Alex UA's blog

At DrupalCamp Austin I presented a new version of "From a contractor to a shop", which I've presented at a number of DrupalCons and DrupalCamps. Attached are the slides from the presentation, as well as a slideshare embed of the same.

Join us for this upcoming event to hear about the new goodies coming in Drupal 7.

Register at http://www.panma.org/events/2010/09/learning-event-getting-to-know-drupa...
'Come for the code, stay for the community' is the newly adopted tagline for the Drupal project. At this session we'll give you an introduction to both the code that is driving the extremely fast adoption of Drupal, as well as the community that makes builds and supports this truly Free and Open Source Software project (meaning: unlike projects like Wordpress, Alfresco, or MySQL, no company owns Drupal).

What we'll cover:
Some of the main reasons that organizations and companies are adopting Drupal, including the module and theme systems, robust content creation and organization features, tight integration with most popular APIs, its user & role system, content permissions, flexible workflow, etc.

- What's new in Drupal 7. Among the new features we'll Database Abstraction Layer that has opened the door for running Drupal on Oracle, MSSQL,
Casandra, etc, to improved core media handling, the move from 'nodes' to 'entities', fields in core, and more...

- Acquia's Drupal Gardens, a hosted 'Software as a Service' version of Drupal 7, meant to compete with wordpress.com and other hosted website options.

- The Drupal community. Drupal owes much of its growth to the early adoption of the platform by community/political organizers, and these same people use their online organizing skills to enable the Drupal community to scale faster and better than most, if not all, other Open Source projects. We'll look at where the community works/communicates, how it operates, and what makes it tick (hint: talk is silver, code/work is gold).

Zivtech will be hosting an Alfresco webinar tomorrow (9/14/2010) on integrating Alfresco, Drupal, and Salesforce.com.

Please join us to find out more about how we're integrating these technologies, and get a sneak preview of the new product (Houston Command Center) that Zivtech built to deal with some of the issues our client's faced when trying to integrate these three popular systems.

Zivtech will also be hosting an Alfresco Lunch and Learn at our offices in Old City, Philadelphia on October 14th. If you're interested to learn more about Alfresco, or how it integrates with Drupal, please consider attending. And yes, as with all events we through, there will be free food/drink for all!

Here at Zivtech we love training all levels of Drupal users, from complete newbies to seasoned developers, and over the past year we've spent more and more of our time training users at DrupalCons, Camps, and MeetUps, hosting all day trainings in Philly and NYC, and providing on-site trainings for a wide variety of organizations (mostly for development clients, government agencies, and large corporations). Over the next couple of months our trainings are kicking into high gear, with a total of 7 trainings, on 7 days, in three cities (Philly, New York City, & San Francisco), and we couldn't be more excited. Below is a listing of trainings we currently have scheduled for the next few months, but please see http://zivtech.com/services/train for the most up-to-date listin. We hope to see you there!
March 10, 2010 - Zivtech offices, Philadelphia - PHP for Drupal
March 29, 2010 - Zivtech offices, Philadelphia - Intro to Drupal Module Development
April 12, 2010 - Zivtech offices, Philadelphia - Drupal Architecture Training
April 18th, 2010 - DrupalCon San Francisco - Zivtech is hosting three trainings at DrupalCon San Francisco, but the only one still available is our Intro to Drupal Theming Training.
Mat 26-28, 2010 - Eyebeam Studios, New York City - 3 Day Intro to Drupal Module Development (includes PHP for Drupal + Intro to Drupal Module Development I & II)

Zivtech is excited to host two events in the next couple of weeks at our offices featuring two of the Open Source Enterprise Content Management systems that we work with.

Tomorrow (Thursday, January 14th, 2010) from 6:30-8:30pm we'll be hosting the January meetup for the Philadelphia Area Drupal community at our offices, located at 32 S. Strawberry St, 2nd Floor. As with past meetups we've hosted e'll have two tracks going once again: a beginner track which will focus on some basic topics and questions and an advanced track where we'll all show off some of the crazy things we're doing and sites we're building with Drupal. We'll also take some time to plan for the upcoming Drupaldelphia (coming in May), and as usual we'll have beer and pizza for the thirsty and hungry amongst us. If you plan on attending please register on either the G.D.O. event or over at the Greater Philadelphia Drupal Meetup Group so that we know how much refreshment to buy.

Zivtech is also hosting the Philadelphia Alfresco Lunch and Learn from 11am-1pm on January 27th. In response to demand from some of our clients, Zivtech became an Alfresco Gold Partner, adding Alfresco's Document Management System to our core Drupal and LAMP Stack development and training services. If you'd like to know more about what makes Alfresco such a great component of the Enterprise Content Management Stack, please join us! The food is free (as in beer), and we'll be looking at: