drupalcamppdx

Just winding down from a great day at the first ever Portland Drupal Camp. This was an unconference in the barcamp tradition, put on the Portland Drupal Users Group. The group that put the show together did a really fantastic job. It was a free to the public, all volunteer event, and was organized better than many paid events I have been to. Hats off to Grant and all the other volunteers who clearly spent a lot of time putting together a great event.

Speakers include many local Drupal wizzes, including Matt Westgate, president of Lullabot and co-author of Pro Drupal Development.

I was a co-panelist with Dan Mendell about at a talk titled Drupal in business, pitfalls, concerns, features for the business owner. Dan is the President and CEO of NeutralSpace, a new company whose focus is experimenting with and deploying collaborative technologies. He have a great presentation about his experiences with Drupal as a business owner, in many ways concluding that while is a good platform with many features available out of the box, successful projects still require a great deal of planning and talent to get them done. I then spoke about running a consulting business based on Drupal and, I think more interestingly, the pros and cons of using Drupal as platform for a web startup.

Working on launching MomHub, GreeRenter, and Newsvetter (for a client) has taught me a few lessons about the latter, although none of those sites have scaled to the point where a platform decision might really start to hurt. The basic takeaway in my opinion is that Drupal is a great tool for getting the common tasks done in an elegant and flexible manner. These include things like a user account system and managing content postings. Having these tasks taken care of lets project teams focus on adding value at the top of pyramid so to speak, not on the basics that any site needs to have. On the other hand, a truly unique idea (at the time) like Twitter probably lends itself better to custom development.