Matt Cheney's blog

It should come as no surprise that San Francisco is a great place to talk about technology. The area has fostered a ridiculous amount of innovation and there are always plenty of people interested in getting together to talk about the next cool thing. We have seen wonderful growth in the Drupal Project and its been great to see that growth translate to an increasingly vibrant local Drupal community here in San Francisco. It is a wonderful time to be doing Drupal in the Bay Area and I wanted to share a few highlights:

Drupal User's Groups: SF and Berkeley

There are two vibrant user's groups in the Bay Area. The San Francisco group meets monthly and regularly gets 50+ attendees. Hosted by John Faber in the PariSoma Co-Working space each meeting has several different presentations from community members. Across the bay, long time Drupal contributor Tao Starbow runs the monthly Berkeley User's Group well attended (40+) by UC Berkeley staff (and members of the east bay community). I try to regularly attend and speak at this groups and have recently given talks on security (feat. Neil Drumm), using organic groups to build an academic community site, and the panels module. Outside of the immediate Bay Area, there are also vibrant user groups in Sacremento and Santa Cruz. Information about these groups and their events can be found on groups.drupal.org.

Drupal Camp: BADCamp 2007, 2008, 2009

For the last three years, the Bay Area has played host to what we affectionately called BADCamp (Bay Area Drupal Camp). Started on the UC Berkeley campus in 2007 by Tao Starbow, the camp regularly draws 200-350+ people to attend sessions by Drupal visionaries, masters, entrepreneurs, rockstars, poets, and prodigies. The event is free to everyone and helps lower the barrier to entry so others can learn and join the wonderful Drupal party party.

The last BADCamp was held this past weekend at the San Francisco State downtown campus. The entire event was conceived, planned, produced, and executed in a span of about 2 weeks and was a true testament to the vibrancy and agile nature of the Drupal community. The back story here was after we finished our Drupalcon SF 2010 proposal, Kieran mentioned he had a venue downtown San Francisco and everyone agreed it sounded just about right to host an event. A couple weeks later we proposed some sessions (including a session on Panels and the End User by me and one on WYSIWYG Editors by Jen, Sun Microsystems and Acquia sponsored some drinks, and the magic just happened.

Chapter Three has been doing a number of training sessions around the Bay Area and as part of the BADCamp we proposed to hold free all day introduction to Drupal class. The class began with Kieran introducing Drupal and giving a demonstration on installing Drupal with the Acquia installer, John Faber discussed content and content management, Chris Bryant talked about site building and Views, and Jen Lampton and myself talked about Drupal theming and "Advanced Topics" to close out the day. We had over 100+ people attend the introduction training and got some great feedback from all the sessions. Total attendance was over 200 with a lot of new faces. Look for lots more events like this in the future.

Drupalcon SF 2010

As we mentioned earlier, the Bay Area Drupal Community has come together to propose to host Drupalcon North American 2010 in the world class city of San Francisco. We launched our public proposal website last month and have been working hard to refine and improve our proposal since then. There has not been a lot of movement on this from the Drupal Association (they are hard at work on Drupalcon Paris), but I think the selection process will get picked up and finalized soon.

To keep up to date with our progress, follow the DrupalconSF Twitter and check out our proposal website at http://drupalconsf2010.org/. Nota bene, we were able to secure additional dates at the Moscone Center that during the 3rd week of April which avoids major holidays + conferences and allows a Drupal party we can all attend in downtown San Francisco.

Chapter Three has a long history of bringing together the rockstars to make wonderful things happen and as participants in the open source process we understand that sometimes making the coolest things takes a community. We have an amazingly vibrant Drupal community in San Francisco - and the surrounding Bay Area - and so it was that we decided to come together to propose something awesome - Drupalcon 2010 in San Francisco.

We have been working hard over the past couple of months - meeting every Wednesday in the Chapter Three office or at Parisoma - to plan, prioritize, and finally propose to the Drupal Association that the next North American Drupalcon be held in late March 2010 in downtown San Francisco at the Moscone Center. It is a lot of work to run a great conference, but we have the right people and the right attitude to produce a wonderful conference in the city we love.

San Francisco is a world class city and a great place to hold a Drupal conference. We are home to Silicon Valley, one of the most vibrant technology communities in the world, and with thousands of web developers, designers, and writers nearby we can guarantee tremendous local buzz and attendance. San Francisco has always been an incubator for startups and new technological innovation and as we look forward, as a Drupal community, to the next few years innovation on the web - what better place to have that conversation that at Drupalcon in San Francisco?

