Introductions!

I am Karen and I think Drupal is the Best Thing Ever. I manage small sites, and some revolve around a community while others simply take advantage of Drupal's content management. It would be great to do this for profit because it would allow me more time to do what I like: tinker with Drupal!

hi everyone, this group sounds fantastic!

i suppose most would consider me a Drupal "master", though i still know barely anything about some parts of Drupal, and many parts of web design, CSS, JS, AJAX, etc, etc. i don't think the "master" vs. "apprentice" distinction is a single bit, it's a whole multi-dimensional spectrum.

that said, my strengths are that i maintain a bunch of the contrib modules that run on drupal.org infrastructure (project, project issue tracking, cvs-integration, signup (here on groups.d.o), etc). i've also contributed a lot of patches to core, and am among the 2 most clueful people about CVS around Drupal these days. i designed and wrote the new release system and before that, the CVS repository access control system for drupal.org.

i've been working for the Condor project for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Computer Science Department for about 12 years now, though i've been living in Oakland, CA for the last 5 years.

when i'm not hacking code, i study and perform a lot of music. i direct Bateria Lucha, a brazilian percussion ensemble here in the bay area (my first drupal site and the reason i got started in this whole mess!), i study north indian classical music at the Ali Akbar College of Music (with maestro Ali Akbar Khan), and i do a lot of other musical projects, too.

i'm also a revolutionary socialist, and have been working on a project to convert the website for SocialistWorker.org, a newspaper i help write for and distribute, into a drupal site.

so, between my day job, my band, and my political leanings, there are ALL sorts of drupal things i'm interested in: software development, revision control, event management, location stuff, news publication, multi-media stuff, you name it. ;)

i've been hacking drupal code for just under a year now. i taught myself php, SQL, and the Drupal API in that time (with some help from other drupal developers, and i still make heavy use of the docs[1]). it's really not that bad, once you get into it. ;) the quality of drupal core, and the abilities of the core development community is really fantastic. i was totally hooked -- it's been such a joy to surround myself with a whole new set of clueful people to learn from, new problems to solve, and interesting code to work on.

i'm also thrilled about this group, and really hope to help train some aspiring drupal ninjas to also become project* ninjas! ;)

thanks,
-derek (dww)

[1] my handy reference:
http://drupal.org/handbook
http://api.drupal.org
http://us2.php.net/manual/en
http://dev.mysql.com/doc
http://www.postgresql.org/docs

hi all

for my day job, i work with mobile stuff - building wap, sms, video streaming, realtime billing systems and blah blah for telcos.
I've done alot of php over the years, and i'm a bit of a postgresql ninja - mysql i haven't used much.

I've contribed a few postgresql table defs to various modules on drupal.

i'm keen to help out more, but not sure where.

Hi, I'm Lyle.

My company decided that it needed to update it's osCommerce website to something more maintainer friendly, so now we're writing an ecommerce suite for Drupal. We felt that the ecommerce module didn't do things in just the way we wanted them, so we have to create something that would, which we lovingly call the Übercart. As an added bonus, we're going to let the general public be able to make it whatever they want as well. I've only been working with Drupal for a few months, but I've learned a lot through reading the source code and extending both node and taxonomy to fit my needs.

I'd like to be able to share some of the things I've learned and get back some wisdom in the process.

Übercart -- One cart to rule them all.

Drupal Dojo is an interesting idea. Can definitely relate to the idea that #drupal can be a little overwhelming.

Will be watching the goings-on here with much interest. Cheers.

I'm Dave from Calgary AB. I got into Drupal a few years ago when I installed CivicSpace for my Provincial Green Party. My skills are mostly in the areas of implementation and customization. I've also just begun to start a full time Drupal Development business called CommunIT.ca.

I'm looking forward to learning from you Drupal masters.

dave hansen-lange

Hello everyone,
I'm Corey, from Louisiana. I'm a somewhat recent graduate with a BS in Computer Science. I've been doing PHP/MySQL development for the past 3 years and toying with Drupal for the past 2.

I want to get into Drupal module development, because I have a few ideas for useful modules. I have large chunks of time being freed in my schedule, so I may begin submitting more patches for contrib modules to learn how things work.

This group looks useful, and hopefully we can all benefit from it.

Hi, all. I'm Mike.

I've been developing software for 20+ years, mainly focused on PC platforms and Microsoft Windows, but have always tinkered with other things (like unix/linux, apache, etc.) (This is my way of saying that I was never a platform zealot - tools is tools - best one for the job, etc.) I've moved in and out of consulting over the years, and I'm now a full-time consultant. I guess I'd categorize myself as a Drupal intermediate developer, but a master Windows/Win32/UI developer :D

Over the last several years, I've been doing more web-based development, starting with hand-rolled server and client code, moving on to using various CMS systems, and have been working with Drupal exclusively over the last year.

I've rolled out several sites using Drupal, and (naturally!) I have been working on custom modules for my sites - some of which I think may be useful to the community at large. So, I'm working on getting these hosted on drupal.org's CVS repository.

My new, Drupal-based site serves as a web presence for my company, and as a way to give back to the Drupal community. It has a number of Drupal-related posts and modules available, and I've assumed a maintainer role for the orphaned directory module.

I'm looking forward working with Drupal and the Drupal community.

Cheers!

I'm Chris from Minnesota, though I'm not a native so don't read that as menaSOtah. I've been a "computer guy" for the last 13 years, but a programmer for only the last 3-4. I came across drupal because I was looking for a solid codebase to build my friend's social website on and want to learn something that was already "mature". Drupal fit the bill. I've built 4 sites on top of drupal by now.

My current projects have taught me a lot about XQuery, XSLT and other XML based languages. I'm hoping to learn a lot more about Drupal through this effort. I haven't heard much about when the meetings will take place. I'm hoping they aren't during work hours. If so I will have to withdraw my application.

