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Whaddaya think: Is it a good idea to take a new job, move your family halfway across the country, and then immediately head to Hungary where you'll share a room with your new employer -- all in a space of two weeks? When I told my Dad about my plans to do just this, he chuckled and then mumbled something about "crazy" and "didn't get this from my genes."

August was a tornado of a month for me, culminating in my joining Palantir, moving to Chicago, and then attending DrupalCon Szeged (I was one of the track coordinators).

Back in June I wrote about how to theme correctly in Drupal (Sustainable Markup: How to be a themer in Drupal). At that time I was working on a new website for Graycor, a leading provider of construction, maintenance and facilities services throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico. So much of what I wrote about in my last blog entry relates specifically to the newly launched (August 25, 2008) Graycor site.

We set 3 goals for ourselves before we started the prototype build out:

1. Avoid using tpl.php files where ever possible.
2. Create default CSS styling and reuse as much as possible, "Theme" don't "Skin"
3. Leverage the Drupal admin everywhere we could.

And we did just that. We succeeded in reaching our 3 goals on this site.

Let me break down for you what we did...

I’ve clearly got travel on the brain. George and I are traveling to Drupalcon Szeged via Vienna and Budapest for a little pre-conference touring next Thursday and I can’t wait.

Before I leave, however, I need to announce a few more line-up changes for the Palantir team. Welcome to Brad Nowak and Matthew Butcher (mbutcher) and adieu and bon voyage to Rob Thompson and Elliot Vernon!

...ok, so while I did indeed win the Mindfield Sony SingStar Karaoke competition at Lollapalooza (prize: brand new PS3!), this post is not actually about me.
It’s about how the Drupal Association came to name Mark Boulton Design Ltd as their design partner in the Drupal.org redesign.

When I started at Palantir back in May, I left the newspaper industry for the greener fields of open source development. Part of the appeal of the Drupal project and open source is that by opening yourself up to the wider community, opportunities you could never predict might come your way.

Since my last post about Drupal at South by Southwest, there have been a couple of new developments to share:

First, the main SXSW Web site has been redesigned and relaunched as a Drupal site! Kudos to the festival organizers for picking Drupal to run the site for what’s probably the coolest music, movie, and interactive festival in the country.

Second, the Interactive Festival Panel Picker is now live. This site gives you the opportunity to review all of the more than 1200 panel proposals that were submitted for the 2009 festival and vote for your favorites. I’ve submitted two proposals:

Are you going to Szeged yet? If not, you'll miss out on all the Palantir fun! Palantiri are giving no less than 11 presentations and two BoFs at DrupalCon Szeged this year. If you're going, stop by one (or several) of our sessions and say hello! And if you're not going, there's still time to sign up!

Here's our full itinerary:

The folks at South by Southwest (SXSW) recently posted the audio podcast of Content Management System Roundup, the panel of CMS experts that I hosted there back in March. Even though I was fighting a losing battle with the flu and pumped full of DayQuil at the time, I think the session went very well, and the feedback that we got was quite positive. Matt McDermott, Jeff Eaton, Mike Essl, and Tiffany Farriss all deserve a tremendous amount of credit for the work that they did to make it such a great session.

One of the things that really struck me about the experience was the tremendous amount of interest in Drupal among the folks who attended our session. Nearly all of the questions in the Q&A sessions were about Drupal, and when Jeff asked how many people in the audience had heard of the software, nearly everyone raised their hand. What’s significant about this is that there were close to 1,500 people who attended our session; we had just been at Drupalcon in Boston the previous week, and that entire conference dedicated to Drupal had an attendance of around 850 people.

This disparity in numbers is made more significant when you consider that the audience at SXSW is pretty different from the one at Drupalcon. While Drupalcon is primarily attended by programmers and Web developers who specifically work with Drupal, SXSW attracts a wider audience that includes people involved in all aspects of interactive technology. This tells me that there’s a whole lot of people who are interested in and using Drupal that are not currently part of the traditional developer community.

Palantir has had much to celebrate of late and many people to thank for it. So we threw a party!

We wanted to welcome folks to the new digs, introduce some new faces and thank our friends, family, colleagues and partners for their support and encouragement. Fun was had by all and we've got the pictures to prove it!

We have a brand-new writeup on the Art Institute of Chicago’s Collections site for your consumption at Drupal.org.

It provides insight on the steps Palantir took in creating their new Collections site.  In particular, it highlights how Palantir went about integrating the AIC’s vast existing collections data into their new Drupal platform.