Last year I had the privilege of speaking at the Chicago CMS Expo, a yearly event that brings together experts from a variety of open source communities for learning and collaboration. In 2009, Joomla!, Drupal, and Plone folks had some great training and education tracks as well as interesting business sessions for the suits.

This year, WordPress has been added to the mix and the Drupal track features quite a few community luminaries. I'll be there in May along with Larry Garfield and Colleen Carrol of Palantir; Emma Jane Hobgin, co-author of Front End Drupal; Doug Vann and Matthew Lechleider; and Volacci's Ben Finklea. I've also heard a few rumors that a big name in the Drupal universe will be talking about the future direction of the platform... The list is pretty impressive and I'm looking forward to connecting, teaching, and hanging out with folks from various CMS communities.

If you're in the area and are interested in kicking various platforms' tires, it's one of the few events where you can hear experts from several CMS communities, rather than a few token visitors at an event dominated by one product. In addition, CMS Expo's banners are a pleasant, soothing shade of aqua. Check it out!

Good Drupal theming and skinning is hard. Really hard. Why? Often, the hard work of making a site smooth for visitors and managers is punted onto a designer who's used to working with pure HTML and CSS. In a system as flexible as Drupal, though, that's only one piece of the puzzle.

Front End Drupal is a book the Drupal world has needed for years, and its arrival is an indication of the software and the community's maturing. Rather than focusing exclusively on 'theming' (the process of skinning and customizing Drupal's HTML output), it covers an impressive range of topics needed to build the user-facing portions of a site.

Converting an existing Joomla! or Wordpress design to Drupal? There's an awesome 'cheat sheet' to help translate. Using jQuery in Drupal? Three chapters cover learning and using the library. Planning your site's structure? Covered. Building an administrative dashboard for editors? A full treatment of that topic alone could fill an entire book, but Front End Drupal gives readers a great overview and points them in the direction of useful tools that can get a lot of the work done for them. It even provides guidance for "front end" folks who need to dig into code to tweak tangly Drupal content like input forms.

The breadth of the book means that individual topics aren't always covered in depth -- if you need to start cranking out serious Drupal code or translating complex designs into HTML, for example, you'll need to dig deeper with other references. Most people making their way through these challenges, though, need a guide to the pieces and how they fit together before they can absorb the details.

For far too long, there's been no single place where these different disciplines -- the "Front end" part of building a Drupal site -- were treated as parts of a cohesive whole. With the release of Emma and Konstantin's book, that's changed: it's exactly what Front End Drupal provides.

The rumors are true. I've gone over to the dark side. While this site -- jeff.viapositiva.net -- is still running Drupal until I can migrate all the content, I'll be moving over to a new streamlined blog over the next few weeks. That blog will be running WordPress.

Why? Have I abandoned Drupal? Of course not. I spend a lot of time working with Drupal -- building sites with it, helping clients figure out solutions to esoteric problems, writing new tools for other developers... It's easy, though, to get tunnel vision. When I joined the Drupal community a little over four years ago, I was an outsider. I'd been working on Windows software for years, and had spent time with tools like DotNetNuke, Rainbow, Xoops, Movable Type, and TikiWiki. Drupal's approach to solving problems like organizing content was a breath of fresh air. After some time juggling multiple CMS platforms, I made the 100% switch and never looked back.

During the first couple of years of my involvement in the project, I drilled deeper and deeper, submitting patches for modules and then Drupal core itself. Eventually I was rewriting key pieces of the core software itself and working closely with the Drupal ninjas who'd started the project. It's pretty thrilling to get involved, become knowledgable, and have an actual hand in shaping a tool that you love to use.

So, why the switch on my blog? Two reasons. Simply put, the Drupal community's biggest weakness is its insularity. The folks who are most knowledgable about Drupal, and spend the most time building and enhancing it, are the least involved in other projects, the least likely to be getting first-hand experience working with other tools like Wordpress, Django, Joomla!, Ning, and so on. There are exceptions to that, of course, and even a degree of tunnel vision isn't unique to Drupal. Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress fame isn't spending his days cruising the CCK issue queue, after all.

But as we look to build and improve Drupal, it's critically important that we keep our field of vision wide. When we talk about improving the Drupal administrative user experience, are we carefully studying other tools' solutions to the same problems? Are we just skimming screenshots and feature lists, or are we using those tools and becoming familiar with how they work in addition to how they look?

Beyond the goal of improving Drupal, there's a second reason. It's easy to allow my familiarity with the platform to blind me to better solutions; after all, I'm the guy who cloned Twitter in Drupal just to show it could be done. The fact that a Drupal expert can do something with Drupal doesn't mean that they should, however. Forcing Drupal into tasks it's not well suited for is like using a Swiss Army Knife to cook breakfast -- it demonstrates flexibility, yes, but it's also pretty frustrating. If my goal is to blog, quickly and simply, why not use WordPress? It's designed specifically for that task, and it does a great job.

Over the next few weeks, as I embark on my migration, I'll be posting more about my thoughts and experiences with the new platform. It should be quite the adventure!

