Decision Maker

June 2010 we took a bold leap as a new company and decided to spend part our summer developing an Open-Source Internet Curriculum. We partnered with COSOLA-MACILE, a non-profit organization focused on K-12 education in less advantaged communities.

In July, we are travelling to Itabo, Dominican Republic to teach 6th-12th grade students and teachers about the Internet, Open-Source technology and Drupal, using Drupal Gardens as the primary teaching tool. The Pilot Program will run for approximately 2-weeks as an after school program open to interested MACILE participants.

Drupal has long been touted as a system that provides the necessary "plumbing" to build community-oriented websites. However, it is not immediately obvious, even to developers with some experience how one gets from a vanilla Drupal installation to creating a sophisticated community with complex interactions and different types of users.

This session will focus on opening your mind to the point of view of your clients. Whether you are working for a non-profit, a corporation, or your mom... we will cover some tricks that will help you understand what they want even if they can't explain it to you in Drupalspeak.

Ultimately, the aim of this session is to help you build skills that will enable you to understand your client's desires. Your clients get the Drupal site that they want. Your save time and energy (and money and aggravation) while you build it. This leaves both you and your client happy.

A user exists in a community website through their identity. But identity informations are not to be displayed to everyone.
In this session we will talk about tools we used and developed to create, manage and moderate those identities, as well as modules and techniques to provide privacy and confidentiality management.

A few points that will be discussed during this session:
- Profile and Profile Privacy
- Multistep register
- User Workflow
- User roles and User Relationships
- Access control and confidentiality cursor

In this session we would like to share our experience and talk about 15 contributed modules (pros, cons, needed tweaks, interaction with each other, ...) that helped us build the community part of the french news website www.lefigaro.fr.

Here is the list of modules we will be talking about.
- Messaging
- Private Message
- Notifications
- Activity
- Facebook Status
- Profile Privacy
- Profile Complete Percent
- Content Profile
- Avatar Selection
- User Relationship
- User Workflow
- Flags
- Organic Groups
- Weblinks
- Shorten

Almost all clients who approach your agency about a project want to know up front what the total cost will be. They hand you some loose notes and expect a fixed number of hours or price. To many this presents an impossible task. What is often forgotten is that an exact estimate isn't expected. What you need to produce is one that is accurate enough to close the sale. In this session you'll learn a method for producing early estimates to support your sales process.

Straight from Brussels, Europe's ultimate linguistic mosh pit, we share our experiences in supporting multilingual projects. As most of our clients require support for at least Dutch, English and French, we are committed to implement multiple languages as swiftly and seamlessly as possible. Needless to say, this is not easy to accomplish.

Multilingual support can be all too quickly formulated in the requirements document (a mere 'support multiple languages' generally does the trick).

Architecturing the way content editor will be able to manage the content on their site is one of the most important parts of building a web site.