I learned about drupal when trying to set up a school group website a couple of years ago. I wanted a program that would make it as easy to design a site as designing my high school newspaper had been with quarkxpress. I thought dreamweaver might do that but quickly discovered that it only made things marginally easier. Finally I happened on drupal which was the closest thing I could find to a program that would let someone with no computer experience set up and customize a site. But drupal was also frustrating. Despite all the functionality there was always one last constraint that you couldn't get around. It seemed as though it was so close to being that miracle program that lets you make a site just the way you want it and yet a tantalizing gap remained. I gave up on my hopes that I would be able to find something perfect that wouldn't require me to learn how to do programming. I started teaching myself the tools necessary to use drupal and have so far gotten through the basic tutorials on making modules and using javascript with a decent level of mastery. I would like very much to gain real confidence with the system through this group and very much hope that I suit your needs. One thing I am quite interested in is the development of the wiki module. Mediawiki has a clean canvas appeal that is similar to what I loved about quarkxpress (in a different context). Adding that feel to drupal will bring two great worlds together.

I feel kinda out of place in the midst of all these intelligent, technical people who have signed up. I have no interesting achievements like everyone else. I am still wondering how I can be of any help at all.

Hi Everyone,

My name is Jason and I'm a Drupaholic. I'm a Computer Science graduate student at the University of Guelph in Ontario Canada. I'm from Brampton Ontario, but I live in Guelph when I'm doing my school thing. I started using Drupal in September 2005 when I was given the job of maintaining the department Website. My fascination and obsession with Drupal only increased with time. As I continued to learn more about Drupal, I became the guy that would bring up Drupal in every social gathering. I've read Dodge's book on Drupal cover to cover and I'm currently reading the Drupal articles from IBM DeveloperWorks.

I was given the honour of redoing the department website and this time I want to do it right. So this will be the "project" that I will be contributing to this Dojo group.

I work as a web developer part time, and take photos when I see something pretty. Sometimes when I'm bored, I work on my masters thesis and write research papers.

Many tech companies coughIBMcough look fondly at anyone who gets involved in open source projects. I want Drupal to be the open source project that I can get involved in. Hopefully I can learn enough about Drupal to start giving back to the community in a more concrete fashion. Maybe even land a job working with the OS-CMS that I love :)

Wow! This group has really exploded in a very short period of time. It looks like it's going to be another group that overwhelms me in e-mails. :^( I'll just deal with it, I guess. :^)

Okay, I'll come out of the wood-work and introduce myself. My name is Jason Flatt. I started pursuing a career in software development about 20-ish years ago and got side-tracked into other things. I've spent the last 12-ish years being a computer service and repair consultant & network administrator (and dabbling in database administration and programming with various languages), and the last year desperately trying to get myself back on the software development track.

During my time sysadmining for businesses in Las Vegas, NV, I've noticed a definite and growing need for quality software that is flexible and doesn't tie a business' hands to something they don't want or need. I have been searching for a way to make that happen, and last year about this time, I made up my mind that I was going to use Drupal as a web application framework to start pursuing some of those areas. So far, all I've been able to do is to create one module and design a theme that has yet to be finalized and see the light of day beyond one private site. I've been working on upgrading the theme for Drupal 5.0, and it's almost ready. I've also recently discovered that I suck at taking ether and creating stunning visuals. :^( So I may have to partner up with someone or get a job (not really my M.O.) to really make this all happen for me.

I'm not a Drupal Ninja, though I know a lot about it. I'm also not a PHP Ninja, nor a CSS Ninja, though I've got a good grasp of both of them. I used to be an HTML Ninja, but that was before 4.0. I'm not a Javascript or AJAX Ninja, and have very little clue about either of them. So I'm learning a whole bunch of new things all at once. I do consider myself to be a (extreme?) power user, but a beginning programmer. I suspect that is because of my last years of experience and that it will change that with more time and experience in programming.

My name is Omar Bickell and I live in Montreal. I've been using Drupal since fall 2001 when we used it to replaced a proprietary CMS for the cmaq.net (aka quebec.indymedia.org) project.

I have since co-founded a non-profit called Koumbit.org that brings together local activists and geeks with the aim of providing affordable ICT services and creating a platform for individual and collective economic development. While Koumbit does a lot more than Drupal, this tool lies at the heart of our development strategy.

Anyway, I love the idea of this group and look forward to seeing it progress.

Hey everyone, I'm Michael and I'm from Northeastern Ohio... While I've been using Drupal for a little more than a year now I am now feeling the push to try to get a few projects that I have been working on off the ground; to do that I need, and want, to learn how to code under Drupal.

Before becoming a Drupaler I tried a fair number of other Open Source CMS packages including (but not necessarily limited to) e107, various *nuke flavors, Mambo, Joomla, as well as a blogger or two. Each time I found myself asking "Why can't I do this?"... Hindsight is always 20/20 and I wish I would have tried Drupal a long time ago.

I've been doing PHP for better than 5 years now and I would consider myself an intermediate to advanced programmer, however I have always had a fair bit of trouble with other people's code... usually it;s a matter of style, but with Drupal's code standards (which are real close to what I have chosen to do on my own) I have found it increasingly easier to actually read and follow what is going on in the Drupal codebase. Hopefully that will just get easier for me in the future.

When I first really started giving Drupal a good hard look to see if it would fit my needs I was pleasently surprised by the very items that seem to confuse/turn off some people... The difference in terminology, the fact that "forums" are built in (no 3rd party app required), and the "for geeks, by geeks" attitude. In fact, the decision was made easy when two features in particular were already in the core without any 3rd party add-ons necessary... Multisite functionality and a configurable and expansive ACL layer. No, they are not perfect... but they are more than adaquate.