San Francisco is also a center for culture, cuisine, and creativity. Our location offers an ideal combination of cross-pollination with other innovators online, business connections for the expanding Drupal marketplace, and a stimulating and pleasurable experience for conference attendees. The evening party scene will be off the hook and plenty of attention will be paid to hosting events that have more to do with code than cerveza. As the Drupal community grows - and the attendance at Drupalcon is measured in thousands (instead of hundreds) - special care needs to be paid to making sure we maintain our distinctive community feel and give core developers a chance to discuss and plan the next big things for Drupal.

This initiative is only a proposal and the final decision over where Drupalcon North American 2010 will be located is up to the Drupal Association. However, if you are interested in getting involved with our planning process or want to keep up to date with our progress please checkout the proposal website - designed by the wonderful Nica Lorber - and follow us on Twitter.

We spend a lot of time at Chapter Three talking about how we do our work and developing the project management and developer tools we need to make sure everything runs smoothly. Our team has grown considerably in the last year and its important to us to continue to keep the bar high and have each member of the team produce high quality work the Drupal way. We see our design and development work as more than just meeting a specification for a project, but rather something that fits into a larger framework of how Drupal design, development, and deployment should be done. Best practices are wonderful things.

It is in that spirit that we would like to announce the Chapter Three Experts program as an initiative to involve high quality people in our company to help make sure we keep a high level of Drupal excellence. In practical terms, Chapter Three Experts advise on large scale architectural decisions, help design and develop custom functionality for our client and company projects, and provide tier-three Drupal support and advanced training to our development team. Chapter Three will coordinate our Drupal outreach efforts with our experts to help maximize our contributions and community involvement.

To kick off the program, I would like to formally welcome Neil Drumm to our team as a Chapter Three Expert. Neil is a longtime Drupal contributor who is the branch maintainer for Drupal 5, maintains the ever useful api.drupal.org, and is developing the very awesome Dashboard module for the new Drupal.org. He is a wonderful person and Chapter Three has had the privilege of sharing office space and working on several projects with him over the last few years.

I have always been impressed with the contrasting mix of craziness and competence in the Drupal community. Only in our wonderful world can a rockstar create industry leading educational videos, those who cannot vote or drive can still patch core, the sexiest man in Drupal is also one of the baldest, and somehow skills in customizing websites translates to customizing beautiful fixed gear bicycles. Deciding to start Chapter Three with Josh and Zack was one of the best decisions I have ever made and so much better than the stuffy alternatives.

As a company who regularly handles half a dozen client projects, its not always an easy thing to take time off. However, Drupalcon DC was shaping up to be a fantastic event and we decided to bring the entire company to share in the community and learn from the best. Chapter Three also had our own rockstar moments with Matt presenting our work on PBS Engage, Josh demonstrating crowd pleasing techniques to Handle Asynchronous Data with AJAX/AHAH, Jen talking about her experiences running BADCamp, and Matt (with Neil + Greg + Ezra) doing a security double header session with plenty of live demonstrations.

To help spread the good word, Drupal evangelist Zack took the stage to present "Drupal Lunch" (feat. Kieran Lal) and educate DC based CTOs and technology decision makers about the benefits of using Drupal. Josh (and the rest of the Drupal Dojo) ran an all day session talking about screencasting and Drupal education. Jon released the Live Update module and we all threw down for patches and strategy at the code sprint.

The nightlife at Drupalcon is always very unique and Chapter Three was happy to host an epic party Thursday night at the Asylum Rock and Roll Lounge. The following night we combined two wonderful elements (chx + a limo) and headed to Virginia to spend the evening playing lasar tag with Dimitri, Charlie, and our flat hat awesome friends at Zivtech. Drupalcon was fantastic and a big thanks to Bonnie for making it all rock. It's a great community of which to be a part, I woudn't have it any other way.

You can't go wrong with a Rock & Roll Lounge that welcomes the Harley Davidson and serves a fully complemented vegan brunch. Please join Chapter Three on Thursday night from 8pm onward at the Asylum Rock & Roll Lounge for drinks, eats, and general Drupal mayhem. The bar is a hot minute from the Adams Morgan Metro which is four steps down the red line from the conference venue.

nota bene - there will sadly be no pinatas on account of some previous incidents and corresponding strong options from the bar staff.

A couple years back, Chapter Three made a commercial where I embraced my tangential family legacy by quickly firing off a few rounds to highlight Drupal offering "rapid prototyping like you've never seen". Since then Chapter Three has done plenty of prototyping and has built dozens of sites, some on extremely tight timelines, but yesterday sets the company record for speed of design, development, and deployment of Drupal.

