UPDATE: We have a RedHen sprint scheduled for Wednesday May 22nd at 1pm in room A107.
The big week is finally here with DrupalCon Portland kicking off in our own backyard. For those of you not familiar with Portland, we're really big into birds (yes, I'm aware that's very 2010), and chickens in particular. I'm working real hard here to make a clever connection to RedHen, the leading native Drupal CRM, and the only one named after a bird!
You are all invited on Monday, May 20th, the first day of DrupalCon Portland, to honor Aaron Winborn's ongoing contributions to the Drupal community and to celebrate Drupal's power to make the world a better place.
I have to admit that I don't exactly know how to write about this event. I don't know Aaron personally. But like most of us, I've been working with his contributed code and following his writings on Drupal for several years. If you follow Aaron's blog, you know that he and his family are struggling with his ALS. You may have seen Aaron's G.D.O. post two weeks back looking for volunteers to help him continue to code in spite of the progression of his illness.
Like many developers, we get pretty psyched about building stuff. Sometimes it takes us a little longer to get excited about describing the stuff we built... but RedHen has been getting enough attention that it was time to do some communicating, especially considering we recently released version 7.x-1.2 of the module.
Today we published a significant, if not quite complete, chunk of RedHen documentation to Drupal.org here. That documentation can now grow with RedHen!
But I know what you're thinking: "Documentation? Am I having some horrible 2005 fever dream? Where's the video??"
So, ok: I made a little instructional video about getting started with RedHen. It's my first one, so critique gently: it's surprisingly difficult to converse with an imaginary audience.
I’m in the somewhat novel position of having helped plan the agenda for the 2013 Nonprofit Technology Conference but going as an attendee for the first time -- which is very exciting. People tell me the NTC is the best event of its kind, so I look forward to experiencing it without being pulled in five directions at once.
Outside of the two plenaries, here are the sessions I hope to attend in Minneapolis.
9:00 am - 3:00 pm
Drupal Day for Nonprofit IT Professionals
At ThinkShout, we spend as much time as possible dreaming up and implementing new ways to leverage Drupal to meet the web technology needs of the nonprofit organizations we serve. As the technology conference season ramps up, these 10 topics and tools are foremost on our radar.
A few days into my work with ThinkShout, I'm pleased to report that everything I always knew must be doable with Drupal isn't just possible, it's in process. I've seen things people wouldn't believe. Engagement scoring tied to user activity. I watched email sent from a website report stats back to an ESP.
If you're interested in expanding your Drupal expertise, I encourage you to join us at "Drupal Day for Nonprofit IT Professionals" at the 2013 Nonprofit Technology Conference. (You already know about the NTC, right? It's awesome! Anybody involved with nonprofit technology in general should attend at least once.)
ThinkShout is very proud to announce that Brett Meyer has joined our team as our new Technical Project Manager!
Brett has a long history of making significant contributions to the nonprofit tech community, and for the last six years Brett was the Director of Communications at NTEN. Brett brings a wealth of knowledge surrounding nonprofit tech goals and strategies, and we are thrilled to have him on our team working closely with our nonprofit clients.
As our technical project manager, Brett's primary objective is to help guide nonprofits we work with from discovery through launch, and to help us focus on our mission of developing useful and sustainable open source tools that help our clients achieve their goals.
Update: Version 7.x-1.3 had a couple of bugs: as of March 18, the latest-and-greatest version of Mandrill is 7.x-1.4!
We ThinkShouters have been working away on our Drupal/Mandrill integration module, and released version 7.x-1.3 today. We think it's a pretty significant step for the module: I'll tell you how we got to where we are, what's in this release, and a little about what's next for Mandrill.
If you aren't familiar with Mandrill, it's a transactional email service built around the email delivery system for MailChimp, and it's deliberately built to be used by custom apps and plugins. If you want your Drupal site's automated emails to get sophisticated modern analytics and reporting, be spam compliant, scale to bulk levels, and be more reliably delivered, you can route your email through Mandrill.
With the session submission deadline drawing to a close for DrupalCon Portland 2013, ThinkShout (along with many other fine Drupal community members) participated in the mad rush to get all of our awesome session ideas in on time! The DrupalCon session committee has a busy couple of weeks coming their way, and in the meantime, we'd love to hear your comments and feedback on our presentation ideas.
Our team has a broad range of topics we can't wait to share with the community, from CRM and Salesforce to Magic: The Gathering!
Check them out in more detail below, we can't wait to hear what you think:
With 2013 well underway, we thought it was time to circle up in the office and bust out an open source sprint. Our focus this time was on RedHen, our native Drupal CRM, which is fully open sourced and lives on Drupal.org. In one afternoon, with our team of 8, we were able to give the issue queue some lovin' and also roll the release of RedHen 1.0!