Well, there you have it in a nutshell... I'm an experienced user, but n00b developer... Let's see what can be done about that.

I run a small web development company in Maine (by small I mean - just me), and I just started working in Drupal about a month ago. I'm not a super CMS expert, but working with Drupal instead of Mambo/Joomla has been a great experience.
I've started messing with theming and the Forms API for some small sites. I have been working on a site for the Media Bloggers Association, www,mediabloggers.org, which is in its infancy and is a kind of on-the-job Drupal training project.
I look forward to learning as much as I can here, and helping in whatever small way I might be able to...

Hello! I'm Travis Cooper, with Beaver Hill Productions. We're a two man production company in Coquille, Oregon. We are producing a brand new kind of fishing show. (Sorta like Mr. Rogers takes you fishing.) It's nonredneck, and the host don't wear no NASCAR uniform while he's trying to peddle speedboats at you! hehehe

I worked in television for a long time, and then stepped away right as nonlinear and DV was becoming mainstream. I worked as designer and digital printing guy, until I found myself in some kind of CSS dementia and drove my self crazy and became a long haul trucker, and then..... Well, and then after 300,000 miles I healed my inner nerd, became a roving design snob, again and wound up back in TV production with some really good people.

Now, we're going to be producing a site where you can watch the whole shows online, and if you like'em we'll sell you the DVD along with a free HD download for a really nice price. My business partner and I want this site to be a real destination for people fishing in the Northwest and exotic locations throughout the world. So besides making a buck, we really want to provide some detailed and useful information that is relevant to many different kinds of fishing people.

About 18 months ago, I worked with Drupal on a couple projects, and for some reason we just didn't fit together. When we started to develop our site this month, I forgot about my brief flirtation with Drupal, and sleezed on over to Joomla. Well, Joomla is a fickle lover. First it bitch slapped me a couple times, and then it tried to pimp me out on the street. Three embed nightmares and two high maintenance shallow templates later, I was abandoned and left in a battered geek shelter with no where to turn.

And while there, in a 12 step JA program I was pulled out of the Ghetto by my old friend Drupal. And let me say its amazing what Drupal has become thanks to all you fine folks out there. So with Textwrangler, Transmit and Navigat back at my side, it looks I found Drupal after all!

In all seriousness, though. I'm no expert PHP developer by any means. Maybe in a couple years, but for now I'm happy with my handcoding HTML/CSS skills and putting stuff together.

We're entering a brave new world here in new media and internet content production. And for all of us people trying to get ahead a little help for the people can go along way. A lot of people have helped and contributed to bringing me up the line, and I hope there's something in my skill areas I can do for you all.

A pleasure to be here, and you all have a great day!!!!

Travis Cooper
Beaver Hill Productions
Coquille, Oregon USA
http://beaverhillproductions.com

I am frome Sweden and living in Malmö.
I am a x-plummer.
--- a x-welder
And now working with horses.

I am dyslexics and loves writing stories. That´s the reason why I started a computer.
I have runned sevrel horse events and that was the reason why I learned html and css.
So during working hours I never see a computer and I have been using drupal since 4.5.

I think DOJO sounds very thrilling and I would like to learn more about theming and learn
howe I can be a tester for 5.x.

Hälsningar
Sten Sandvall
DysleXtiskt kebabstuk

Hello guys/gals, I'm Joon. I live in NJ. Been working with Drupal for about 10 months now. Before then, I dabbled with other random cms's for about 3 months looking for something that worked for me. This was a big jump as it was all Dreamweaver creating static .html files before all this.

Thanks to Drupals' clean coding standards, I've learned a decent amount of php. Although I haven't created a lot of themes, I feel competent creating themes from endless experimenting. Here's one for Drupal 5 that I'm still working on. It'll be available for download when the time is right.

I'm stronger on the design end but it's been lacking lately from learning all the technical aspects of Drupal and web-dev in general. My aim is to hone my design sensibilities while knowing enough to implement the back-end coding.

I'll help out where I can and hope to learn at the same time.

Hi! This sounds like a great idea. I hope I can participate at some level. I don't think of myself as drupaler just yet, but I am slowly getting a feel for how the code hinges together behind the scences.

I have four out of five sites up on Drupal and I have just done my first real customization (beyond theming, views and using contributed modules) by tweaking the forum module to include an "access forum" permission. It felt so good to get something to work the way I wanted it to for a change.

I am a perl hacker and I am puzzling over how to convert all my perl apps into drupal. Do I use the ecommerce, views and cck APIs or do I keep the same database and just write a drupal module to access it?

Not sure at this point. But I sure would appreciate seeing how others are answering similar dilemmas.

Katrina

ambereyes.net
connectdc.org
katrinamessenger.com
reflectionsmyst.org
aerianna.com (test site only)

Hi, my name's Nick, I'm from South Africa, I am fairly new to PHP and programming in general, though I have learnt all the basics already. Like "arphaus", I am a drupal dabbler who is seeking mastery. I am currently setting up my first drupal site, narutomonkey.net. It will be fansite, with fan downloads and a phpbb forum as its centre.

Hello all,
New to Drupal, and recently reinvented as a web designer after a successful career in IT (systems analysis, business analysis) with a large multinational corp. Into photography too.

I am happy and excited to participate in this vibrant community.

