Sure it helps to have extensive Drupal experience. And of course key project management skills are important. But are there qualities that set one project manager apart from another?

I work as a technical project manager for a healthcare software company. I get to manage the details of a technical implementation- training, tracking, meetings, and a steady stream of multi-way communication. But is there more to it than ’strong communication skills, outstanding interpersonal skills and a proven track record of managing multiple projects within schedule and budget.’

I think one of those keys is participation. Especially when it comes to an open source community such as Drupal. In fact, participation is one of the best ways to distinguish yourself in the community. “Drupal cred” is something that has to be earned through contributions to the codebase, or documentation, or one of the other many ways members can take an active role in growing the community.

I think I’ll continue to explore this question, for the simple fact that demand for Drupal developers and project managers is rising.

Drupal Job Trends - odinJobs.com

There have to be intangibles. What sets a Drupal project manager rockstar apart from the crowd?

What made it a bit easier, however, was the redesigned user interface for Taxcut.  I’ve used Taxcut every year since graduating from college and found each year to be an improvement over the last. This year’s Taxcut is particularly impressive.  They’ve simplified their helpers, refined their UI, and made it slightly more bearable to complete my tax forms.

Just for fun, I like to look at the actual 1040 alongside Taxcut’s worksheets. It helps me to appreciate the software for what it does – simplify a tangled mess of crap.  Look at the taxcode and try to understand which worksheets go with which forms, and what lines need to be filled out when.  It’s awful.

Take a look at what Alan Siegel had to say about poorly designed legal documents. I wonder what Alan would have to say about 1040’s.

• http://www.vitradirect.com
• http://www.nest-living.com
• http://www.equipyourtrip.com/

All are incredibly clean designs, strong lines and plenty of whitespace to prevent visual overload and make it easier to peruse the catalog. I especially like VitraDirect. They have some great flexibility in the design… I could see this making a great Drupal theme.

Sure, Twitter is great for celebrities. If only there were celebrities I cared enough about to warrant receiving an update every time they posted a tweet. But there aren’t. Sorry MC Hammer, I do not care what you had for breakfast:

I caught the “Red-Eye” and now it’s time for “Shut-Eye”!!! I had a little breakfast…. wait.. I might mess up my hair ! oh, Le coconut !!!

So what IS Twitter good for? Probably something, but what, I don’t think anyone knows. Since its inception in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, it hasn’t turned a dollar of net profit.

So where was I? Turns out you can cram an awful lot into 6 months.

However, I have been hearing more and more about the merit’s for Drupal as a CMS.  Actually, it turns out it is more like a content management framework.  I decided to give Drupal a chance to win me over with it’s flexibility and growing community of developers / designers.  I spent a few evenings searching out what I would need to develop something comparable to ScienceForAmerica.com.

I’m aware of the fact that Drupal is more extensible than Joomla!.  However, after the release of Joomla! 1.5, this advantage shrunk considerably.  With the MVC framework of Joomla, developers can create plug-ins with considerably cleaner, more compliant code.

Groups management is an area where Drupal is a clear leader.  It seems like Joomla! assumes that everything on a particular site will be done with an admin or super-admin.  This is annoying, as it seems a short-sighted assumption.  Besides creating content, there’s not much you can do.

The other clear winning area is for SEF URLs.  Joomla has never handled these well.  In fact, many of the components developed for Joomla to accomplish SEF still fail to fully enact unique, well-formed URLs.  Drupal has Joomla beat, with the code optimized and lean.

When it comes to design and ease of use, Joomla wins hands down.  The larger number of free and pay-for templates, combined with the well documented how-to’s for editing templates, show that Joomla is really for the design-minded developer.

So I guess at this point things are a bit of a wash.  I don’t see a need to develop SFA any further- it’s got a decent forum (although severely underused), a good downloads management system, and can handle multimedia relatively well.  I’ll keep an eye on Drupal, however, for future projects.  If it ends up I need an ecommerce solution, the Ubercart module appears to be a strong Virtuemart competitor.

]]> http://www.bretwagner.com/10/2008/drupal-vs-joomla/feed/ 1 http://www.bretwagner.com/10/2008/ted-blog/ http://www.bretwagner.com/10/2008/ted-blog/#comments Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:04:19 +0000 Bret http://www.bretwagner.com/12/2007/ted-blog/ TED Blog is all you’ll ever need to visit to learn about technology, entertainment and design (hence TED!).  Thing I love about this site is all the streaming content- TED has some great presenters.  What I would give to get a ticket to this event.  Check it out here.

The sessions I got the most out of were the ones I could use that day.  My professional web site (you’re here, obviously) was stale and the Wordpress session inspired me to tackle a redesign that made maintanence 100 x easier and posting 100000 x easier.

The second-most useful session was Drupal.  I’ve never used Drupal to build a web app, but when I was trying to decide between CMS’s it was Joomla or Drupal.  Armed with some new ammunition, I might do some more exploring of Drupal as a robust CMS that has solid code and some cool features that Joomla doesn’t offer.

]]> http://www.bretwagner.com/10/2008/more-bcmke3-best-sessions/feed/ 1 http://www.bretwagner.com/10/2008/barcampmilwaukee-where-did-all-these-photographers-come-from/ http://www.bretwagner.com/10/2008/barcampmilwaukee-where-did-all-these-photographers-come-from/#comments Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:49:47 +0000 Bret http://www.bretwagner.com/?p=21 Note to self: I need a Nikon SLR.

I just got back from BarcampMilwaukee3, the technology and creativity “un-conference”.  I wasn’t prepared for the creativity side of it, but I found this to be more refreshing than the discussion about web technologies I had throughout the two days.

It seems interesting to me the sheer number of photographers in the crowd.  I would put this number at one out of five participants either had a camera at the conference or were active flickr users for their blogs.  The photowalk was one of the most popular sessions.  Maybe this is a release for the sometimes mundane tasks of writing code.  But the creative side is important for programming, so maybe this is another means to foster that creativity.

All are examples where users happily do for free what companies would otherwise have to pay employees to do. It’s not outsourcing, it’s “crowdsourcing.”

Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail takes a look at the power of crowdsourcing. Anderson states that “the advantage of crowdsourcing is not just economic; customers can do a better job, too.” User generated content on review sites like Amazon and Netfilx is often well-informed, articulate, and trusted. The trust factor alone is enough reason to make user-submitted content the focal point of your social network. You’re not going to create an effective community of users by maintaining a one-way stream of communication. In fact, I would go so far as to say 4/5ths of all content on your site should be user generated. In the case of this “self-service” model, the work is being done by the people who care most about it, and best know their own needs.