Darren Mothersele

This Friday, 13th Aug, I will be presenting a case study at Drupal Focus on Publishers. If you are interested in hearing more about the use of Drupal in publishing then come along to this free event. I will be presenting a case study and talking about content aggregation, personalisation, and creating sites with premium subscriber-only content.

I'm not completely obsessed with GPL licensing, but I do seem to be talking about this more and more these days. Tonight I gave my #9 speech at Toastmasters, the "Persuade with Power" project. The aim of this was to persuade listeners to adopt my viewpoint or ideas, or take some action. This is definitely not a techie audience, but I decided to present GPL and free software, and "persuade" people to look at alternatives to Microsoft and other proprietary software.

Here's my Drupalcon Szeged review. Not a full account of what I got up to during the week but some of the highlights of the conference. The Szeged2008 website now has slides and videos, with more being uploaded as they are transcoded by archive.com so go checkout what you missed or revisit the sessions if you need a reminder. Here's my highlights from the event, in no particular order...

My session at next week's Drupal conference has been confirmed. I will be presenting a few case studies from recent Drupal developments, and talking about Drupal APIs and Drupal as a Web Development Framework. Here's the abstract:

Drupal is often compared with other CMS products, but the true power of the platform is in it's flexibility and extensibility. Drupal, as a set of APIs, is a viable choice as a framework for developing powerful web apps. This session will demonstrate the use of Drupal APIs and Modules for web application development by means of a couple of case studies. Along the way we'll touch on comparisons with other frameworks from a developer perspective, and requirements for enterprise from a business perspective.

See you in Szeged!

Last night's event at Sun Microsystems office in London was a big success. Congrats to the Drupal UK team for organising. The live hook up with Robert Douglass worked well, and it was good to hear more about recent search developments in Drupal. I presented my little case study on Interoperability with Drupal, in particular producing sales reports in Drupal using External User Authentication and report building. I'll post my Drupal module code for those that asked when I've sufficiently GPL'ed it.

See you at the next Drupal UK event?

I will be presenting at the forthcoming Drupal for Enterprise event being organised by Drupal UK. The event is on 13th Aug and is being held at Sun Microsystems. You can register for this event here.

Details are still being confirmed but I will be presenting something on integration of Drupal with other systems. This could include external user authentication, and the work I have done in the past integrating Drupal with accounting systems, and webbots to process sales information feeds.

The Drupal for Developers event was great fun this week. I did a 15 min presentation on Programmatically Creating Drupal Nodes. The slides from this presentation will be going up on the Drupal UK site in the near future, but you can get a preview of the presentation below.

I will be speaking at the next Drupal UK event, which is being held at The Economist offices in London next Wednesday, 30th July.

My presentation is going to be about programmatically creating content (nodes) including CCK fields, attachments, and images. I will be presenting a case study from recent development that automatically creates content from iTunes Producer packages.

Places are limited but you can find more information and signup here:
http://drupal.org.uk/event/drupal-developers/04-jul-2008

Also, check out the other upcoming Drupal UK events, I will also be presenting at the Enterprise event.