

What people are saying

The GVS team loved this:

Several people are proudly displaying their CTR presence on their personal sites or drupal.org profiles.

Companies such as Lullabot and Grammys.com are asking job applicants for their CTR score, if they have one. We think it's great that a CTR score can help support a job application, but not guarantee a job nor exclude anyone.

More information

About Certified to Rock For Drupal

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KIPP Colorado

evelyn — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 03:30:17 +0000

The Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) is a network of free open-enrollment college preparatory public schools in under-resourced communities throughout the United States. Today there are 82 KIPP schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia serving over 20,000 students. KIPP Colorado has two schools in Colorado with more planned for the future. With their growth and success came the need for a new website to further raise awareness of their mission.

With a beautiful new design in hand from Bainbridge Studios, KIPP needed a Drupal shop to bring it to life. We created the Drupal theme and configured several features, including a rotating photo block on the home page, a newsletter sign up box and an event calendar. We were conscious of setting up the site so that as KIPP opens more schools in the future it will be a simple matter for them to add new pages for those schools.

After the site launched, KIPP sent us this happy news:
"We are thrilled with the site and have already received several online donations as a result of the email that was sent announcing its launch! Thanks so much!"

We have also written an in-depth case study of the KIPP Colorado site.

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Arapahoe Community College

evelyn — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:40:46 +0000

Arapahoe Community College (ACC) website had been designed and maintained in Dreamweaver for years before undergoing a major redesign and redevelopment in 2009. The new design created a consistent look-and-feel throughout the site and integrated more imagery on key pages.

ACC and the designers determined that using a CMS would be the best way to maintain the site in the future for the sake of better aesthetic consistency and delegation of content authoring. Growing Venture Solutions was hired to help build the new website in Drupal and provide training and support for the College staff.

GVS worked closely with ACC's staff to carefully develop content moderation practices that would allow many different authors to participate with migrating content from the old site and easily integrate images into the specific page templates. In a matter of a few weeks, the staff added over 1000 pages of content.

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University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

evelyn — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:23:31 +0000

The University Center for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) in Boulder has adopted Drupal as an organization-wide standard for deploying websites. One of the intranet sites UCAR needed was a system for managing the tutorials and FAQs that help administrative employees navigate through the center's guidelines, processes and procedures.

Growing Venture Solutions worked with stakeholders from across the organization to design a knowledge management system to reduce the work for administrators and to improve access to relevant information. GVS also trained in-house web developers and designed an efficient workflow for transferring existing content into the new Drupal site.

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