Ryan Price and Mike Anello from DrupalEasy will be at DrupalCon San Francisco this April with a (hopefully) full agenda.

Workshop: Intro to Theme Development

DrupalEasy is proud to announce that we've been selected to present one of the official pre-conference workshops for DrupalCon SF on Sunday, April 18. We'll be teaching our beginner-level Intro to Theme Development workshop. In this course you'll learn the anatomy of a theme, basic XHTML/CSS/PHP, and basic template modifications. By the end of the day, you should be able to take a static HTML theme and turn it into a Drupal theme. The cost for the workshop is $350 and you can sign up on the official DrupalCon SF site.

Session Proposals

We have a three proposed sessions - if any of these are of interest to you, we encourage you to vote for these sessions using the links below.

• Drupal on Your TV - in this session, Ryan Price will discuss his work with a project where one of the requirements was to use Drupal to drive the display of several televisions in a theater lobby to deliver timely information to patrons.
• 10 Tips to Supercharge your DrupalCamp - As one of the organizers of two very successful Florida DrupalCamps, Mike Anello will share ten tips that he learned from experience. Tips about finding sponsors, managing food, planning sessions, obtaining swag, and giving back to the local community will all be covered.
• Panel: The Many Flavors of Drupal Training - As professional Drupal trainers, Mike and Ryan wanted to discuss with other trainers the various methods used to successfully teach Drupal to different audiences. Participating in the panel will be trainers from Lullabot, Growing Venture Solutions, Lynda.com, Zivtech, and Chapter Three

See you in San Francisco!

While it is still fresh in my mind, I wanted get some words down about Florida DrupalCamp 2010 that took place over the weekend of February 20-21. I'll be writing up a much more detailed case-study in the coming days, but I wanted to get some thoughts down while they were still fresh in my head.

First of all - wow, wow, wow. If last year's Florida DrupalCamp showed what was possible, this year's camp shows that the Florida Drupal community has arrived. We sold out at 150 attendees (at $5/each) nearly three weeks prior to the event and eventually had a waiting list of rougly 40 additional people. Rather than completely turning away the wait-listers, we decided to do a two-hour "Intro to Drupal" session (led by DrupalEasy's Ryan Price) on day 2 of the camp that was open only to people on the wait list. In the end, more than half of them showed up for the free session (and got free lunch and a swag bag as well!)

The first day of the camp had three tracks of session, including a comprehensive beginner track with each session building on the previous. We also had an intermediate track and a special topics track where we has sessions on topics such as GIT, could-based hosting, community building, and other. Addison Berry, Drupal's documentation lead, was our keynote speaker and rocked the house with her talk on the Drupal Community and strategies for being a successful contributor.

Day two of the camp was a "Coding for a Cause" day where we built sites for both Junior Achievement of Central Florida and the Central Florida Mothers of Twins and Triplets. Over 50 people participated, including many beginners who worked alongside more experienced developers as a continuation of their learning experience from the day a. Unfortunately, neither of the Coding for a Cause sites were 100% completed, but more than a few participants have already committed to finishing the projects in the very near future on their own time. We learned alot about how to prepare and manage a Coding for a Cause day (including many "lessons learned") and will share everything we learned in a more detailed post later.

Thanks to the amazing generousity of our many sponsors, we were able to provide everybody food, drinks, t-shirts and swag over the course of both days, including a full burrito bar for lunch on Saturday and boxed lunches on Sunday. We also gave away over 30 Drupal books from virtually all major publishers. I would be remiss if I didn't mention three of our sponsors in-particular who when above-and-beyond in helping make the camp a raging success. The Central Florida Computer Society, a 501(c)3 organization, helped us with the financial aspects of the camp and also provided a number of volunteers who helped with registration, setup, cleanup, and the general awesomeness of day one of the camp. I can't even imagine how we would have pulled off the camp without their help.

Salim Lakhani and Jeff Decker from WebEnabled.com flew in from various parts of the country to help out at the camp, particularly during Coding for a Cause. They set up (and continue to provide) free hosting and SVN services for the projects and were on-site to help us troubleshoot any issues that cropped up. Without their assistance, we wouldn't have completed as much as we did.

