After the late, late party at Miko’s last night, I wasn’t hyped to get up early on a Sunday morning a head off to a technical conference on administering and programming for Drupal. However since I needed to learn more about this open source content management system for a side project that I am working on called Ensideus.com (more on that soon), I dragged my sorry butt out of bed and headed to Brooklyn. Plus it was a good excuse to get out of going to church with moms. She has been bugging me to with her to church since Ski and the kids went with her on Easter Sunday.
The conference was held at PolyTechnic University, in the very same meeting area that housed the Blender conference I attended in October of last year. PolyTech host a number of open source conferences like this throughout the year. I missed the Drupal camp last year since it was held while I was overseas. I didn’t want to miss it again. On a side note, I need to see if we can replicate this at LaGuardia. It would be a great way to tie my students in to the tech scene and keep them aware of freelance and full time opportunities.
Anyway, the focus of the conference was on the open source system called Drupal. Drupal is a free and open source content management system written in PHP. Because of the PHP framework Drupal runs in any that supports PHP and MySQL. Like many content management systems, Drupal allows users to create and organize web content and site wide tasks with little or no programming experience. Which is exactly what we need for the Ensideus project.
I had fiddled around with Drupal in the past but wanted a better understanding of it’s full capabilities. It was a decent conference with multiple breakout sessions. The only downside was that I wasn’t able to spend as much time as I would have liked with a couple of my LaGuardia students that showed up. Understandably they were more interested in the intro breakout sessions than me. I was just impressed that a group of college kids voluntarily got up early on a Sunday morning to attend a lecture.