Event Details

7:00 – 9:00p.m. August 11th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos

Drupal – An Introduction

Presenter: Lauren Roth

The days are long gone when the height of sophistication in web development and design was applying a style sheet to your static HTML. You could instead hand code a custom web application to serve your content, but not have an easy way for your client to log in and change content themselves. Along came blogs and with blogs, and more sophisticated client-side scripting, dynamically loaded content. A powerfully flexible way to organize large amounts of content is to use a Content Management System like Drupal.

So, what is Drupal? You may have heard of it. You may have tried WordPress and considered it a lightweight CMS. You may have also tried Joomla! Drupal is a content management system, written in PHP, which can be used to build websites as simple as blogs or as complex as full-scale community sites. You can use its abundance of community contributed modules toward building a web publishing platform, a social application, or a even a magazine like The Economist, which is currently being converted to Drupal.

Documentation as Conversation

Presenter: Anne Gentle

Even if your documentation system does not converse with your users, your documentation can help customers talk to each other and make the connections that help them do their jobs well or learn something new as if they were in a classroom with a community for classmates. This talk describes how you can think about documentation and user assistance in a conversational way, with the help of social media technology. I’ll discuss the topics in my new book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. I’ll describe the use of in-person Book Sprints that combine wikis and community events to gather together writers to accomplish documentation goals.

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