Atlanta Drupal User Group

We held a WYSIWYG Shootout last Saturday at Drupalcamp Atlanta (see presentation slides here, with video of the session forthcoming). The stated purpose of the session:

"Select the best editor, available through the WYSIWYG Module, for common content entry tasks in Drupal."

DrivenByYou.com represents a new approach to buying cars online. Traditional online car buying guides users to shop for automobiles by selecting a make, model or year as the first step of the buying process. Autotrader.com decided to take lessons learned from shoppers at brick-and-mortar auto dealerships and apply them to an online car buying experience.

We had an action packed Atlanta Drupal User Group (ADUG) meetup last week with two awesome demonstrations of emerging Drupal distributions - Open Publish, which was created by our friends at Phase2 Technology and Drupal Gardens from our partner, Acquia.

We recently completed a 2010 long-range planning meeting for our Atlanta Drupal User Group (ADUG) meetup. Our pseudo-committee consists of five to seven key organizers, and we have intentionally kept the structure fairly informal. We conduct presentations on the third Tuesday of every month in a training center that is provided by Matrix Resources (large staffing agency).

One of the over-riding goals of the Drupalcamp Atlanta organizers was to provide as much video footage of the event as possible in order to share back to the community at large. We also heard from a lot of people that had a conflict of interest with the date, were turned away by the weather, or may have attended, and wanted to see two or more sessions that overlapped.

Last weekend was the first ever Drupalcamp Atlanta, and I am proud to report that things went really well. As I write this, we've had 11 straight days of downpours in metro Atlanta and flooding throughout the city. As a result, we had a higher percentage of no-shows than we would have liked, but about 200 Drupal'ers braved the weather and made it out.

We are now less than a week to go and final plans are being ironed out for the inaugural Drupalcamp Atlanta happening this Saturday, September 19th. We have coordinated what we think will be an informative, exciting, and fun event with lots of opportunities to network with your peers. For those who can’t make it, we are trying to provide as much video footage as possible.

Whenever a group organizes a conference for the first-time there are a lot of unknowns – the phrase "if you build it will they come" is always in the back of your mind. However, I am happy to report that the response so far to the inaugural Drupalcamp Atlanta has been just awesome – as I write this, we have 158 attendees, 15 sessions, 9 sponsors, 2 keynote speakers with strong Drupal credentials, and a passionate organizing committee.

We recently completed a relatively small, but really cool Drupal v6 microsite that exemplifies to me how open-source is impacting traditional advertising channels (i.e. print, TV, radio, etc.). Unfortunately, the website (Neurowebcast.com) is for invite only guests, but works similarly to other messaging chats you have probably seen online.

There was some little reported financial news that came out of Wall Street last month that did not make much traction in the Drupalsphere, but it should – particularly to our partner Acquia and those of us in the open source world. The news was that the darling of commercial open-source business models, Red-Hat, reported that business is good, very good, despite the global economic recession.