What does Lullabot do and how do you work with Drupal?
Lullabot is Drupal’s leading consulting, architecture, and education company.
We offer customized on-site trainings, educational DVDs, and have trained hundreds of Drupal developers through our workshops around the country. We produce the #1 Drupal podcast, and offer a huge variety of free articles and information through our website. We are the author’s of the O’Reilly Drupal book, “Using Drupal” (now in it’s third printing), and have employed both authors of “Pro Drupal Development”, an Amazon top 100 book. We also produce “Do It With Drupal”, a large-scale curated educational event (look for the second installment of this great event in fall ’09).
Our happy clients include Sony Music, Inc Magazine, Stanford University, Fast Company Magazine, Harvard University, The BBC, Washington Post, MTV UK, The New American Foundation, The George Lucas Educational Foundation, and many more.
How did you first get involved in Drupal development?
Lullabot has been kicking ass in Drupal for three years. We employ such Drupal luminaries as Angela Byron (webchick), co-maintainer of Drupal 7 and Addison Berry (add1sun), Drupal Documentation team lead. Lullabot’s Nate Haug (quicksketch) wrote Drupal’s drag and drop functionality and is the leading JavaScript developer for core, Jeff Eaton (eaton) is one of the primary contributors to FormAPI and Drupal’s internal rendering system, and is a prolific developer of new Drupal modules, and James Walker (walkah) Drupal’s resident identity and OpenID expert.
What does your shop do and how do you work with Drupal?
Gorton Studios is an award-winning full-service web design and development company based in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul) of Minnesota.
We build user-friendly, owner-friendly, results-oriented websites. For a long time, that meant we were quietly building them with the best tool available (Drupal), and educating our clients on the merits of the tool along the way. Now, with Drupal’s emerging popularity many of our clients seek us out specifically because of our abilities with Drupal. That shift sped up significantly in 2008, but I think a big part of that was tying for the #2 showcase award at the 2008 Boston Drupalcon – and the fact that we tied with some absolute rock-stars in the Drupal world (a team including DC 2009 sponsors Lullabot and Tree House).
So, now, in addition to our primary focus on designing and building great websites based on Drupal, we’re also increasingly consulting and training others who are hoping to do the same.
How did you first get involved in Drupal development?
We’ve been in business since 2001. Like just about anyone who dates back to that era, we developed our own CMS. It had some neat features, but as time went by, it got increasingly difficult to keep the pace of innovation that we wanted. Sometime in mid-2004, we were starting a new project and felt it’s feature-set merited a serious look at other open-source CMS options. After a quick look at Drupal, we gave something else a shot. That tool gave us a fast start with a slick UI, followed quickly by some major technical limitations. We adjusted our CMS survey to focus much more on code review and Drupal got another shot – resulting in the launch of our first Drupal site in spring of 2005 (with version 4.4!). We did several Drupal 4.5 sites and really started thinking of it as our go-to tool with 4.6. As of Drupal 4.7, we effectively became a Drupal shop.
So, the technology got us hooked. On a more human note, though, I’ve got to say the Drupal community is an incredible group of human beings. Since becoming more involved with the people of Drupal, I’ve been repeatedly blown away by the combination of personable, open, thoughtful, straightforward brilliance that seems to be such the norm in this community.
How does Princess Cruises work with Drupal?
Drupal supports our shipboard intranet site. Our entire fleet, not matter where they are around the globe is always connected. One of the site highlights includes an area where users can share stories and photos from their experiences cruising around the world. With Drupal, our site is constantly updated with the latest news whether it be from crew members, our corporate offices or world news (from RSS feeds). Drupal was an easy choice for our CMS solution because of its flexibility in customization, caching solutions and ease of use for the end user.
How did you first start working with Drupal?
We began using Drupal 5 a little over a year ago. We were investigating other CMS tools and they fell short of our requirements. Drupal was able to meet all of our requirements and more with its hundreds of modules.
What are you most looking forward to at DrupalCon DC?
We’d like to learn more about migration of Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 as that will be our next step with our shipboard intranet. Due to the success of the shipboard corporate intranet, we will also be developing our shoreside corporate intranet with Drupal as well.