What does CITI do and how do you work with Drupal?

Community IT Innovators (CITI) is an employee-owned company committed to helping social mission organizations effectively use technology. Since 1993, Community IT Innovators (CITI) has developed a successful, socially responsible mission-driven business model. We attract and retain highly skilled computer consultants committed to serving the nonprofit community. By combining technology expertise with a commitment to our clients' missions, we have provided unsurpassed service to more than 800 organizations.

CITI builds both small brochure sites based on drupal for local non-profits and large complex sites for international associations. CITI's drupal developers excel at integrating Drupal with existing systems, data migration, custom module development and empowering clients to understand how to leverage the full power the core and integral modules like CCK and Views.

How did you first get involved in Drupal development?

I was hired at CITI in March of 2007 to help start up an Open Source web development arm. CITI was already using OSS like MySQL and making all of our code available to clients, but they were looking to offer fully open source stack. We started looking at different CMSs like Joomla!, Plone and Drupal and in the end chose Drupal based on its community, developer-friendly code base and existing popularity with our client base of mission driven organizations.

Getting things up and running in an environment that was used to IIS and Coldfusion was a bit of a tough start, but we have some really smart people on board and everyone is always willing to learn new things. We got up to speed quickly and are coming into our own this year with launches of some pretty complex implementations and integrations.

Can you tell us about a recent Drupal-based project that CITI did that was particularly interesting?

Our team has been getting handed some pretty interesting projects that require integration with existing Association Management Systems like iMIS - especially their authentication mechanisms. This has given us a chance to really delve into some of the login and session stuff on the back end and it's really satisfying when it all just works.

Also, we've been getting pretty good at importing data into Drupal to help folks transition off of vile systems like Frontpage (shudder). As a former database guy, that's the kind of work I really enjoy.

Being DC-based, what advice do you have for other Drupalers coming to the city?

DC is a great walking and biking city (swamps are flat, right?), so make sure to walk where you can. There are also plenty of great restaurants and bars in the U Street and Chinatown areas, which are both really close to the convention center. Avoid Georgetown. It's not hard, since there's no metro there, but trust me when I say to avoid it.