Drupal for Musicians BOF at DrupalCon 2011 Chicago

Posted by zirafa on February 9, 2011 at 8:23am

Hey everyone, I thought I'd let you know of an upcoming BOF session I'll be organizing at Drupalcon Chicago. If you have an interest or already build music sites with Drupal, I hope to see you there!

BOF: Drupal for Musicians
http://chicago2011.drupal.org/forum/bof-drupal-musicians
We'll share different approaches and best practices used to build music websites with Drupal, as well as discuss ways to combine efforts like Voltron. We'll also touch upon progress-to-date, Drupal 7, media handling, features, distributions, design practices, federated social web standards, and mobile frameworks.

Comments

Drupal and music

Posted by drupero on February 14, 2011 at 4:45am

Been jamming with chicago bands for 3 years. Working on a music website project. I'd be interested on collaboration.

Hey guys, I booked a BOF slot

Posted by zirafa on March 8, 2011 at 9:42pm

Hey guys, I booked a BOF slot for Thursday evening. See you then!

Room: Arkansas
Time slot: March 10th, 5:00 PM - 5:30 PM

http://chicago2011.drupal.org/conference/bof/drupal-musicians

Thanks!

Posted by mbyrnes on March 14, 2011 at 4:00am

Thanks for organizing this BOF.
It provided a lot of really interesting insight into the importance of a website / web apps for bands.

Some things we touched on, in no particular order:

With Social Media/ do we need sites? what is the role of site?

In terms of communication, twitter is really the main way bands connect with fans best.

In terms of information and what information is highly valuable is tour dates/live performances and media surrounding the seem highly valuable to an artist and fans.

Forums/ micro communities are important to music fans.

Seems like the video options really makes sense to use youtube/ vimeo and em field. They do all the heavy lifting and embedded media field gets it on the site for a wider audience.

The sound streaming service industry still seems up for grabs, sound cloud, band camp, spotify (coming soon)
Also as digital music becomes the norm- the graphic visual experience becomes most important.

As the music itself moves into digital, the website becomes an increasingly important and personal way for an artist or band to actively brand and express themselves visual as a companion to music.

Ideas for making it easier for bands to get on Drupal:
-Install profile
-Base theme geared specifically towards it
-Mobile integration for easy blogging or updating to the site via mobile

These are great notes, Molly.

Posted by zirafa on March 14, 2011 at 6:36am

These are great notes, Molly. Thanks to everyone who came out! It was very enlightening to hear everyone's experiences and opinions, and I'm looking forward to building on some of the ideas we talked about.

By the way, here are the

Posted by zirafa on March 14, 2011 at 6:49am

By the way, here are the slides I had prepared but ended up not showing at the BOF, it is a similar run through of topics listed above.

Thanks for the great recap

Posted by ahughes3 on March 14, 2011 at 1:59pm

Thanks for the great recap Molly and Thanks for the slides Zirafa.

I'm glad I attended, the BOF has me extra motivated to build upon the things we discussed

What's next?

Posted by gusaus on March 16, 2011 at 2:17am

Looks like I missed a great BOF. Very curious to hear more about what were considered good ideas and things to potentially collaborate on.

Would love to help move things along...

Gus Austin

Those slides are great

Posted by mbyrnes on March 16, 2011 at 3:10am

I do agree with some of your assertions that out of the box Drupal can be confusing and even TOO powerful.

It is such a great tool, but with many competing BAND platforms that are right out of the box-- it may be too steep of a learning / difficulty curve for bands especially emerging unsigned bands to use.

What would be great to provide would be a

1) basic distribution with some views/ content types pre- added:
possibly menu pre populated
-event view (possibily linked to a tour map)
-embed field
-MP3 fields
-photo galleries

2) + simple theme that incorporated pieces, but allowed for fairly easily configurable pieces (like maybe an image slider- where custom artwork could be added in)

I think you are right on with the JQUERY mobile idea-- where this could really win is if the distribution was very MOBILE friendly- so the site can be as much of a calling card -- on all platforms.

3) Some sort of very well designed friendly website where this basic tool kit could be provided to bands. THINK "open source music"-- I don't really see bands finding this info on drupal.org....?

Many design focused musicians have flash sites, which unfortunately may probably be phased out with HTML 5? So some sort of up sell from a templatized band camp and between a totally custom build-- this could be possible?

Open Music Distribution Test

Posted by ahughes3 on March 23, 2011 at 4:54pm

I attended http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/zero-distribution-using-features-... and rewatched it over the weekend

I basically followed along and did the following

1.) Created http://openmusic.i45media.com using cck and views

2.) Exported my content types and associated views as Features (Music, Photos, Videos)

3.) Created my installation profile using profiler - consists of 3 files : open_music.make, open_music.profile, open_music.info

You can watch the video and download the files on the site I created here: http://openmusic.i45media.com/content/zero-distribution-using-features-p...

You can also go to http://openmusic.i45media.com and add some content, etc

I would like to expand upon this and eventually turn this into a complete distribution and something similar to what Molly mentioned above

Hopefully this is a good start any questions, comments, feedback, suggestions would be greatly appreciated

Awesome! I've got something

Posted by zirafa on March 23, 2011 at 7:38pm

Awesome! I've got something in the works that I hope to post soon too. The drush make stuff looks awesome. Any problems you ran into when trying things out? I know in the past when dealing with Features it can sometimes forget about certain variables leading to use of Strongarm and custom code.

@ahughes3 - where can we download it

Posted by chrowe on August 20, 2011 at 9:09pm

I looked at http://openmusic.i45media.com/ and it is no longer there.
It would be great to get your profile into git so others can download, use, hack, add to, and share.

I think Drupal needs an easier way to collaborate on install profiles and distributions that does not require git access.