Good day fellow Drupalites.
Since this is our first day as a group, I thought we should take a moment to introduce ourselves, and give a bit of background
on why we use Drupal, or if we aren't using Drupal yet, why we are interested in using Drupal.
I'll go first :
My name is Adrian Rossouw, and I have been a Drupal core developer for several years (I actually lost count. I think I started in 2002 or so).
I originally started using Drupal to rebuild an online community site that had been lost due to the evils of proprietary software. I became
very involved in the Drupal community, and have ended up writing thousands upon thousands of lines of code for the project.
Among other things I designed the templating layer, wrote the PHPTemplate theme engine, am largely responsible for the new forms API,
and also spent many years maintaining the PostgreSQL port.
I started this group, as I want to get more people locally involved in Drupal, and especially help South Africa get into Web 2.0.
I am currently living in Cape Town, but I also make regular trips to Johannesburg to visit family.
Comments
Will the real AE please stand up
I'll go next then g
I'm Andre (close friends call me AE), 30, and an ectomorph. I've worked at Obsidian as front-end designer for a locally developed CMS since 2000. A certain someone there cough introduced me to Drupal... and I've been a happy blogger since 2003.
Every new release blows my mind, and am leaving more and more Drupal installations in my wake, including upcoming big names like Mustek, Mecer and BHF (Watch this space). My mission: Get all South African sites up to standards, and Drupal is my tool! er...Drupal is my answer..
Chain reaction
Well I think it's fitting I go next.
Hi, I'm Richard. The first time I encountered Drupal was in late 2004 it was the Obsidian website in actual fact. Just before may last year is when I really started getting into Drupal. I've been a happy drupalite ever since.
Other info about me
I'm 22 (almost), Love Open Source Software and I'm the the owner of DataPoint
TBL & The Onion
Hi,
I'm Mitton. I found out about Drupal while evaluating CMSs to replace the expensive inflexible proprietary CMS my organisation was using before. I chose Drupal because it has a large and helpful user community. The fact that Tim Berners-Lee and theonion.com uses Drupal had nothing to do with it.
Our Drupal installation went live this morning. (2006 04 13).
Newbie to Drupal
Hey, I'm Riaan... I came to Drupal very recently. My site (DarkLight) was basic custom CMS based a long time ago, even PHP-Nuke and it's forks once. Eventually I settled on phpBB, it's CH mod and custom code and it stayed there while my work life (DarkLight is a hobby) took most of my time.
I've looked extensively at upgrade options over the last couple of years for the site. Mostly, I install and play with all the CMSes out at the time and for various reasons rather stay with what I have. Xaraya nearly won out in the last rounds... then I got Drupal. It's perfect! Can't wait to get some time to get into it and dig around! I have a test site up for our moderators group and they're loving it - though it is very far from replacing the current site.
Our new Drupal DarkLight will likely take a month or two before public launch.
I'm 32, live in Johannesburg, ran Nightclubs most of my life (for fun) while keeping busy with IT work (job). My PHP knowledge extends to only what I needed for running the DarkLight site and later doing some custom code on a freelance basis. I'd love to pop in to Obsidian (still owe the boss-man a CD there) but will likely not have much to contribute to a Drupal group just yet - give me a month or two ;-)
Interesting.
I'd love to chat to you some time about what you chose for your site.
Theoretically I'm in charge of the NetRaver web site (need to chain a graphic designer to the project though), and I think we might share a lot
of functionality if I do inted to do the site sometime soon.
The future is so Bryght, I have to wear shades.
Indeed, such communities
Indeed, such communities will have a lot in common! I was cause off-line this holiday period (back on Tuesday, on 3G now) and was stuck without any Internet, and thus Drupal documentation (wish there was a downloadable format). I did have a copy of Drupal though. So I prepped a nice site for domiNation so long. I think the two music related sites will need some custom stuff, and I look forward to integrating Audioscrobbler, MusicBrainz and Amazon with them. In the mean time I got to know Drupal a little better as a vanilla installation, made a cool theme for domiNation and think it may be a good idea to use domiNation as an always vanilla installation and site of Drupal to keep a good idea of what can be done with Drupal out of the box. I'll upload it to the domiNation site as soon as Drupal's out of RC.
Incidentally, I always thought phpBB was well written, now I really have some good code to look up to. Man Drupal is nicely put together. It's like a dream come true!
I'm not sure of the
I'm not sure of the formality on the groups and posting in it... I'm so used to forums where general discourse is the order of the day and the more communication happens online, the better. For one thing, is it possible to have a forum attached to this group? This comment for instance, I would have posted in a forum in stead. Right now, I posted it here thinking it may be the best place to ask - a new story would likely be better posted as an invitation to partake and ask questions by adrian, I suppose, if a forum is not available, as a story.
Anyway, I'm off to go find that netraver site and see what you're up to there, it's been a long while since I raved and danced the nights away.
Same mechanism as a forum.
New forum topic for new threads, replies to old threads in comments =)
and netraver hasn't even started getting worked on though.
--
The future is so Bryght, I have to wear shades.
Flatforum helped a lot for
Flatforum helped a lot for domiNation.co.za which I got live yesterday. There's still some serious work to be done on the forums though - date or comments and so on, I suppose it's time for me to get under the hood, I'm both excited and a little daunted.
