Blog posts during April 2006

Adrian Rossouw: Announcing DrupalCamp Johannesburg - Over the last few years that I have been involved in the Drupal community, I have noticed only a handful of South African developers, and I've always wondered if there are more of us out there.

I have also been introducing many many people to Drupal, but unfortunately every time people try to approach me for projects, I have to turn them down, as I am just too busy building Bryght.

To combat this, I am going to be holding a training session on how to become a Drupal developer, for local web developers at the end of June. I hope to help bootstrap the local Drupal community so that we can have better representation from my fellow South Africans.

Considering that there are 11 pages of people who have specified that they live in South Africa on drupal.org, I will also be heading up a DrupalZA group on DrupalGroups, just as soon as I can get an administrator to create it for me.

If you are interested in being kept up to date about this, and being put on the mailing list for South African Drupal users, please contact me via my drupal.org contact form

EDIT : I have created the DrupalZA user group. You can join on groups.drupal.org. You can just log in with your drupal.org auth, so you don't even have to create an account.

read more [Planet Drupal]

I think South African Community has a better chance now we have a central place to work from.

Well I've finally been able to do some work on the project/source management side of my website. As you can see there is now a link to the bug tracker, its running Flyspray its a really great system. As for Darcs I'm working on a patch management system of sorts.

So what project are you starting? you might ask. Well I'm not going to say, only once there is something usable will I announce my projects.

Registrations for LinuxWorld are now open so start registering. Be warned though when I tried to register it would only work in IE, apparently some last minute changes broke Firefox support so it should be working again soon for us non-IE users.

I think I'm just about ready for this years event, just need to make sure my name is down for the LPI examinations run by the Geek Freedom League.

And if you haven't guessed already I'm quite excited about this years event.

It seems everyone is using mambo these days and the number is growing, it hasn't got all those awards for nothing. However the templating system is not very flexible as far as content goes, while there are many ways to arrange content with the system itself styling it remains a challenge, ironically its was the template system that was one of the first things that drew me to mambo.

There is no denying that content management systems help in many ways but I can't help think that people aren't picking the best system for the job but rather by popularity and the result can be some particularly bad looking websites or worse generic looking ones where they just change the header and colours. (I'm not listing names)

So my point?

One: Don't settle for the first CMS that comes to mind. Do some research it will save you time down the road.
Two: If you are a business or organization don't be afraid to spend a little money on your site. In this day and age you can't afford not to.