John Lowe

hello! i have been using drupal since the summer of 2005, but most of my work has been spent on theming rather than module development. my "day job" has been working for the genocide intervention network, where i not only do website development but also public relations work and member organizing. yeah, we're a small group.

so consequently, much of my time is simply spent building sites for the organization -- for which i need to do a lot of theming, but usually (especially post-cck) not a lot of module development. some of the sites i've developed so far are:

• darfur scorecard, which was my first big cck+views project. the theme was built on spreadfirefox with some niftycorners folded in. also uses service (delicious, digg, etc.) links module.
• time to protect, which i only had about a week and a half to build (and as such the theme has many bugs which you may discover). events, google mapping, civicrm. also my first site with a flickr badge.
• sprint for darfur, a SUPER fast-and-dirty site that i almost didn't list. an oh-so-slightly modified version of andreas03.

you'll notice that the main genocide intervention network site is not drupal. i have been overseeing development by an outside firm of the main site in drupal (so that i can work on these other sites and, you know, do the non-drupal parts of my job). we hope to launch it...soon. yeah.

an unrelated project of mine is for a commercial site that sells titanium wedding rings. this site has only been slightly modified in the past few years, and the design is circa 2000 (the site went up in 1995). it is not dynamic in any meaningful way, and calling the code "semantic" would be a stretch. so the project is to get it into drupal and get the products into the e-commerce module. because of some idiosyncrasies in the pricing, this is going to be a challenge. so any projects relating to e-commerce or ubercart will be ones i'll be watching.

i do have a personal site, but i have barely touched it -- all my energy goes into these other sites. please forgive the ludicrous theme. i'm just now beginning to build a more-respectable site in 5.0 on a new web server, but there's not much there yet.

as to my work for social change rather than pocket change, much of the time i have to dash things out quickly, and so don't get around to making them contribute-worthy. i'm hoping joining this group will motivate me to start doing that.

hey all,

I'm Jason, and I've been lurking around the Drupal community for about 2 years (with ample time off for being a student). I try to stay up on all the latest happenings and such, and have always wished I knew enough (and had enough time) to start giving back to the community in a meaningful way. I'd also like to gain some mastery so that developing sites doesn't take me so dang long!

I have two current site projects. One is a simple brochure site that was just launched, http://thecycletest.com, and the other is a long-time in the making site for a music group I'm in. I am constantly thinking of new things to use drupal for though.

In terms of module development, as a researcher I am particularly interested in the evolution of Laboratory Information Management System (LIM) functionality for Drupal (probably a LIMS-Drupal distro), and reference management functionality including the biblio.module and automatic record parsing (a la CiteULike.org).

Very glad to see this group come together!

Hi Josh, and esteemed fellow Ninjas and Ninja wannabes..
I've been a fellow practioneer in drupaland for about a year and I've founded Linnovate.net (http://www.linnovate.net) an israeli company that specializes in drupal and community oriented infrastructure.
We've helped build the local drupal community site - http://www.drupal.org.il and have built our little community which is growing nicely).
I love the Dojo idea because I too am in the constant look for good drupal talent.

I'm more in the business side of wooing new customers and I constantly guide my white to green belt ninja wannabees across projects.
I'd be happy to participate in any local or global effort and am constantly looking for growth opportunities and interesting partnerships.
One of the most needed resources for a local entrepreneur is decent courseware.
I want to start teaching drupal in local technical collages here.
Maybe the dojo can put that in one of it's missions and thus create a kickass course for the masses.
I need to study the current documentation activities offered and then I'll see what I can contribute to spark that initiative.

Lior

Linnovate - Israeli drupal services
http://www.linnovate.net

Hello, all.

I'm Justin, and if it weren't for the pesky web designer lurking in the back room of our office, I probably wouldn't be posting this intro right now. A few months ago, he decided to start using Drupal to manage the content of our company website in hopes that it would make life easier for everyone by eliminating the need for our content writers to work with us IT types to get their materials where they need to be. Bless that man. Works great.

I actually come from the IT side of things (first as a sys admin, now in management), but I help with some of the lesser PHP needs on the side when I can. I love this Drupal Dojo concept almost as much as I love the name. Seems that it will give those of us who've dabbled in the past the focus we need to really learn how to use and abuse this great product, and I'm looking forward to learning (and, eventually, contributing).

Admittedly, my PHP skills aren't as great as they should be, but they're passable. If I can contribute anything up front it would probably be my own experiences with online learning... Maybe sharing the stuff that did and didn't work for me might help finetune this effort for everyone? Who knows... Regardless, I'll be following along.

Thanks for this,

Justin

Just thought I'd go ahead today and throw my hat into the dojo as well. I'm Edd, and I've been a web designer/developer/codemonkey in some form or another for the past decade (plus a few), have worked for several companies as well as for myself, developed multimedia apps with director before flash came out (shockwave, anyone?) and had a handle on php back when it was a bunch of CGI scripts called personal home page tools - I actually had to talk the ISP I was using through installing the extensions so I could use them!

I'd found drupal a while back when scouring for a solid, open source CMS to use for my current employer, and I'm now looking for any excuses I can find to use Drupal for everything I work on! I've started to rework my personal sites when time permits with Drupal and still have a ways to go, but I'm looking forward to expirementing with the templating and layout control.

Hi all,

My name is Marco Carbone and I'm perhaps a feral Drupal coder who is looking to be tamed. Specifically, I ran the Internet operations of Nevada's Question 7 campaign (the Regulation of Marijuana Amendment) and used Drupal for the web site (http://www.regulatemarijuana.org -- alas, no longer fully functional but still there). I consider myself more of a coder although I did the theming for the aforementioned site, but spent most of the campaign developing and maintaining several custom-built modules.

My reasons for being here are several-fold: 1) I'd like to continue to work with Drupal as a full-time job in the non-profit and political arenas, but am not connected with anyone in the community; 2) I'd like to contribute to ongoing work on the Drupal core, and maybe even in the service of reason #1; and 3) I have several tools that I built for the Question 7 campaign that are way too customized to trivially become contribs, but with a little bit of work could be generalized. I have no idea if such things are already out there or in progress, but I built modules for home phone banking over the web (which was used for hundreds of thousands of calls), barcode-enabled data entry for walklists, quality control queues, and statistical reporting mechanisms. With a contact lists of all 1.3 million Nevada voters, we didn't use CiviCRM so all the above modules were constructed to work with a Sugar-based CRM. By connecting these modules to CiviCRM (and there were others but these are the biggies) and generalizing how surveys are constructed, etc., these could turn into cool contribs. My problem is that 1) I haven't worked within the community and 2) I need to make a living, so I guess that's why I'm here -- to learn to become a productive member of the Drupal community, rather than be an outsider.