Is it correct that most of the modules, though listed for Drupal 4.7 are in fact not yet functional for it? Things like captcha, buddylist, bbCode and pathauto?
Then I still have issues with having to manually remove all users' signatures. If any user have one filled in and comments or adds content that content is broken for anyone trying to access it with a Call to undefined function: check_output()
There are already 202 tagged modules
and many more are ready
Check this page : http://drupal.org/node/59396
Someone actually tested all the modules. =)
--
The future is so Bryght, I have to wear shades.
Thanks adrian! While those
Thanks adrian! While those lists narrow the modules down a bit, some appear still not to be compatible. I also tries to sort by date on the modules download page so that modules recently updated show on top. Two out of three were still not working, but I guess that sorting method will give me a daily dose of modules to play with on domiNation.co.za. By the time I get some time to work on a new DarkLight, I'll know a little more and feel slightly more at ease.
It's amazing how easy people find Drupal to use - the dN community took to it quite well and even the DarkLighters that tried is are reporting good things - many can't wait for the move!
Well, I pushed through the
Well, I pushed through the launch of darklight.co.za today. The CSS still need some exception handlin for IE, but the site is functional and members are starting to use it. It's Sunday, so we have few users online - only 20 registered in the first couple of hours, but they seem to like the site. I know I'm loving Drupal!
Cool. Why don't you write a post about it
http://groups.drupal.org/node/add/story?edit[og_groups][]=39
=)
I think we should make an effort to mention all the cool local sites we do =)
--
The future is so Bryght, I have to wear shades.
Err, I feel a little out of
Err, I feel a little out of my depth still faced with all the greatness that is Drupal and you guys' code! Let me have a look at the experience a little more during the course of tomorrow when people really start using the site and I'll write something up.
I often wonder what causes people to not take part in all of a site's functionality. Now that I'm on the other end (the user) I feel the nervousness about posting something like a page as opposed to a mere comment ;-) Weird.
While I believe a good community will be very difficult to build without a good CMS like Drupal. I also believe a whole lot of the success of such a community s dependent on the way things are done and the psychology of the interaction. Now that I have experienced this first hand, it's time to think of how to breach such barriers.
I suppose one way that Drupal provides us with is that users' posts can be promoted to front page. But more though need to go into this... especially for something like DarkLight and NetRaver.
YAI (Yet Another Introduction)
Hi,
I am Kobus Myburgh, IT consultant for a local university, focusing mostly on the student environment, however, it is in my part-time persona that I got involved with Drupal in 2001. I started out very slowly, and still sort-of slow, but have been picking up big-time this year after finishing my studies at the end of 2005.
I see myself more of a designer as a developer, often getting trapped in the situation where I have this amazing design idea, but not have the necessary artistic skills to implement it. I do have some cool designs though that was met with great enthusians by my customers. I have, recently,I picked up a bit on the developer part and became official maintainer of the automember module originally written by Nic Ivy. I am still struggling a bit with the conversion to Drupal 4.7 though.
I am also the official maintainer of the Afrikaans translation of Drupal, and maintain drupal.co.za (which is unfortunately offline at the time of writing this due to shifting to a new web host).
Otherwise, I've been a regular "+1, -1 person", leaving my (sometimes poorly conceived) ideas out there on the public mailinglist ;-P
Nice to meet you all!
--
Kobus
www.netgold.co.za
--
Kobus
www.netgold.co.za
Willem aka diepoog
Hi All
my name is willem and i am a drupaholic
I did more than 100 drupal sites in one year!
check it out at http://www.econsultant.co.za
[[http://www.econsultant.co.za|Drupal South Africa]
[[http://www.drupal.co.za|Drupal South Africa community]
Honey Badgers eat snakes
Hi, I'm Charles Oertel, owner of http://FineBushPeople.net and http://HoneyBadger.net
I've been a fan of Drupal ever since XMambo was discontinued (that's what FineBushPeople.net is built in, and I just haven't had a chance to migrate it to a real CMS).
Right now I am assembling a team in Cape Town to build a huge high-volume global website in Drupal. Some posts are still available in the team (check out http://honeybadger.net). Meanwhile I hope to see some of you at DrupalCamp, either in JHB or in CPT, because I want my team to get trained up.
regards
Charles
Introducing Nebe
Hi everyone my name is Julian.
I'm working as a UNIX Administrator for my company mainly OpenBSD installations. And I also develop PHP programs on my own.
I have been coding in PHP, MySQL for a few years now. And is quite comfortable with the language.
I really love PEAR and use it alot.
But since I found Drupal it has been quite a blessing since my code is now alot more portable by extending it through modules. I have been busy writting a few custom modules for some of my clients and I'm amazed at how fast and efficient things can be done writing in the correct framework. Oh yes and the Drupal forms API is my best friend :) Finaly something more simple and yet efficient than PHP QuickForms.
My asspirations for the future would be to know Drupal in and out and truely be it's master. I would then like to participate in developing some core Drupal code.
Anyways that's it from me for now ;) Don't hesitate to contact me if you feel the urge to talk to me ;)