Announcing Transition Drupal
By Ed Mitchell 5th May 2010
At the April DrupalCon San Francisco conference the open-source Transition Drupal project was kicked off. Drupal is a popular website management system that specializes in creating social networks (its tag line is “community plumbing”). Many popular sites are being run on Drupal, WhiteHouse.gov recently becoming one of them.
Drupal by itself takes significant technical know-how to set up so the Transition Drupal project is creating a “website in a box” package that a modestly skilled person can set up on an inexpensive hosting account. It will have the essential features already configured — just add content.
Work has begun identifying the features version 1.0 will have. You can find the the draft 1.0 specification at the Transition Drupal site (pardon the spare look; though under construction it’s usable). Most of the conversation about the project itself is taking place on the Drupal group (anyone can register for an account). You’ll also find discussion of the first draft of a fabulous theme Chris Wells from Transition Kensal & Kilburn has put together.
There will be plenty of ways throughout the project to help. Right now we need these specific skills:
- Information Architect: This person would design one or more site maps that would be appropriate for different sizes and types of Transition Towns. A large town may need different features, content and layout than a small one, for instance, and we need someone to study needs and put together one or more site structures.
- Drupal developers: if you are a Drupal developer, please consider joining the core development team! With help, some of the long list of features currently slated for Version 2.0 may make it into Version 1.
- Graphic designer: we have lots of graphic needs throughout the project
- Drupal Themer: This is a specific skill that converts graphic designs into theming code
In a few months we will need:
- Documentation: We’ll need people to create setup tutorials and other documentation, including video tutorials
- Installation support: we’ll need people who know how to set up Drupal to answer questions on the forums
If you are interested in participating, get an account on the groups site in drupal and introduce yourself!
André Angelantoni, PostPeakLiving.com