Drupal.geek.nz Bevan on drupal, usability, web, open source, tech...

We are excited to announce the DrupalCon Asia-Pacific Organisers group. DCAPO intends to lay foundations that will facilitate international Drupal Conferences (DrupalCons) in the Asia-Pacific region.

Contributing to Drupal at DrupalCon Boston March 2008. Photo by Steve Krueger.

I am currently available for Drupal development contract work.

I am interested in contracts or projects of any width, height or length. I am especially interested in projects that (roughly in order);

• are socially conscious
• have other talented and experienced Drupal developers to work and grow with
• compensate at reasonable-to-good rates

I'm going to be in Auckland this Friday and am meeting up with some other Drupalers to drink, dine and talk Drupal. Please see my post on groups.drupal.org for more details and to let us know if you're coming.

1. Promote Drupal in the wider FLOSS community (which is good for business)
2. Run a DrupalCamp/Conference; which allows attendees to combine expenses if attending LCA, and organizers to share venue, admin, financial and other resources with LCA.
3. Just hang out and drink & talk Drupal! Or perhaps (talk) and (drink drupal)!? :)

I recently finished Feriana.co.nz, a simple Drupal 6 site for my fiancée and her handbag business. It uses CCK, Views and Panels 2 alpha, as well as ImageField, ImageCache and Lightbox2 modules. I also wrote Image Themer and Views Themer modules, which I contributed to the Themer package and plan to abstract in to re-usable solutions in my next Drupal 6 theming project which I start this week. I will also be demonstrating these modules at the Advanced Theming Techniques session (if it gets in – Go Vote!). You browse the still-very-alpha code for these modules in Drupal's CVS repository.

Now that I have been a full-time Drupal Developer for a couple of years, and a part-time Drupal developer for a year before that, I am beginning to recognize recurring patterns and problems in Drupal projects and people's experiences with Drupal. This is a report on my experiences, and a summary of learned lessons and recommendations for those entertaining the idea of a financially-driven Drupal project.

Together with some friends and colleagues we have been working hard to organise, finalize and publish details of what will be the two most important days for Drupal in New Zealand:

DrupalSouth: The New Zealand Drupal Event for 2008

DrupalSouth is the New Zealand Drupal Event for 2008. DrupalSouth will bring NZ's Drupal community together for the first nation-wide Drupal event and the first ever Drupal camp in NZ.

I don't like to advertise, but this might save someone $1000 USD:

If you've been thinking about coming to New Zealand from the US, now is the time to get tickets. Qantas has specials that have cut flight prices by about 50%.

I arrived in Boston yesterday afternoon, absolutely exhausted after Usability testing at UMN -- which was amazing. See the report at 9am on Monday to hear why. It was snowing heavily here this morning. Today I need to prepare for my presentation on Scalable Theming and my parts of the Usability presentation, and try open another US bank account.

Here's my photoblog to date: