We're Ramping Up for DrupalCon in DC!
We’re proud to announce that Tree House Agency is a gold sponsor of the upcoming Washington, D.C., DrupalCon in 2009. We’ve been working to steadily increase our involvement in sponsoring Drupal community events, from being a Bronze sponsor of DrupalCon Barcelona con to a Silver sponsor of DrupalCon Boston, and now being a gold sponsor of both Do It With Drupal and the Washington, D.C. DrupalCon.
My name is Steven Merrill, and I’m the newest developer on board with Tree House Agency. I initially met Tree House at DrupalCon Boston, so I’ll be introducing our plans for the Washington, D.C. DrupalCon. Since DrupalCon Boston, we’ve done quite a bit, and a lot of that will be reflecting in what we talk about in Washington, D.C.
Creating Interactive Magic
I’m one of several new members to join the Tree House Agency team since DrupalCon Boston, and before I joined up, I got a chance to work on a truly amazing project: BobDylan.com. BobDylan.com runs on Drupal, and it features a custom AJAX page-reload engine, and lots of integration with some amazing Flash pieces produced by PROD4Ever, the Boston agency who did the Flash dev and design for the project. I was part of the implementation team due to my Flash and Service expertise. We’re rallying all the BobDylan.com troops to show you how it was built in a session we proposed called Creating Interactive Magic . If you’d like to hear more, vote our session up!
Building Complex Application and Publishing Workflows
Another new face in our virtual team is Sean Buscay, who I worked closely with in implementing one of our newest client projects: The Big Money, for Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive, which was a collaboration between Tree House Agency, Lullabot, and Gorton Studios. Sean’s a master of Drupal development and one of his areas of expertise is in building publishing workflows for large organizations like Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive and the Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. He’s offered to present Building Complex Application and Publishing Workflows. If you’ve ever had questions about how to get your content picture-perfect before posting, vote for his session!
Scaling Drupal: Not IF…HOW
Tom Wysocki is Tree House’s lead architect, and one of his specialities is building Drupal sites that scale. We’re no strangers to high-traffic web sites: Lifetime Network’s Dress Up Challenge gets up to 1.5 million pageviews per day, and Lullabot helped us with a plan to build The Big Money so that it could withstand the force of up to 5 million visitors in a single day. Thomas provided his expertise in implementing a Content Distribution Network and refining The Big Money’s code and modules to scale well with a PostgreSQL implementation. We have no doubt that Drupal can scale, and we’d love to teach you how, so vote for Scaling Drupal: Not IF… HOW! .
A Breath of Fresh AIR for Drupal
Josh Katris is another of our senior developers, and he’s been doing some serious thinking about Drupal’s administrative interface, an area that’s often neglected in creating a site. As lead themer on sites with elaborate administrative requirements like DressUpChallenge.com, Josh has become acutely aware of the challenges the Drupal admin poses to non-technical users. From observing client experiences, he has devised an approach leveraging AIR to create a desktop-style content administration tool for Drupal sites. Vote for his session, A Breath of Fresh AIR for Drupal to see why you would want such a tool, and how to create one for your own sites.
The Case for Drupal in the Enterprise
There’s no doubt that Drupal has been gaining traction on the web overall, with major musical artists, humanitarian organizations, and news organizations using it to power their sites. We’re also starting to see major corporations use Drupal for internal or external sites. With Acquia’s recent launch, there’s now a distribution of Drupal and a support network targeted at making Drupal an easier choice for the enterprise. Even so, many large companies are still wary. What are they worried about, and what can we do about it? We’re putting together a discussion featuring our own Michael Caccavano and Lullabot’s Jeff Eaton, to see what the corporate landscape is really like. Vote for The Case for Drupal in the Enterprise.
That’s what we’ve thought up so far. We’re really excited to both sponsor DrupalCon and to share some of our collected knowledge with everyone who attends. We hope to see you this March in Washington, D.C.!