Great day at Boone DrupalCamp

The weather was perfect for the first Drupal Camp in Boone, NC. I got a good 3.5 mile jog in this morning on the Appalachian State University (ASU) campus to get the day started. Time for the camp to begin.

Finding parking was easy, then you just followed the signs to the registration area. The day kicked off with a welcome message from Toney Carey, Vice Provost Academic Affairs and Chris Wells (@sceo), Redfin Solutions (main sponsor).

The first session I attended was Making Drupal Friendli(er) for content editors by Christina Dulude (@cdulude) who is a web developer at Duke. She talked about

  • admin module – http://drupal.org/project/admin
  • vertical tabs – http://drupal.org/project/vertical_tabs
  • pathauto module – http://drupal.org/project/pathauto
  • realname module – http://drupal.org/project/realname
  • editing in Drupal, ie don’t want to make users go to the long content listing so you can use View -> Node (edit link) under fields
  • WYSIWYG
  • Permissions

Good stuff from Dulude to get the basics of taking a core Drupal install and getting the right modules to create a better user environment.

Next was the keynote session with New Kind’s Chris Grams. Ruth Suehle (@suehle) wrote a great recap of the keynote. I never mind watching Truth Happens again, which was shown during the keynote.

Lunch was at the dining hall. Wow, they’ve come a long way since I was on campus. It was fun to eat with all the Freshman who arrived on campus last week with the start of the Fall semester.

After lunch, I presented an updated version of Creating online community the open source way. Lots of good questions and great conversation with the attendees.

The rest of the afternoon at Drupal Camp was spent in sessions. First up was Planning Drupal Sites with Cindy McCourt (@cindymcqt). She covered all the parts about why, how, who, what, where, when and other tips about deploying a Drupal site.

My final session was also with McCourt, titled The Power of Views. There are some very interesting things you can do with views. She covered basic views, how to display nodes in views, other views in views using arguments, and a photo gallery view. Awesome stuff, a little over my head for some parts, and this will definitely needs some practice.

All in all, a great day in Boone learning lots of Drupal things and meeting some great people from the Drupal community.

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