Finally, MindComet continues to be the de-facto home for the Drupal community in Central Florida. They not only allow us to use their offices for our monthly meetups, but for the past two years they've allowed us to invite the entire Florida Drupal community in for DrupalCamps. I'm pretty sure Florida DrupalCamp 2011 be somewhere else next year (only due to space contraints!), but we all owe a huge "thanks" to them.

We've received some great feedback from the camp - here's just a small sample:

I want to congratulate and thank those that worked to organize FL DrupalCamp this year. It was truly an outstanding job with great presentations all around. I really got a lot out of it.

Wow!!! it was a great event. Next year should be even more super awesome!!! Glad the weather got nice for our out-of-town visitors. I am sure they will spread the word - Florida is "the" place to be for February Drupal Events!!!

A rainy, jammed commute in South Florida only reminds me of how much I wish there was more #fldrupalcamp.

DRUPALCAMP FLORIDA BROKE MY BRAINS. Battery 0%.

We had a number of people taking photos and posting them on Flickr using the tag "fldrupalcamp". Thanks to everyone who has posted pics so far!

(warning: shameless plug ahead...) Want to hear more about how we pulled it all off? Vote for my Ten Tips to Supercharge Your DrupalCamp session proposal for DrupalCon San Francisco.

(Originally, this post was titled "Florida DrupalCamp 2010 Quick Wrapup" - until I finished writing it and looked up at how long it was!)

In an attempt to point to some of the great things that are available using Features, I tried to look for a directory of Feature Servers. Sadly, Google was not very helpful. After some digging, I was able to locate a page on the OpenAtrium Community site called Distributed Feature Servers. This points to many of the other pages I was able to find via search.

Utilmately I created a wiki page on the Packaging & Deployment group of groups.drupal.org, which seems to be one of the hottest places to discuss Features.

Directory of Public Features Servers wiki page

Currently, there is tons of info about how to create your own Features Server, but not much about where all the publicly available features servers are located. If you know of others, please go edit the wiki page on groups.drupal.org or leave them in the comments here.

Ryan Price wasn't able to make it for this week's podcast, so we went out and got ourselves a different Ryan. Ryan Szrama, previously of Ubercart fame and now leading the Drupal Commerce project joined us for a bit to clear up the muddy waters around recent changes in Drupal ecommerce development. Andrew and Mike were also joined by Marc Ray from Right-Sprocket to discuss the latest news from the world of Drupal.

5 Stories

• What is going on with Ubercart? What is Ubercore/, Drupal Commerce? Ryan Szrama joined us to help figure it all out. Ryan's blog post announcing the big changes
• Happy Birthday, Drupal! Thanks for Drupal 7 Alpha 1!
• Dries' 2010 Drupal predictions
• Pressflow and Drupal 7
• IT World article about the current and future state of Drupal

Picks of the Week - every podcast we each pick a module, theme, or other Drupal-related "thing" that we'd like to spread the word about.

• Mike - Adjustisearch - by Conner Kelly (ConnerK)
• Andrew - Drush Make - by Dmitri Gaskin (dmitrig01)
• Marc - ThemeKey - by Markus Kalkbrenner (mkalkbrenner)

Florida DrupalCamp 2010 is coming February 20-21, 2010 in Altamonte Springs (near Orlando), Florida. Join us for more Drupal learning than you can shake a ridiculously large stick at.

Find all of these links on our FriendFeed, even the ones we don't talk about: http://friendfeed.com/drupaleasy

Follow us on twitter:

• @drupaleasy
• @andrewmriley
• @liberatr
• @ultimike
• @marcomatic

If you'd like to leave us a voicemail, call 321-441-3964. Please keep in mind that we might play your voicemail during one of our future podcasts. Feel free to call in with suggestions, rants, questions, or cold weather advice for Ryan. If you'd rather just send us an email, please use our contact page at http://DrupalEasy.com/contact