On a personal level, I live in Las Vegas, NV and before I came out here I worked at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society developing http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu, an experiment in online education using shareable bibliographical "playlists." (But that's neither here nor there, since we used Jakarta Struts.) And before that I was a student. So that's about all. Oh, I have a personal site at http://crazymonk.org.

It's great to be overwhelmed by all these introductions!

I like what you've written about apprenticeships. I have an apprentice starting with my business this year, but he's not on-site and there will be challenges I'm sure. It seems like a good idea to get involved here and see what we can offer and learn.

This group looks like just what I was looking for a year ago when I first started with Drupal. It was a brutal learning curve, but I think I finally "got it", and built a site for a local non-profit, played with it for some personal projects and recently picked it up again for a new site I've got in the works.

For my day job I work for a enterprise software company developing UI for their web-technology-based applications - including a rather well known CMS product.

Though I've some experience with PHP/mysql/apache, I've spent most of the last 10+ years on the client-side, doing UI development in mostly html/css/js/etc., on large commercial sites and web applications. I've worked on the theming/templating end of lots and lots of frameworks and done some front-to-back (or is that back-to-front) web projects in both perl and php. Recently I was re-cast as Ajax developer, which means I do the same as I always did except now with more javascript closures :)

I dont expect to be digging around too much in the Drupal core, but themes and some module development are definately things I'm interested in getting into in more depth. I'm also interested in best practices and tips on running a mission-critical site on Drupal.

I'm glad to have this group to learn with. I'm not having much luck attracting learning buddies among my fully-employed fellow librarians. Heard about Drupal from a church IT committee meeting three months ago and have been hooked ever since. I've mostly been testing its many features for my personal website and for a few non-profits. As a librarian, I am focusing on modules that will help organize and deliver content. I see the ever increasing number of interactions and nodes in Drupal.org as a very interesting mountain of content to study...

I am also especially interested in membership management based on my experience as a member of several professional organizations where membership data are still being painstakingly entered manually into spreadsheets that are not well integrated with communication and financial functions, even in supposedly technology-related professional associations.

My coding skills are shallow - a couple of programming classes in Visual Basic gave me some foundation about data representation and structures, functions, arrays, etc. but I never did master its syntax. I have started learning PHP and MySQL on my own but did not go beyond finishing the book exercises. I was on my way to becoming good at XML but with no project to work on, that too got pushed into the backburner. There is of course the UI side - HTML & CSS- which I think I am good at and could get better if I put my mind to it.

I live in Portland, Oregon currently but will soon move to Kansas for a job and doctoral study in library and information management. [Still in Portland. Weeklong stay in Kansas did not work out!]

Good morning folks. Saw this group yesterday as I was recovering from vacation email/RSS backlog and subscribed.

My skills

I've been doing PHP/mySQL work for two relatively small corporations (the first < 80 employees, the second ~300 employees) over the course of the last three years. I first learned PHP about five years ago to create a small system for entering and editing syllabi for a technical college.

I've been using Drupal for almost a year for tinkering and learning. This summer, I convinced the company I work for to switch from proprietary code bases and other OpenSource CMSes to Drupal. I run two sites that use very basic features of Drupal, however, I'm working on learning as much as I can about Drupal to hopefully unify the module/code structure for the two sites with a third site. All of them are publications and the goal would be to only support "one install" but for multiple sites. Not necessarily a "multi-site" configuration... but just to ensure that work that gets done for one can be easily implemented for the others (new modules, etc) without having modules that might conflict.

If we were to use the Tae Kwon Do system of belt color coding for Drupal skill ranking... I'd place myself at yellow (white, yellow, green, blue, red, junior black, black 1st-7th degree, Master, Grandmaster). Probably in the blue or red range for PHP/MySQL but only yellow for Drupal.

Focus

There are so many things that I can see Drupal doing. The main problem I have is keeping my dreams for the code in check with the reality of time constraints. Nick Lewis put it very well when he said that the problem many make is, "the assumption that it [is] possible to turn their vision into reality at low cost." So, my goal is to learn Drupal as well as I can from as many angles as I can to become at least a "4th degree Drupal developer." I think it will truly take that level of understanding to be able to accurately anticipate just how complicated, and sometimes how easy, things are within Drupal's support structure.

Me

I grew up in Chula Vista, California (San Diego County), went away to college in Orange County California and moved to Pennsylvania in 2000 to pursue an Internet (ICQ random chat) started relationship that has worked out fantastically. We've now been married for 4 years and have two sons. I'm happy with my current job, but I'm always looking for more cash or stronger opportunities that will help me pay off student loans and other debt faster! :) Looking forward to the discussion!

Hey People,

I'm a web producer with a small team here in Toronto, Canada. We specialise in Joomla and have been actively developing groovy sites with it for some years - well, I suppose with Mambo first and then Joomla (when the community got all 'Storm the Bastille' a little while back). Despite being passionately committed to seeing Joomla's community flourish and its use become easier and fun to understand, I totally dig Drupal as well ;)

I've been tinkering passively with Drupal for quite some time and never really had a chunk of time to build anything great with it, by 'great' I mean anything that would reflect its amazing capability... Well, that is until recently - all of a sudden over the past few months I've jumped full tilt into Drupal and am loving it, can't wait for a Stable 5.0 release to convert some Joomla site's we've made...

I'm glad this group has finally been formed!

qasim./
Design Guru

--
Web Production for communities
http://www.designguru.org - http://www.joomlasphere.net

hi kids.
i ve been learning drupal for several months now experientially through building out the site: http://www.nymapexchange.net with the help of jredding. i am coming from the wonderful world of Youth Media. i am an artist and educator... not a programmer.
sorry.

i am a filmmaker, animator, and diy artist (with an MFA in integrated electronic arts). i ve spent time as a bike messenger, arborist's assistant (ground man), cook at a summer ski camp... but mostly i am a teacher. currently (outside of administrative work) i do animation with 3-5 graders. check out our stuff: http://animationworkshop.blogspot.com

not too long ago, i started building out my personal blog/vodkast site in drupal and here it is: http://www.breathingplanet.net
ive been poorly coding html since 1999, when i got started posting ont he web with a local indymedia collective in upstate NY: http://hmimc.org. i am a css hack and i know how to cut and paste php and java.

very eager to gain skills and spread the drupal love. in the next year, i aim to build a pirate radio station (shhh) that people can automatically upload content to. thats probably already been done. but i havent done it yet!!

andrew

http://www.breathingplanet.net
http://www.stillweridethemovie.com
http://www.nymapexchange.net
http://www.youthchannel.org

Hi Ninjas
Well may better introduce myself -> Hi im Morten \m/

Been working with drupal since the summer 06 - after 5 years of hammering on my own cms, but finally let my cms child die after the drupalCon in Brussel.

Im an oldskool webDesigner - actually it was designer by choice, and hand html/css/php/mysql/whatever coder by force, when all coders i worked with were to lazy to make the html just right - "2px to left ... not 4 dammit!".
So well in 96 i digged in the html stuff, and have been browser debugging ever since... Since then my text editors (bbedit & textmate) have never left photoshop ;) and with 100+ sites done over the year i know why i got my first gray hairs at the age of 33...

Today i run Webdesign "agency" noget med ILD (roughly translatede to "something with Fire") a small 2 man geek-shop, where all cms sites now are build with drupal (yeah i know -the company site is outdated etc, someday it will be updated ;) )

Projects
im playing round with 2 projects right now, that are kinda related.
css "framework"
one style to rule em all ... or rather a base style & html system built allmost like the old days with rows etc. Some handy naming & ideas to create any design you want, and offcourse with loads of small bugfixes so it works in evil ie6+7

copenhagen Tango
a theme based around the tango icon set, and some idears how to make the admin a little nicer to look at (yup icons all over the place).

and offcourse total World domination throught the drupal denmark group ;)

my danish blog |
latest portfolio |old portfolio

/morten.dk king of Denmark
...wondering how many ninjas one viking could kill in 2 minuts?

My name is Matt and my friend and I have been building in Drupal for about a year now. I have been sniffing and learning about Drupal for about 2 years but only the last have we done any actual work. I'm from Lubbock, Texas and my friend and fellow business partner, Ryan, lives in Austin, Texas. My day job is for KCBD-TV. At KCBD I do everything from produce nightly topicals, direct news casts, advise on technology, create graphics, create web content, to editing. When I am not at work or with my girlfriend Amber, I am at home with drupal or some other coding project. My programming roots are rather shallow, but over the last year I have managed to learn a lot about all sorts of languages like php, java, various scripting languages, c/c++, css, etc.. While my knowledge of these languages is not very firm, my ambition to learn and achieve is! Ryan and I make a great team and together I think we can learn a lot from this group and I also think that we have many attributes that could benefit this group as well. I'm looking forward to meeting as many of you as possible and I am looking forward to what we can accomplish together.

Matthew Pare

Web Technologies Director

Pare Technologies
info at paretech dot com

www.paretech.com

Better late than never, right? :-)

I have been working with Drupal for a comparatively short time, it seems -- I was a by-hand PHP coder just a few months ago, and had been for years until talked into creating and managing a CMS site back in July of '06. That was a Joomla site, and I quickly started looking for another CMS alternative (mentioned without comment [wink]). Found Drupal just in time to start building my next CMS site (a political webzine, The Texas Blue), and realized I would quickly have to dive into themeable functions, and then the Forms API, and then putz around with making a small module, then patching others' modules, then porting some to 5.x... :-) I feel like I've been swimming in Drupal for the past month or two. (Hey, at least I'm not drowning!)

As far as what I'd like to learn... well, I have plenty of PHP experience, and dig the coding side; I'm also very particular with my HTML/CSS, and dig the theming side, so I suppose what I would really like to learn is how to be a Drupal ninja. :-) Jack of all trades, master of most, that sort of thing. I imagine that'll take a while...

I'm rbahaguejr. A member of a group in the philippines that help grassroots organization in their technology needs. We have been using drupal since last year for our Project Peoples' Web program. Last year we have a couple of portals developed by the People's Organizations (http://www.cp-union.org/cms/?q=node/16) themselves after 2 days of trainings with drupal.

rick

Hi there,

I'm working with Drupal since last summer and I have started to set up an Intranet for a group of research students in the field of Art and Design in London. Some of the content will soon also be made public. I'm not a coder, more like an information architect. I know my HTML and CCS a bit and I've had several approaches trying to get into programming (action script and PHP) but I haven't really succeded as I have so many other things to do and probably I haven't go the mind set. However I understand the principles and that helped a lot in copying and pasting stuff around. I'm very impressed by Drupal and I'm quite happy about what I've achieved during the last year.

My aim is in improving this educational Intranet with some advanced features over the coming months. Recently I have concentrated on setting up very individual user profiles with this whole bunch of new modules (Usernode, Nodeprofile, Nodefamily, ...) developed for this specific purpose. Part of it was developing a tabbed user profil. Here a discussion about this issue which explains how this is done: http://drupal.org/node/97383 Got amazing help there!
I'm investigating at the moment how I can give my users more individual space on the site to develop their own ideas for their research.

