Tracy Smith's blog

Discover an intranet solution for your organization using Packt’s new book on Open Atrium.

Packt is pleased to announce Drupal Intranets With Open Atrium, a new book which introduces readers the power of Open Atrium using practical examples of an Open Atrium Intranet. Written by Tracy Charles Smith, this book provides precise steps to set up a web server on a Windows or Macintosh computer and install Drupal with the Open Atrium distribution.

Open Atrium is a Drupal installation that provides intranet solutions to various organizations for sharing ideas. Anyone and everyone can develop features for it, add modules, change the skin, re-factor the workflow and accordingly customize it as per the requirements. Basically Open Atrium is used to create intranets where co-workers or teams can collaborate easily.

One thing I've always been interested in is Disaster Management and Recovery. I think it can be attributed to my ability to stay completely calm in high stress situations. In some instances, I can seem rather cold as I try to filter the emotion and start searching for a solution to the problem. Often this is countered by my since-of-humor during wee hours of the morning trying to resuscitate a file or web server. My interest in emergency management matches my utter amazement at technology in general. I often wonder how it is that GPS, Radio, Mobile, and Wi-Fi connections all just seem to work. It just doesn't compute in my head, but I've learned to accept it.

• This post was created while working at Quiddities. The original post can be found here: Drupal Training

Getting to Minneapolis

On Wednesday, I travelled to Minneapolis from Santa Cruz to attend Drupal training by Lullabot. I travelled via feet, car, 2 planes, tram, light rail, and feet again. Who knew that one could use so many different forms of transportation to get somewhere.

What is Drupal

Drupal is a content management system (CMS). It is an extensible framework that performs the basic CMS functions and allows us to customize code. It is setup so that you can apply customizations without “hacking” the core. By not “hacking” the core, updates and security releases can be applied without losing any previous customizations.

How is Drupal Different?

There are hundreds of CMS systems available to you. Joomla and WordPress are two options available to you. If you just want a blog, then WordPress if for you. Joomla is a great CMS out of the box, but leaves little room for customizations. An alternate is to have someone develop a custom CMS for you. While a custom CMS may do exactly what you want it to do, there are several disadvantages.