Spent my Birthday at the CMS Expo

The 2009 CMS Expo was in Evanston IL 4/29 - 5-1 & it was a huge success. Details at www.CMSexpo.net I was there to teach the Drupal KickStart Session along with co-presenter Matthew Leichlider. Our slides are attached to this post in PDF format. Our class had over 2 dozen attendees and for 3.5 hours we gave them a healthy dose of Drupal. We started off with the history of the Drupal CMS and finished with a walk through of CCK, Views2, and setting up a Debian server with Drupal. Just before our session George DeMet of www.Palantir.net ran down the CMS Showdown where WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal were all given 100 hours to build a real site for a real client to the same specs. When the sites were finished the client, a community organizer in Evanston IL, weighed them and decided that Drupal was an ever so slight advantage over Joomla while her perception of WordPress was that it wasn't in the same league as the other two. That is unfortunate though, because Many of us believe that WordPress did a tremendous job at tweaking itself into a better showing as a CMS. More info available at www.cmsshowdown.com Also while there, The Drupal Song took front and center. I had no intentions of playing the song over 5 times in a 24 hour period. It just happened. Here are 4 videos; most of them excellent quality. The 1st time: At the Speakers Dinner 2nd: Lunch time in front of the entire Expo. (Expo Organizer, John Coonen, jogs up to me after I've finished lunch and says, "Hey Doug! Go grab a guitar and play the Drupal Song on stage!" So I did. :-) 3rd: With the SDRNEWS.COM crew after interviewing me (take one) 4th: SDRNEWS.COM Take two A big THANK YOU to Jeff Powers for backing me up on the harmonica! I met a lot of great people, made many new friends, and learned a great deal. The CMS Expo was a BLAST! I look forward to the next one!