drupal

James and I will be giving a Drupal talk next Tuesday the 17th February 7pm at Manchester Free Software.

The meeting is taking place at the BBC on Oxford Road, Manchester, if you're interesting in coming along please let your intentions be known by emailing team@manchester.fsuk.org

I've just got back from the first Dublin Drupal event. Over 70 people turned up and over half of those had no experience of Drupal what-so-ever! What a fantastic turnout. The downside was there were only enough sandwiches for fifty... :-)

Hats off to Stella and Heather for organising it and a big thank you to DIT for hosting the event, too. It was a good venue.

Paul Boag interviews Mark Boulton about the drupal.org redesign and the approach of designing by community.
Definitely worth a listen if you haven't been following the process so far. The latest design iterations can be found at http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration7/

Hey, we've been busy writing our Drupal 6 courses and are very happy to announce we'll be running three all new Drupal 6 courses in Manchester UK early next year!

We're planning an 'Introduction to Drupal 6' course in January 2009, followed by a 'Theming in Drupal 6' in March 2009 and to complete the set we'll be doing 'Developing for Drupal 6' in May 2009.

So if you're interested drop us a line and we'll keep you updated with the details!

We're excited to announce that menusandblocks will be speaking at the very first North West PHP conference!

Last Friday a few of us from the Manchester Drupal User Group ventured off in the direction of the sunny climes of Birmingham for the first ever Birmingham Drupal User Group!

We left mid-morning so we had time to sample the delights of the Urban Pie, I have to recommend the Steak & Kidney!

At last!!! The fame and fortune we didn't deserve :)

In case we hadn't mentioned it before, James and Chris help organise the North West Drupal User Group - http://nwdug.org.uk which meets once a month at MDDA.

Just thought you'd might like to know there's a bit of a revival going on at #drupaluk on irc.freenode.net - 14 peeps in there right now :)

I'll be going to DrupalCon in Szeged, Hungary, which is taking place in the last week of August.
I'm going to hold a Birds of a Feather session on CSS which is aimed at beginners, so come along if that's you.
Other than that, I'll be desperately trying to clone myself so I can get to all the sessions I want to go to!

A brief, but well-written, overview of Drupal 6.2 at http://cmstester.com/drupal-6-2-review/
However, I'd disagree that Drupal's weakness is theming: I think it's one of its strengths. Yes, there may be a paucity of third-party themes available for non-designers, but that isn't because it's difficult to theme Drupal. It's because Drupal isn't just one thing: it's not just a blogging tool, it's not just a content management system, it's not just a tool for building social networking applications. Drupal can be, and is, used for a huge variety of web projects.