Spent the day yesterday at the Bay Area Drupal (BAD) Camp learning some basics about Drupal, the open-source content management system.
As someone new to trying to develop websites in Drupal, the intro workshop I attended was both amazingly informative and overwhelming.
Apart from the explanations of nodes, modules, blocks, views and panels (whew), what I enjoyed most about the day was the communitarian impulse of the people involved in organizing the event. Kieran Lal, who is billed as Acquia‘s Drupal Adventure Guide, the first speaker during the session I attended, was both open and welcoming to us newbies and talked about his desire to make Drupal more widely available as a low-cost publishing option. Not just for the people in the room and their communities, but also for newspapers and magazines, which are being shuttered left and right in this era of cost-cutting.
Loved this. As an ex-journalist, I’m torn about the financial difficulties newspapers face. Selfishly, I don’t want my dead-tree Sunday New York Times to go away. And yet history tells me that journalism is a creature of evolution and will always exist in some form or another. It’s just the medium that has changed, from town crier to printing press to now blogs and Drupal.
Oh, and I’ve got a website idea … let’s see if I learned enough at badcamp to launch.
dComposing 