Anyone want to run a Drupal booth at SCALE?

Hi there, I'll have to clear things with work, of course, but if I'm at all available, I'd love to help out. Let's be in touch on this.

(Also interested in the Women in Open Source mini-conference)

-Crystal

I'm interested as well.

I will clear some time for this. Saturday looks like the best day for me.

As a shameless Drupal promoter, this is perfect for me.

I'm up for volunteering and advocating.

I plan to be available most of both days.

Do we have sample Drupal sites to show. (Internet access may be slow.)

We still need screen for the projector. A 4'x6' piece of foamcore would be perfect. Otherwise a white sheet with hems at top & bottom to insert pvc tubes would work. I can supply the tubes.

If anyone has links to some cool D6 sites, with good videos or just good content, add them here please.

Drupal 6.0 RC3 released - I think this will be replaced by an official release, but here's the download link for the RC

Theme developer module for Drupal 6 - Screencast - This blew me away! These types of tools are going to make themeing in D6 so much smoother, especially those of us still learning the system.

Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6 - a book for D6 - How is this already out?

What's new in Drupal 6 (composing a marketing "brochure") - there are a bunch of other links on this page with more info

Contributed modules status - version 6.x - I think it would be good to have a basic idea of when D6 will be ready for implementing real website projects.

http://www.lullabot.com/videocasts/installing-drupal-6 - probably not something useful for the convention, but a good resource for the curious drupal newbie.

I'll add more links as I find them.

Having a set of sites to show off what drupal is capable of would be great. It might be best to just capture screenshots of these site for showing on the projector (do we have a screen yet?). Add links to some of your favorites.

Site Lists - these pages list drupal sites
http://drupal.org/handbook/drupal/gallery
http://weblog.cemper.com/a/200601/24-truly-cool-drupal-sites-showcase.php

MultiMedia - Music, Movies & More
http://www.mtv.co.uk/
http://www.mylifetime.com/
http://www.droge.com/ - Awesome site with full Flash implementation - drupal is the backend.
http://www.jumptv.com/
http://www.moby.com/

Social Networking
http://teamsugar.com/
http://www.terminus1525.ca/

Newspaper, Magazine, Publications
http://www.onion.com/
http://www.snowboard-mag.com/
http://www.linuxjournal.com/
http://www.la2day.com/

Commercial / Shopping
http://www.cameraprices.com/ - price comparison site
http://www.hipfoto.com/
http://www.concreteideas.com/

Non-propfit, Museums, Goverment
http://www.smm.org/

Services, Portfolio, Blog, ASP
http://www.pando.com/
http://www.goingon.com/
http://www.ericscouten.com/
http://acko.net/
http://2bits.com/
http://www.socialseo.com/
http://pingv.com/

It was great seeing and talking to everyone on Saturday. See you at the next group meet.

Came by the Drupal booth at SCALE and it was BUSY! Good job folks (though I am sorry to have missed Chris and Crystal).
Here is my Flick link to Drupal: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=DRUPAL%20SCALE&w=21916121%40N06&m=tags

Nice Pic Gus!

It was fun talking to people about drupal and helping answer their questions.  And it was great to talk more with the other drupalers at the booth.  I kinda wish I'd been there Saturday since was a lot more traffic and schwag.  The LA Drupal group is really picking up momentum!

Some of the biggest frustrations I heard from people were about:

• migrating from older versions of drupal (4.6, 4.7)
• getting started with setting up site -
  
• making a site look good
  

how can we help to fix this?

• Promote Drupal Profiles - In theory, install profiles could make it easy for users to install drupal and have what they really need to get their website going already pre-configured with all the modules they need.  The blog profile is a prime example.  People coming from systems like wordpress are used to install and use, without having to do hours of configuration.  The blog profile would get them there, IF THEY KNEW IT EXISTED.
• link to install profiles from the main drupal project page - one of the big problems with install profiles is that they can only be used when starting from scratch, so users need to know about them before the even download the drupal project, since they can't be added on after the fact.
• Super Modules/Packages - I've written elsewhere more about the direction I'd like to see install profiles move: Why Install Profiles are inflexible and what would be better. And on a related note about the need to package more prebuilt items with cck and views.
  
• I think Installation Profiles is a terrible name for this feature.  I think very few people especially newbies, for whom these profiles are the most useful, might guess correctly what this refers to.  Distributions would be a better term - is that inaccurate in some way?  "Drupal Flavors" would work better too!  Changing the name however may cause more confusion than it's worth ...
• Improve the intro homepage - the page you see before any content has been posted.
• Links to Cookbooks (Website Recipes)/Help improve them - sending new users to the modules download pages really doesn't work.  There are 2000+ modules, and some of the most basic functionality has many different modules to choose from.  Having users be able to check out different site recipes would be much more effective to educate newbies and help them get their first site up and running.
  
• Links to Theming Handbook pages - Users who want to get an intro to how to change the appearance of the site they are working on need several links so they understand how themeing works
• How to change theme handbook page
  
• Link to Themes Download section
• Advanced theming handbook pages
  

Ideas for next time

Raffle Entry on website - We could have quite easily created a form for people to enter their email address into our website ladrupal.org, which would save us the effort of entering the addresses in by hand now.  And these people would have seen our site.

Website Showcase - For the second half of Sunday, I set up my laptop to cycle through tabs which displayed various sites built with drupal.  A LOT of people stopped to watch, and were really impressed when they were told that all those sites were built on Drupal.  We should definitely do that at the next event.  There are a lot more sites to be found and shown off: http://drupal.org/node/219476 It was really easy to set up with Firefox's Tab Slideshow, but BEWARE it has serious bugs that make it go crazy if more than one window is open and I couldn't find start and stop controls. Maybe it'll get fixed ???

Drupal Pamphlets - These should really be supplied by the Drupal Association.  We needed to have sheets/postcards for people to take with them that gave a quick breakdown of what drupal is capable of.  With the site competition going on, perhaps screenshots of the winners could be included somewhere on the sheet.

If there are any other conventions/conferences where we can promote drupal, I'd love do it, especially now that I have some better ideas for how to set up the booth.