What does your shop do and how do you work with Drupal?

Four Kitchens works almost exclusively with Drupal to build large-scale, community- and publishing-oriented websites. Our in-house staff can handle any task, including designing the look and feel, implementing the theme, developing custom modules, streamlining content workflow, and optimizing sites to improve performance and scalability.

How did you first get involved in Drupal development?

Our first Drupal site was That Other Paper, an Austin-area online publication we founded and operated from 2006-2008. Only two weeks before its launch on the MediaWiki platform in November, 2006, Four Kitchens co-founder David Strauss discovered Drupal and immediately realized its potential. We halted all development on the site and completely rebuilt it on Drupal 4.7.2 in less than three weeks.

Those three weeks were the ultimate crash-course in Drupal design and development. From that moment forward, almost all of our projects and client work were built using Drupal.

What type of websites do you specialize in?

We are probably most well-known for our expertise in performance and scalability optimization for large sites with lots of users and content. We take performance concerns seriously, and they influence many decisions during a project's planning, development, deployment, and maintenance.

We also specialize in editorial workflow. While Drupal provides many options for editors to work with text and media, few firms have the experience necessary to understand how a professional editorial staff operates. Four Kitchens' web chefs bring a combined twenty years of writing, editing, and publishing experience to bear when designing tools and workflow solutions for content-heavy, editorially driven websites. These tools and workflow solutions also apply to sites that rely on user-generated content.

What are you most looking forward to at DrupalCon DC?

The most important aspect of Drupal is its vibrant and active community. In its forums, issue queues, groups, and chat rooms, this community spurs debate and innovation that continues to improve the Drupal project every hour of every day. DrupalCon gives all of us the humbling opportunity to meet face-to-face with incredible contributors from all over the world, and people we would otherwise only know as IRC nicks and avatars.

(But if you really want to know, we're most looking forward to morten.dk's endless beer recommendations!)