Catherine and I had a great Valentines' Day -- in addition to the usual romantic gestures I introduced her to Raising Arizona, which she'd never seen before. Pure magic: it's always gratifying to know that you married someone who finds classic Cohen brother insanity amusing, too.

And now, I'm on the road again. @quicksketch an I are heading out to Stanford to help train their internal team, and this week will be a parade of Drupaling. Sadly, I think @walkah will always win the frequent flyer mile contest.

The next couple of months promise to be packed, too; Drupalcon DC is coming up in just a couple of weeks, and I'll be presenting on API design and webservice-based site architecture. Drupalcon's growth over the past few years has been crazy: this year, tickets sold out more than a month in advance. This fall, the European Drupalcon will be held in Paris -- hopefully the venue will accommodate will match the demand.

Looking a bit farther down the calendar, there's the SXSW CMS showdown: a team of Drupal devs and designers will be competing against Wordpress and Joomla! folks to build a reusable site for local nonprofits, and a team of judges will select a winner. After last year's warm SXSW welcome for Drupal, I'm hoping we can make the site shine. And later this spring, there's the Chicago CMS Expo: a combined Drupal/Alfresco/Joomla! event that I'll be speaking at. It's a great opportunity to connect with other projects in the OSS community, and I'm really looking forward to it. In addition to the usual presentations about Drupal development, I'll be speaking about successful GPL-based business models. There's a lot of interest in this in the Joomla! world especially, since they're going through a community discussion about how the GPL impacts for-profit extension development and template design.

Never a dull moment...

I spent last week in Providence with a few of the other Lullabots, filming training videos for Drupal's popular Views and CCK modules. It was a real learning experience: all of the video/TV work I've done in the past was more conversational and casual. You needed to be coherent, of course, and not look terribly goofy, but there was no need to convey a large amount of very precise technical information while the cameras were rolling.

We also kept a live webstream going, so various friends and members of the community could peek in on the progress throughout the day. It was fun for bloopers, and I think it gave folks a good idea of just how many takes it requires to get a good shot of someone, say, turning on an AJAX pager without accidentally mispronouncing the words "graceful degradation." Also, we had to wear stage makeup.

I'm back at home now, helping clients finish a few interesting sites (social business networking, e-learning, and more). To celebrate, Catherine and I binged on the first season of Damages, a cool court-drama-action series. The main character is kind of a low-rent Jennifer Connolly, but without the personalty, but she exists mostly as a catalyst for the really fascinating characters. We'll be finishing the last episode tonight, and tensions are high...

While the post stayed up (and the contest stayed open) a bit longer than I'd intended due to busy schedules, but today I took some time and read through the awesome comments.

There are some really cool people out there doing interesting things with Drupal, and planning really exciting projects. Helping foster families connect with kids? Building collaborative tools for green communities? Connecting amateur robot builders? All very, very awesome. Figuring out who to send off a copy of Using Drupal to was tough.

At the end of the day, one project really jumped out. Webmaster Ari Davidow has been maintaining KlezmerShack since the 1990s. It's a site about Klezmer, a traditionally Jewish form of music that spent a couple of centuries under the radar, and experienced a revival in the 1970s. (I'm no expert, but I think his dedication shows: the site was second only to Wikipedia when I googled for "Klezmer".) According to Ari:

[The site] contains reviews, band listings, an international calendar, a blog, articles, vendor listings--it is one of the most immaculately messy collections of hand-crafted obsolete HTML (with some help along the way from Movable Type, bless it).

it's time to move the site into the 21st century. Bands should be able to maintain their own listings. People should be able to rate bands. People should be able to get the word out without my mediation.

That's one of the reasons the site excites me -- this is the kind of stuff that Drupal really excels at, and the kind of stuff we wanted to help people accomplish by writing Using Drupal. I think the site is a really good match for it, and I hope Ari digs his new copy of the book.

My only regret is that I can't drag an entire armload of the books out to the post office and send them off to everyone who posted about their "dream site." If any of you have updates or news about how the sites are progressing, I'd love to hear about them as they grow!

Do you have a dream web site you'd like to build? I want you to build it, too. Post your comments here, and I'll pick one to receive a free copy of O'Reilly's Using Drupal.

For me, one of the milestones of 2008 was the publication of Using Drupal, a book I co-authored along with the rest of the Lullabot gang. it was no easy task, but I'm really happy with the results. It's the first Drupal book that gives readers start-to-finish recipes for building a variety of real web sites, combining the software's core features with the smorgasbord of third-party extensions.

One of the reasons we wanted to write it was the inherent difficulty in overcoming the "Wait, how do I make sense of this?" barrier with Drupal. It's powerful software, but building complex sites with it means learning about a lot of different pieces. We -- I! -- want to see as many people as possible build the web sites they're daydreaming about, and I think Using Drupal can help some of them do that.

