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Drupal is in serious demand! So much so, that there aren’t enough Drupal developers to meet this demand. Acquia have recently announced “Acquia U”, a new program providing comprehensive Drupal training and Drupal job placements for graduates.

Dries' keynote yesterday was great, as usual.  I'm impressed with him, with his unassuming, quiet manner.  He's not the sort of guy who you expect to be leading such a large organization. 

I remember a question I overheard at a previous Drupalcon -- what happens when something better than PHP for coding comes along?  Would that really mean the beginning of the end for Drupal?  

This week is Drupalcon Chicago, and Chris and I from ESSDACK are going.  It's going to be awesome. 

This will be my third trip to Drupalcon -- I wish I could go every year, but that just hasn't been possible.  But with the release of D7, and everything that's going on in the community, my boss had no chance trying to argue against my desire to make the trip.  

I'll be posting blog entries from the con, so stay tuned!

The Challenge: A client web site that relies on the Node Gallery module to present a wide selection of project portfolio image galleries, that also needs to present those images in a sensible way on mobile devices. 

In my specific case, the built-in node gallery display is working just fine for the display on the main web site, but it's hopelessly broken in the mobile display.  Since my drupal skills are stronger than my ability to convince my clients that they don't need a site that functions on mobile devices, I need to come up with a display that will work in the mobile environment.  

The Solution: It's Drupal, babe.  Piece of Cake. 

Input formats can be a challenge for folks who are new to Drupal -- especially if you've bowed to the pressure to use a WYSYWYG editor on your web site.  Luckily, the input format system has some good options to help control things. 

One think you'll need to think about is which users will be using your site, and what sort of tools are they going to need. Are they savvy enough users to be able to use some more crunchy formats, like Markdown? That's a possibility, but it's probably not the case for most of you.

With the education-focused sites I'm building these days, it has been very difficult to deliver a site that does not provide some sort of WYSIWYG editor for the end user. Users want to be able to use the same sort of tools they have in Microsoft Word, and if they can't, they aren't going to be comfortable in the new web site.  

I just answered a question in the Drupal Post-Installation forums that gives me chills just remembering my own panic when similar problems have happened with some of our drupal sites. What the heck can you do when you can't log in -- no one can log in, and the site seems hosed.  

It's a pretty chilling problem -- you've got a site that worked fine until a few days ago, and you can't log in to do much of anything to try to figure out what's going on.  

Three years.  Hundreds of thousands of volunteer developer hours invested. A head-to-toe rethink of the whole project. It's not really possible to overstate the importance of this week's release.  For all the excitement going on at CES this week, I'm pretty sure that this is the biggest news around, even if no one outside the drupal community seems to notice.  

So you’re building a site for a client — it’s a pretty typical, nothing special site, a little theme work to keep it from being totally boring and to make sure you feel like you’ve earned your fees . . . And then the client asks the difficult question:

“This site is going to be customized for mobile devices, isn’t it?”

Today completed the three day performance adventure with the Lullabots. Rock solid, all the way. (should rhyme with "double rainbow, all the way").

The most important takeaway for the day is the idea that any Drupal user, from the most high powered enterprise user to the dabbler with a $7 bargain-basement shared hosting account, can take some specific steps to improve the performance on their Drupal sites. No matter who you are, if you're using Drupal you have the tools to make it better.

There is a flip side, of course.