In just over 10 hours using the entire team assembled in our Humboldt County office, we ran a full Drupal design process, simultaneously delegated the configuration and coding tasks - including deploying the new Panels 3 module and getting the MP3 audio integration working. As we do with all of our sites, we made sure to include our Search Engine Visibility best practices and some Views 2 powered custom administration interfaces. We were even able to fix a few bugs with Audio module and contribute the work back as a patch.

So behold, Grown Kids Radio. The site was developed for Dan Finnerty, our exceptionally talented financial manager, who also doubles as the equally talented DJ Spinnerty. With some other cool kids, he has a radio show on Pirate Cat Radio, 87.9 FM and can now use the power of Drupal to spread their "neck snapping beats" around the world. Listen to their show live each Thursday from 12 to 2 PT and once they finish the content migration check out their past episodes. Thanks to Drupal for making it all possible.

BADCamp is the Bay Area Drupal social event of the season. All of the cool drupal genius kids come out to socialize and make fantastic Drupal presentations. Attended by hundreds of Bay Area Drupalers, its really wonderful to see that kind of vibrancy in our local community. A big thanks to Tao Starbow and other members of the BADCamp planning group.

It is a lot of work to put on a Drupal camp. To do our part to help with this year's event, Chapter Three organized breakfast for all three hundred conference attendees on both Saturday and Sunday. We served hipster hip coffee from the Mission District, vegan donuts from Berkeley, an extended selection of juices, fruits, and bagels (with vegan cream cheese). Many thanks for this organizational effort goes to Rachael Boggan, our community and company liaison for excellence.

It is sort of disappointing how goofy many cyclists look. Bicycling is such a wonderful thing and can be done with such great beauty, why do all the cycling jerseys need to be plastered with dull logos and inconsistent colors? We should leave the confusing and overlapping advertisements to Times Square and the Sunset Strip.

Perhaps that is just the way it is, but if we are going to have jerseys plastered with logos I think we know a good one to use. It is always wonderful to roll with a little style and when you mix it with Drupal, all good things.

The cool kids showing off the jerseys below are San Francisco's resident drupal genius Neil Drumm, fixed gear extraordinaire Zack Rosen, and always classy Josh Koenig.

The jerseys were designed by one of our cycling friends and manufactured by Canari Cyclewear. We did an initial run for our friends and family, but if you are a cyclist and would be interested in a jersey let us know. We are considering doing another run, perhaps as a fundraiser for the association.

Drupalcon Szeged 2008 was the annual European gathering of some of the best Drupal minds of our generation with plenty of excitement and style thrown into the mix. For the event I flew across the pond to represent for Chapter Three and chase down some amazing vegan food throughout Central Europe with Drupal genius Neil Drumm. It was a wonderful time all around and worth the trek from San Francisco through Prague and Vienna to the town of Szeged in southern Hungary.

The conference was kicked off with Dries' regular State of Drupal presentation where he dropped that there are over 20,000 Drupal 6 installations currently online and laid out his vision for Drupal 7 which included naming Angie "webchick" Byron to be co-maintainer of Drupal 7. Angie is a big fan of automatic testing and improved usability so wait for that to break out big in Drupal 7.

There were a couple great sessions by Sam Boyer about using Panels and using the Panels API where he laid out some of the existing power and the future direction of this very important module (including a Drupal 6 release in the coming weeks). I attended all the talks on Drupal security (a favorite topic of mine), including some particularly neat automatic security auditing approaches demonstrated by Barry Jaspan. The talk on running a Drupal consultancy by Tiffany Farriss (Palantir), Eric Gundersen (Development Seed), and Robert Scales (Raincity Studios) was fantastic and I strongly encourage anyone in this business to watch it a couple times.

Despite the serious time difference, but thanks to the hotel and conference internet I was able to keep up with the Chapter Three business and got to spend some quality time creating a Drupal 5 and Drupal 6 release for Drupal for Firebug, a module and Firefox extension to help with Drupal debugging and development. Rolled a couple of patches, got up to speed with the latest in Drupal 7, and made some additional improvements to Drupal for Firebug during the Code Sprint on the final day.

I met some amazing people at the conference (including a number of European developers I had only spoken with online) and left feeling really pumped and excited about everything Drupal. The future here is quite bright and I look forward to seeing everyone at Drupalcon North America next March.

We all love the elegance the Drupal. The code style is clean, the architecture beautiful, and it's all pretty well thought out. Plus the logo is pretty amazing.

To find a fitting tribute to our favorite content management system, I spoke with a friend from college, the very elegant Lilly Russo, who makes amazing glass mosaics through her business in Oakland, California.