So, here's my question to you. What kind of web site would you like to build with Drupal? A community hub for your town? A wiki-like encyclopedia of comedy/mystery novels? An online magazine about vegetables? Post your dream site idea here, and I'll pick one of the commenters to receive a free copy of Using Drupal.

What's the catch? You have to post your idea -- and if your idea is chosen, you have to tell me how it goes when you give it a shot. I want to see cool things happen!

If there's one thing that travel in winter teaches, it's appreciation for warmer climates. I've just arrived back from the Do It With Drupal conference in New Orleans, and I'm smack dab in the middle of a Chicago cold snap.

DiWD (or 'dewd' as we pronounced it during planning meetings) was by all indications a rousing success. I wasn't deeply involved with the planning the way a number of the other Lullabots were, but I knew the conference itself was a calculated risk. Our training workshops usually focus on intense hands-on "Build a Drupal module in 3 days" style learning, and the well-attended Drupalcon conference focuses heavily on the developers and builders shaping the Drupal community. Would attendees find three days of material about the business of community building, general site management technique, and Drupal education worthwhile?

Turns out? Yes. It was a real encouragement, and an amazing list of presenters came together to make it a reality. Earl Miles, Karen Stevenson, Robert Douglass, Moshe Weitzman, Gábor Hojtsy, and numerous other luminaries shared from their areas of expertise for people trying to understand Drupal's capabilities. Folks like Heather Champ (Flickr's community manager), Lane Becker (co-founder of Get Satisfaction), and others helped those more familiar with the Drupal side understand the complexities that software alone can't solve. I'm missing many of the speakers, and the full list can be found at http://www.doitwithdrupal.com/speakers -- needless to say, though, it was a different feel than most of the Drupal events I've been a part of.

In addition to a fun session on deployment strategies, I participated in the "Fantasy Sites" portion of event, helping build a Drupal-based clone of an existing popular web site and explaining the process to attendees. I tackled Twitter, and it was definitely an interesting experience. The hardest part -- bar none -- was stripping out the functionality that Drupal really, desperately wants to give. Twitter, like many other successful 'single-purpose' sites, is all about a user experience that eliminates anything unnecessary.

Doing that in Drupal is possible, but it takes a lot of discipline. Cloning an existing site is cheating to a large extent: you can piggyback on their decisions rather than arguing, testing, polishing, and experimenting to determine what your audience want and need. I think that's a challenge that a lot of us in the Drupal community tend to punt off onto designers, and it's important to factor in.

(Of course, that doesn't even touch on the scaling issues raised when you use a full-fledged CMS to implement what amounts to a networking protocol. More on that in the presentation itself.)

All the details fade away, though: I'm stoked about how the conference went and appreciate all the awesome work that folks put into it. Goodbye, New Orleans! Hello again, Chicago! Viva la Internet!

The next few months are looking pretty busy in terms of travel and teaching and presenting. A quick rundown of the schedule, with some tentative dates:

• October 25th: DrupalCamp Chicago
  While DrupalCamp schedules stay fuzzy until the morning of the event, it looks like I'll be doing two sessions. Views 2 gets some love (naturally), and I'll also be doing Soup to Structure, a session on turning Drupal's normally fluid content model into a coherent site structure.
• December 10th-12th: Do It With Drupal
  James Walker and I will be presenting "How We Built Twitter in Drupal," a session on grafting social messaging features onto Drupal, and how to leverage them effectively. It should be fun, especially since I've used "Don't build Twitter in Drupal" as a catchphrase for quite a while...
• March 4th-7th: DrupalCon '09
  The final session lineup is still being ironed out, but I've pitched two sessions for the next DrupalCon. Building APIs That Rock is looking like the front-runner so far, and I think it'll be an interesting session. Plus, puppets.
• March 13th-17th: SXSW Interactive '09
  Final sessions haven't been announced for SXS yet, but depending on how things go I'll either be participating in one of the CMS-related panel discussions, or moderating Drupal With Its Pants Off. The idea is to hold a No-BS™ panel discussion about building mission-critical Drupal sites, helping evaluators spot the pitfalls and take advantage of the easy wins.

Late Friday afternoon, the first news broke about a project that I've been working on for the last few months. Internally, the Lullabot folks have been calling it "Project Codename," because we like recursively cheeky names. The goal is pretty ambitious: build a dirt-simple hosted service that lets people with great ideas leverage the power of Drupal.

For the past couple of months, a lot of cool things have already come out of the project for the Drupal community, though we haven't been able to say much about what was going on behind the curtain. SimpleViews, my new task-oriented front-end for the Views module, is one example. Rather than constructing content listings bit by bit, it lets site-builders make a few simple choices and get quick results. Nate Haug has been building similar tools for the CCK module; Angie Byron has been working with user experience experts to streamline Drupal's administrative interface; and Jeff Robbins has been hard at work on some amazing tools that allow site builders to customize a site's layout and CSS skins with point-and-click, drag-and-drop simplicity. Subtler stuff, like John VanDyk's recent improvements to the Views Bulk Operations module, have grown out of the tools we're building for simple, customizable administration panels.  Continue reading...