[consulting] and they call it drupalcamp -PHP Snippets and thehandbook need love

Thu Feb 23 19:27:39 UTC 2006

Why not use the boot camps as a way to produce documentation, multimedia
clips, and more code-level examples of how to work with Drupal? Let part of
this be a training session, and part of it be a production where people show
off how to make good CivicSpace sites.

Something that occurs to me is that Drupal support is really following the
same track as Allaire did with ColdFusion years ago. There are mailing
lists, users groups, online portals for documentation and examples,
meetings, and experts there to answer questions. When ColdFusion passed onto
MacroMedia, the support became a lot slicker. There were highly visible
portals dedicated to discussing advanced topics, experts with their pictures
being published all over the place, multimedia presentations describing
where the product fit into the enterprise, video with people getting up
describing new features, etc. 

Some of this is due to the fact MacroMedia was who they were, some of it is
just the demands of the market. Drupal documentation is one way to get
people's attention, but IT decision makers are a lot more sophisticated
(even at the tiny civic group level).

One thing I know is 'people' don't really like to read so much as have
people tell them what to do. Not 'people' as in brilliant thinkers deeply
concerned with the intersection of technology, culture, politics, free
markets and philosophy like you and me, but the great unwashed masses who
are amazed by Windows XP and really want to do something with this Intraweb
thing over their AOL dialup accounts. I would love to create a 'Drupal in a
Box' kit for people to download. Something that has a coordinated set of
documents and video that take you from conceptualizing a site, setting
drupal up on a server (or setting up Apache, PHP, MySQL then Drupal on a
server), designing a theme, configuring modules, building a custom module,
using PHPTemplate to override the appearance of various bits of Drupal, etc.
Something that says, end to end, here's what you do to get your Drupal
installation going and here's how you use the skills you already have to
work with Drupal. This could generate funds for Drupal.org through selling
DVD copies of the whole presentation and answer people's questions without
having to do a lot of research on the nuances you need to know to be
effecitve with the platform. We could easily do voiceovers for languages
other than English, and include subtitles in the cases of DVDs. 

Anyways, Drupal Boot Camps could be a good way to do this. You would have
lots of creative minds in the right place at the right time, and it would be
great marketing for the shops where people work. After going to Vancouver, I
know there are a lot of friendly, telegenic, well spoken individuals who
would make great spokespersons and would probably flip at the chance to do
something like this.

M

  _____  

From: consulting-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:consulting-bounces at drupal.org]
On Behalf Of Kieran Lal
Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2006 7:25 AM
To: A list for Drupal consultants and Drupal service/hosting providers
Subject: Re: [consulting] and they call it drupalcamp -PHP Snippets and
thehandbook need love

Camps are nice. I think you should do them. It makes sense for businesses to
recruit local developers at these events.

But if you write a good page of documentation then hundreds , thousands, and
even tens of thousands of people will read it and use it 24/7/365 from all
around the world. I have included a partial days handbook traffic on
programming topics alone. If every Drupal volunteer and Drupal related
business spent just 1 hour a month helping with developer training
documentation we could train thousands of developers to use the platform in
an economically accessible way.

Most popular handbook pages: http://drupal.org/node/508
12 Module developer's guide 180 80858
13 Theme developer's guide 172 99690
14 PHPTemplate theme engine 160 81897
16 PHPTemplate Theme Snippets 140 7427
17 PHP page snippets 139 43870
19 PHP snippets 131 16633
20 Drupal's APIs 119 43365
29 Actions snippets 85 1284
41 Page.tpl.php 63 27622
46 Creating a new PHPTemplate 58 34108
47 Views snippets 58 2021
57 Overriding other theme functions 50 19629
59 Node.tpl.php 47 19071
63 Theme snippets 45 11508
64 Coding standards 45 20929
81 Developing for Drupal 39 50644
85 Plain PHP themes 38 21903
92 SQL snippets 37 3599
95 Comment.tpl.php 35 11880

Cheers,
Kieran

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