The very first Drupal Day Austin took place this past weekend, and it was a great success!
First off, many thanks to everyone that came out for the event! This year, we were unable to have a full-on DrupalCamp Austin, so we had to make do with one day. We appreciate the community for being so understanding and awesome! The speakers were truly all amazing, and their talks generated a great deal of healthy discussion.
The event was hosted by Capital Factory. If you’re not familiar with Capital Factory, you should definitely check them out. Capital Factory is a great resource for the tech community in Austin. They offer office space for startups — a few startups like OtherInbox, Cubeit, and Rockify are housed at Capital Factory. They also offer co-working space for individual folks who want to connect with talent in the Austin community. Overall, Capital Factory is a tremendous asset to our community, which they continually prove by hosting evens such as hours.
The event was kicked off with some BBQ and a talk by Karen Borchert and Erik Summerfield of Phase2 Technology. The talk entitled “So You Want to Build a Drupal Distribution,” which was a version of a talk Karen presented at this year’s NYC Camp.
Up next was Web Chef Mike Minecki talking about how to “Make Content Rock! A Few Modules to Improve the Lives of Editors.” Mike talked about modules like Total Control and Workbench and how they help with content administration.
Following Mike was our much anticipated CMS panel, featuring industry experts in various platforms. We had Devin Price from WP Theming representing WordPress, Travis Swicegood from the Texas Tribune talking about Django, Ryan Irelan from Happy Cog speaking about Expression Engine, and our very own Todd Nienkerk talking about Joomla — I mean, Drupal.
The purpose of the panel was to have an honest look at the good and bad of all the major CMS platforms available to developers, and it seems we generated a lot of great discussion! You can take a look at the tweets on this Storify link.
Next was Michael Caudy, speaking on how Drupal can be used to develop knowledge management systems to help in academic research. You can learn more about this topic by reading Michael Caudy’s blog here.
Lastly, Ben Finklea and Tim Hamilton, of Volacci and Astonish Designs respectively, gave an awesome talk about branding, and how to build a better brand for you and your business. We couldn’t have asked for a better talk to close out the day. The talk was both light-hearted, funny and informative.
You can look at a tweet-by-tweet recap of the entire day on Storify by clicking here. Slidedecks, where available, will also be posted soon, so stay tuned to this blog for updates.
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