I've missed the first session but I will now go through the class notes and I'm looking forward to seeing/hearing you guys later.

xl

I've been doing freelance Drupal work exclusively for a bit over a year now. I really enjoy it. I want to check this whole Dojo thing out and see if I might be able to contribute some of my experience.

Hi my name is Kerry, I was given a drupal site to have around two years ago, I also only got control panel access a short while ago and I have no knowledge of codiing or languages. Anyway to cut a short story long, I have been basically left in the lurch and have to develop and maintain the site, I had people run in and run out just as fast and was always waiting patiently for minor help with it.

As the project I have been working on is a cross between a social/business network and also a creative place for writers and artists to collaborate to create revenue generating items such as posters, graphic novels and hopefully some animation films. I need to know how to fix up the site and find out more about what modules are available and I need to learn how to do this, so although I in terms of offering anything back to the group just yet I am at amoeba status as I dont know enough. I like the videocasts as its been really helpful for me to start understanding how things work.

Hey All, I'm a print designer by training (BA, '93), and hopped on the HTML bandwagon back around '97. This, in one form our another, has been my vocation since. I've spent the last few months figuring out Drupal's basics and am really impressed with just what it can do as well as support the forums have already provided. I'm hoping to add to my knowledge base and maybe someday throw in my .02 about theming issues. -NP

Like the subject says....NEWbie!

Actually, someone I do some online support for wants to create a Drupal question/ans service for customers...so many can get their answers from a lot of folks..and my support will be cut drastically.

My problem...I haven't a clue about Drupal. I would like to be able to d/l it and work offline...then present somthing to him. A surprise, if you will. :)

Is this a possibility?

Also, where might I find a REALLY good tutorial?

Rob

My name is (as my handle says) Dan Schaller.
I attended Drupalcon 2008 in Boston to figure out if Drupal is the tool we (SERRV International) needs to develop a website. It looks as if it is.

Background: SERRV (http://www.serrv.org) is more than 50 years old, one of the first (if not the first) Fair Trade organization in the United States. We've been working with artisans and farmers around the developing world for a long time, providing product development, marketing, and business development support, buying products and marketing them through our catalogs (retail, wholesale and consignment) and our web catalog (retail) for a long, long time. We currently work with about 100 producer groups in more than 40 countries, including the United States.

Recently, we won a grant from the Ebay Foundation to build and support a social networking portal for Fair Trade producers, both those that work with SERRV and those that don't. That's the site that I referred to as the reason that I went to Drupalcon 2008.

The event was really valuable for me, and it did give me enough information to decide not only to use Drupal for the site, but to contract with a Drupal consultant (Kevin Walsh in Madison, WI) and to use Drupal as the basis for our staff intranet, and for sites for some of our producers. One of our projects coming up is to develop sites for producer groups that don't ccurrently have the werewithal to do the development, support and administer them for 18 months (while developing administration manuals, etc.), then turning them over to the groups to administer themselves. We've found a lot of interest in a project like this, and Drupal seems like the perfect tool because it's administration is so non-techie friendly.

I've only begun to use the tool (building the intranet, for instance, to replicate the old one) and I'm sure I'll have questions as I go along. I also assume that ,eventually, I'll have answers for others who come into this universe at the level at which I currently find myself.

Thanks for making, and keeping alive, this community.

Fil, welcome to the revolution! There is room for you in the Drupal Community and here in the Dojo Group.
I, myself, leaped into Drupal just 6 months ago. I have been a fanatic ever since. The community is strong and the resources are endless. Here's a list of resources that my local Indiana group created http://groups.drupal.org/node/10682
If there is no local group in your area [Japan!?] then I say start one. My efforts to grow a Drupal Group here in Indianapolis have been very rewarding.
Last word...Screencasts, Videocasts, Audiocasts, etc. Eat them up.
Good to have you Fil!

I have been a member now for sometime with this group, been introduced to Drupal more than a year ago. Even at that, I still consider myself a newbie. I am located in Los Angeles, yes one of these days I will be attending a Drupal meet up.

A little background. I work as a computer technician at USC and I stumbled across Drupal because I was asked to create (non-work related) a website (www.mymissedconnection.com) which was later abandoned by the people that hired me. Didn't get paid and left me with the domain name and paid for 2 years of hosting. What was I suppose to do? Got bored one night and decided to create the site. It is up and I maintain it once in a while ok, once a week. I was originally going to create with Joomla but it was very shortcoming. Then I started to play with Drupal and saw the potential of this CMS. The last time I created a site was when HTML was hot off the press and that was it, and when I was exposed to Drupal I got hooked. This was all new to me. PHP/MYSQL, database driven, etc. I am currently working on site number 2 (online store) and playing with Drupal 6 (www.friedelectronics.com).. that is all I have to say for now..

What I plan in the future, get more involved and create a database redundancy module, if it still doesn't exist. I still need to learn PHP and MySQL.

Mark

Hello Everyone!

Names Jeff, Working in the industry for 6 years, taught for 2 years .

I have just Recently gotten into drupal ( over the past year or so ) and have found it to be Quite an amazing open source CMS. Although i am still struggling to learn its inner most secrets i am thoroughly enjoying my learning experience.

Oh so many Questions and so many answers.
Just thought i would pop my head in and start utalizing this page as it seems to be a great resource for drupal
ALL HAIL DRUPAL!

Hi All,
My name is Freddy and by day I'm an advertising art director. I found Drupal purely by accident. Early last year I decided I needed to expand my technical skills and begun teaching myself basic web development. After a couple of months of trying to learn Coldfusion and database design I realized the community support just wasn't there so if I wanted to stick with Coldfusion I'd have to build most of my apps from scratch. Further research revealed the benefits of open source CMS systems. I was amazed by how much functionality could be achieved without knowing any PHP. In the end I felt Drupal had the most potential so I started using it.

