Drupal Camp Vancouver

The Drupal community proved, once again, it has heart!

Drupal Camp Vancouver brought together sponsorship from Building Opportunities with Business, stewardship from the Fearless Project (Fearless City), and knowledge/energy/expertise from Drupal Camp Vancouver attendees in an evening that was part code sprint, part barn raising. And there were even door prizes provided by VONIC and FreeTheNet.ca.

Under the leadership of Scott Nelson, Drupal Campers geeked for good at Delicados on Friday evening after Drupal Camp presentations. Scott reported the next day that this work took the site from alpha to beta as well as providing some great ideas around ongoing project management and site operation. We can't wait to see the changes moved from dev to production.

Here's an account of the evening from Lorraine Murphy, aka raincoaster, a local blogger and Fearless Project blogging coach:

So, and it may be superfluous to announce, I'm from the Downtown EastSide. And the Downtown EastSide, as you may or may not know, is one of the most artistic, yet most fatal, regions of the country and even, if you are large-minded, the world. And the Code Sprint, which event this is, is designed to use the brainpower of people who are not in the Fearless City demographic, to help people in the Fearless City Demographic.

After a short intro by Scott, the techie leader, and Stephen, the design side leader, and Irwin, the project leader, we split into rough and amorphous groups along the useability/code geek lines, although it turns out there's a great deal of overlap of which it seems that I alone am aware and thus I keep it to myself lest it complicate things.

PROGRESS!

Shocking to report, within a very short period of time the design team has made radical improvements to the interface, adding large buttons to tell your story, type your story, or show your story; this is critical, since so many participants will be adding pre or post literate content, and not a few are visually impaired.

And, of course, being as organized as I am I cannot remember the name of the lead designer. IF this was you, or you contributed, please tell us in the comments so we can feel less guilty. Otherwise your friends will gradually rat you out over the next year and that would be awkward, right?

And meanwhile the code team has been fulfilling my fondest dreams (well, except for the one with Trent Reznor, but that's neither here nor there).

The code hackers have fixed, almost instantaneously, the Tiny MCE issue with Safari (virtually all geeks are running Safari, did you know that? I didn't). They have then hungrily sought out other challenges and I have handed them the following:

Kill that godforsaken splash page: result: DONE
Make the Add Image option more prominent: DONE
Give us an HTML editor option: DONE
Fulfill my unrecognized, yet compelling, dreams: DONE

I like the way these people work.

It must be said, any group of people who get together to more or less do what I tell them and who then offer me free burritos to take home is a group of people for whom I will retain a lingering fondness.

So what did YOU do Friday night?