Theres 15 people in the alaska group..

I've lived in Alaska my whole life, but just moved to Anchorage in April. I've been playing around with Drupal for about 6-7 months. Mostly just messing around with mockup sites using existing contrib modules to see how easy it is to build cool social/portal type sites. I've yet to go live with a drupal site, but have one that's getting pretty close, actually it's just a conversion from a wordpress/bbpress site to drupal. I've yet to really get into doing any 'real' coding with druapl (ie. creating modules or contributing patches) simply because there is so much you can do with drupal without even having to code anything.

I'd be interested in seeing/hearing about what other Alaskan Drupalers are working on.

'lo

I responded some time ago when rczamor was asking about civicrm as most of what I have done has been drupal/civicrm for political campaigns.... I think this one is still up, though the candidate pulled out before it was even finished: http://campaign.jimbailey.us/
I never heard back from rczamor.....

I have recommended drupal on its own or with civicrm to quite a few non-profits, but the complaint is always the same; they want something that a third grader can use.... one outfit was hiring a new exec dir and I recommended an analysis of the technical skills necessary to manage the web (intra and inter) resources the org was looking for so as to include those in the PVA.... but that was a non-starter......

If you think drupal is complex, you should see it overlain with civicrm ;=}

The grainger site is interesting (though I tend to require that commenters register first)
The bio page for grainger needs to be done so that the text wraps, though, and I would suggest less white space in the text and one font. I would use an about page to talk about the site and use a separate set of pages to provide bios..... the right column is very long and you might want to think about shortening that up and varying that menu based on your context....

on the inlet media site the text is wrapped in your banner (see attached illustration). Drupal themes can be a bear when it comes to managing banners - the Bailey site is a perfect example... we were looking for a layered effect and the image with the logo needed to be just a bit lower, but IE tears up the layout anyway - LOL

Welcome.... I figured you just never got back to your site since you never replaced the logo, but one never knows..... was hired once a upon a time to fix some stuff up cause the "designer" had only used an early IE to view it and as long as it looked good to him, he didn't care that it was a disaster - LOL

Actually, though civicrm can have a HUGE learning curve, once you spend some time with it you can roll out pretty amazing things PDQ! Most of the hassle is in the tiny "gotchas" where you need to twiddle this or that as part of setting things up, but civicrm does not do a good job of giving you a keypunch list for a new site. But, like anything else, the more time you spend with it the easier it becomes.

If you come across another client for whom you might consider civicrm a solution, let me know and I can probably drag you through the rough spots (and there is a new version just releasing so that would be lots o fun....)

I initially started doing civicrm because I thought there might be a market for local campaigns with it, but politics is very political don;t you know ;=} I started out on civicspace but when David split the sheets all the dev work I had done was deleted by those still there....... the bailey site was done from scratch in a few days on siteground (and much of what was done was on the backside, as the paypal, contact management, googlelocation, etc all work). Inquiries I made were not very productive, but then I am really not much in a retail vein anymore.... So, I am willing to help anyone who would like to pursue using this in Alaska, either just for grins or for pay depending on the situation.....

the thing is hugely powerful (though for campaign purposes the big missing link has been easily formulating campaign reports, though that can be managed.... But when you think about it, with all the campaigns we see in the state and all the goofy little websites, there should be a market for this is you can package it nicely and get it out to the various pols.....

http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php?topic=4985.0
WOnder if we could watch this on the big screen at the pnut farm - LOL