Unfortunately I became frustrated when I couldn't get Drupal to do exactly what I wanted so I thought I might have to go another route. In the end I decided to suck it up and start teaching myself PHP so I could harness Drupal's full potential (or try to anyways). Now I'm glad I did, I'm hooked!

For anyone out there who wants to learn the basics of PHP visit:
www.killerphp.com

They have a few awesome video tutorials for beginners, best of all they're free.

I'm currently working on my first Drupal site for which I've started to get my hands dirty with some coding. Now I'm really loving Drupal. Hopefully one day I'll know enough so I can help others.

I'm Kaloyan, I'm graphic design graduate and I'm freelance graphic and web designer. I've been using Drupal for more than a year for my web projects and I believe it's time to broaden my skills here!

Brand new to drupal as well. I just bought Victor Kane's new book "Leveraging Drupal: Getting Your Site Done Right" and I plan on using Drupal to redesign a local museum's website. i currently dabble in HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. I hope to learn more in the coming weeks from the drupal community and fellow web designers.

Hello,

I don't remember if I made an introduction even though I'm a group member. So, here it goes, hello.

I'm currently creating three sites using Drupal as the base and I'm very excited about its capabilities.

Just reviewing the code base of the core and trolling the nodes, has increased my programming skill and understanding in general. Interestingly enough, Drupal has allowed me to understand Joomla, Zend, Smarty and others better.

Here's to looking forward to a long and rewarding relationship.

All the best,

Darrell

I'm Will. I have been involved with Drupal off-and-on for about a year. It is only recently that I've wanted to become deeper involved in the development of the platform and developing on the platform for different projects. Most of my experience is in web design (xHTML and CSS). I have intermediate experience with PHP; however, my understanding of programming is rather basic and not in-depth (which I hope to change within the near future).

I am just exiting my senior year of high school, and plan to major in Computer Science and Mathematics in college.

I am excited to learn more about this platform and to become more involved in the development process. I hope this group will help me in that feat.

Hi..I am Tata Dano. Its always been my desire to learn how to create or become a web developer and then I came across with Drupal. I think its the best. I hope I can learn a lot here and share also my experience. I am also interested in working with non-profit organizations, and do some volunteering work. In this way I can share much and learn fast. See you guys around!

I'm Kevin Colligan, a Drupal newbie and long-time Web producer and interactive content guy. Also a filmmaker, writer and podcaster.

I recently launched my first Drupal site, WellToldTales.com, transforming my old Wordpress-powered blog/podcast into a community site for pulp-fiction writers and filmmakers. (I used Drupal 5 because I wanted a particular module that wasn't ready for 6.)

I'm also working on some commercial sites under my CelebzWeb.com banner. And this week, I'm trying (and trying) to get a multisite installation going on the Mosso Cloud.

I love all the tutorials from the Dojo (and others) -- they've really helped flatten the learning curve. Thanks!

I am Nicole Bluto and I have been working in Drupal for a little over a year. I have fallen in love with it and it is now the only way I build. I feel like I have moved out of newbie status and towards a more intermediate knowledge of Drupal. I love to help other people get started. I have lots of Drupal sites under my belt and have started a development company with my husband Jassen called Intrinsic Web Designs LLC. I so much want to be a Drupal Ninja someday. I am willing to work hard to get there. I love challenging projects that stretch my knowledge of Drupal and really utilize the amazing framework under the hood. We are having a great time. I am also a member of L.A. Drupal. If you want to know more about me you can visit my personal portfolio site at http://www.nicolebluto.com

I hope you still welcome newcomers?

A brief introduction to myself:

Web developer and designer for almost a decade, although I don't consider myself to be a great expert. Maybe just another almost-well skilled web designer and website builder :>

Have used PHP/MySQL driven CMS and etc. dynamic content systems. I love it.

I was very excited, when I first found my first CMS - QuickCart - not really a CMS, but rather a mini-shopping/e-commerce system, but very good, very easy both for the developer and for the customer who will maintain it.

I was very excited when I first discovered Joomla some 2-3 years ago. It was my first touch with a real CMS. But after I get familiar with it - I became finding it's dead-ends in many aspects. There were more and more things I would like to do, but cannot (unless I write a custom module).

I still believe Joomla to be a very good CMS and a best choice for many cases. It's just I needed more flexibility, more freedom to do relatively easily the things I would like to.

And then guess what - I found Drupal. And loved it ever since I started to read the Documentation's introduction.

Now I'm 3 months old Drupal website developer and I like it more and more. And becoming more familiar with it with every day.

In the past I never believed I could do the things now I can. I thought, that I'm just not such an expert with enough knowledge, now I realised it's just I lacked the tool to do those things. And Drupal IS the ultimate tool for so much things to do - but you know that already :)

I'm affraid my current knowledge level is not that high, but I would gladly participate in the group's activities, as far as I can be of some real help.

I know how to setup Drupal websites, create custom content types with CCK, use Views to create custom lists/catalogues, etc, use alot of modules, integrate multimedia content within a Drupal website, etc.
Did some custom templating with Contemplates and Views templating system.

I guess I'm here more as a learner than a contributor, but I hope that equation will change over time. I am willing to make tutorials, especially for newbies, as Drupal seems to be frightening to most people, at least at first look. And there is alot of advanced stuff here and there, but it's amazing that some simple things are not easily explained and that makes it hard for alot of people to start quickly with Drupal.
In my case what really helped me to get started with it - it was www.drupaltherapy.com

Enough for a start. :>

Hi,

I am Ravi Sagar from Delhi, India. I manage small to medium sites using Drupal. I am interested in learning Drupal Module Development so that I can build more complex apps using Drupal.