Drupal Camp Wisconsin and Google Wave
Last Friday and Saturday (6/5~6/6), I attended the Drupal Camp Wisconsin in Madison. Drupal is one of the most widely used CMSs (Content Management Systems) with great flexibility and extensibility. The interest stemmed from my former colleague Bruce LaPlante’s effort on trial to build the web site for our university’s newspaper using a CMS, in Fall 2007. We’ve been planning to integrate this important aspect of Internet technology in our education and research. As popular and easy as they can be or be claimed, they can also be somewhat confusing to learn as a beginner. I think I shouldn’t say I’m a beginner in this, but I am really and I reaffirmed that after the camp. There were quite many sessions for beginners and I attended most of them, but I realized that I wasn’t even a beginner. Because Drupal is so flexible and extensible, the core vanilla Drupal installation (which is very easy to install) is fairly (or too much) limited. I had to figure that out by feeling puzzled with all the more seemingly advanced discussions going on in the beginner track. Feeling frustrated, I had to study those really really basic things myself concurrently in the sessions. And after a while, some of those beginner sessions came to make more sense. Strangely enough, the last session about the theming using CSS hack was most understandable. CMS people claim that web sites can be built without knowing and coding HTML, CSS, PHP, and so on, but it may be true only when there are so many available easily configurable diverse themes and modules. I would have preferred if there were a walkthrough site building tutorial like session, a session recommending very-basic-and-indispensible-but-not-included-in-default-installation modules, a session recommending various themes for various layouts and so on, and something like that, in the camp. However, overall the camp was a great learning experience, not only just about the Drupal topics, but also about how the Internet publishing will be like in the very near future.
About a week or two before the camp, I realized that our program’s web site needs some serious renovation, with better content management. There was an email discussion circulating among our program faculty about the internship requirement and I thought such information and content should be managed and available on our web site. I think a CMS like Drupal or Joomla will play an important role in enabling it. So it is my hope now to find a student who’d like to do an independent study (with credits) for building our program’s web site using a CMS. Since there might not be a programming component, it wouldn’t be a COMP SCI independent study. However, such a project will require learning a very important Internet publishing technology and applying it to a real need, so I believe it can be a great INFO SCI independent study or even a capstone project. From a COMP SCI perspective, I’d be happy if I can find someone who can develop a Drupal module which can perform some internal task like authentication with our Active Directory, which will be very similar to the Wordpress’s Active Directory authentication plugin. I may be ignorant, but I couldn’t find a Drupal module supporting Active Directory authentication and our campus is on Active Directory authentication so we need such a module. If a student of ours could do it (and I believe it is possible), it’d be great.
I’d like to thank all the volunteers and participants of the camp. I got the info about the event from the NEWLUG mailing list. The reason why I added Google Wave in the title of this post is that the NEWLUG member who sent out an email about the camp sent another email about Google Wave. It’s a pretty long video (80 minutes), but I took the time and watched it. I have to say the technology and the direction presented there are really really revolutionary and there’ll be great demand about easily usable Drupal modules for Google Wave, I suppose. So anyway, it was a great learning experience from Drupal to Google Wave, thanks to the great members of NEWLUG and I hope to attend the meeting once my babysitting duty on Thursday evenings is over pretty soon. Meanwhile, here’s the Youtube video presenting Google Video. I strongly recommend that any IT person should watch it and remember the direction.