My week at DrupalConSF
I flew out from Pittsburgh in the cold, early morning rain. I had to get out of bed at 4am to make my 6am flight. But I wanted to take in as much of DrupalConSF as I could, so I was willing to get up a little early. When I arrived in SFO the sky was clear, and the temperature was just perfect.
It was too good to keep to myself, so let me share with you some of the highlights:
@ DrupalCon San Francisco
There were hills
funky ads
boats
see-food
picturesque places to park
big city architecture
geeks!
and of course, chicks! (webchick, {not pictured} to be specific)
Yes, I said 'chicks'. Don't know if I'm allowed. 'The crush of humanity', I sighed, trying to navigate from session to session at the conference. 'You mean Hu-Womanity' I was corrected. :) She was right... 12% or more of the geeks at the conference were girl-geeks. Including one of my own heros (heroines?) in the Drupal world, Webchick!!! I got to meet Webchick in a Birds of a Feather meetup, as well as in the CHX coding lounge working on D7 core patches. Worth the trip in and of itself!
My head is still swimming from the info I took in at the conference. There are some really promising technologies surfacing, including MongoDB, Pantheon, and Fusion. Not to mention all the exciting stuff happening in Drupal 7, which now has fewer than 100 critical bugs to patch.
What does this mean for wildpockets.com? It really became apparent that the Drupal community is tackling a lot of the same social networking and collaborative hurtles as we do at Wild Pockets. We will be harnessing every last bit of the power of Drupal we can manage to bring to you an awesome game development community portal. Stay tuned for more chat, friend finding, match making, project posting and sharing features!
Big thanks to the organizers and over 3000 people that came to the conference.
One last, gratuitous yet gorgeous shot of downtown (near the conference)
Social Game Development with Drupal and Wild Pockets (Vote for us at DrupalCon SF!)
DrupalCon SF is coming in April, and we have thrown in our hat to do a Session on "Social Game Development with Drupal" (click link! sign in! vote for us!)
Session synopsis: "The social game space is exploding on social networks and are changing the face of web based gaming communities. We will demonstrate how we have used Drupal to create 'Pocket Bot', a social networking based game. Pocket Bot is a simple Drupal based 3d game where you take care of and customize your own little robot to interact with your friends on your social networks. Through the combination of off the shelf Drupal modules such and Services, Organic Groups, Actions, and Rules; third party tools such as Gigya for social networking functionality; and the Wild Pockets web based 3D game engine we will expose how we built this social gaming experiment." More about Pocket Bot coming soon... for now, VOTE FOR OUR SESSION at DrupalCon! The vote button is a bit hidden. White button on a white background on the top left corner of the Session page... and it only shows up if you are Signed In... SO, if you would like to help Pocket Bot achieve world domination: Sign Up (for a Drupal.org account), Sign In, and VOTE
New Heinz ketchup package: Dip and Squeeze, now in 3D!
The New Heinz Ketchup container, now in amazing 3d! :)
This is inspired by a conversation with Ari Lightman about Social Media, specifically how it pertains to product development and market research. Ari mentioned that Heinz had an interesting new packaging, and though it was news to me apparently they have managed to create quite a buzz around the launch of this packaging.
Press 'p' to cycle animations
Press 'p' to cycle animations
We were giving a presentation of Wild Pockets for Mr. Lightman's class at CMU "Measurement and Analysis of Social Media Initiatives", and decided to do this quick demo of Heinz's new packaging in 3D, and in ACTION! Because Wild Pockets is embeddable media, I can embed this right here in my blog post. In fact, Heinz could have embedded a demo like this in their own Facebook App. If they wanted to really annoy everyone, they could send out messages "Jane Dough just opened the new Heinz Ketchup packet from the top!" But I think there are better ways to engage users, don't you?
New Year, New Look
Look out world... we have given our website a facelift, and the launch is planned for early next week!
The new layout is specifically designed to make it easy to get to important and useful content, and is built on the 960 Grid System.
New Features:
GetSatisfaction:
Your experience with Wild pockets is important to us, so we have implimented the GetSatisfaction system to collect and manage feedback, questions, and ideas. On the new site you will see a little sidebar feedback widget, simply click it and you'll get a form for sending along your questions, ideas, bugs you've encountered, or just give some praise.
Mollom:
Mollom will help us guard the gates and keep our registrations and comments free from spammers. This extra layer of security should greatly reduce spam messages on the site.
Calais:
We have added semantic rdf tagging thanks to Calais by Thompsen Reuters! Content on the site will now be autotagged, and categorized for easy seaching!
I am looking forward to your feedback, and hope you enjoy the new look and features!
Why we chose Drupal for the Wildpockets.com website
My name is Tony Licon, and I have recently joined the WildPockets team as Web Developer. Today I am going to tell you a bit about our choice to use Drupal (pronounced Drew-pal) to power WildPockets.com.
While Drupal is my favorite Content Management System, there are other great options like Joomla or WordPress. This video comparing WordPress and Drupal has a really interesting take on choosing the best platform. Basically, with enough work and know-how, you can do pretty much anything with the most popular platforms, and generally it makes sense to choose the tool you are most comfortable using.
If there is ONE thing that makes Drupal stand out for me it's the Drupal community. Drupal has a very strong developer base, and it is pretty easy to get help. The community has a strong focus on best practices, has a ton of good modules that are easy to download and install, it's Open Source and VERY flexible.
Drupal enables us to ride on the shoulders of giants. For instance, we will be using Project Mercury as the basis of our upcoming website re-design. Mercury is a performance tuned and highly scalable Amazon E2C image that combines PressFlow (a tweaked fork of Drupal), Varnish, APC, and Cacherouter.
I am looking forward to sharing the new site soon!