Schipul Releases Open Source Tendenci CMS for NonProfit Websites

We love Open Source and our clients do too!  We often hear from clients that you only will use open source software to build your websites and the advantages of having an open source community of developers and designers are undeniable.

That’s why everyone here at Schipul is super excited to announce we can now offer you a new open source option in addition to Drupal and WordPress open source website development and design with our open source release of our Tendenci CMS for NonProfit Websites.

Tendenci.org

Tendenci is the First Open Source CMS Made Just for Non-Profits!

The open source release of Tendenci is now available as part at the  Nonprofit Technology Conference  in San Francisco going on this week, April 3-5.

If you are at NTEN NTC 2012, come to the NetSquared Local Community Organizers #12NTC Beerside Chat tonight at Jasper’s.  Come learn more about the event  and come hang out with us in San Francisco this week!

Read More Details about the Open Source Announcement!

Here’s photos of the nonprofit tech conference that our team of Schipulites attending NTEN’s NonProfit Technology Conference are shooting and sharing daily.

What Does This Mean for Current Schipul Clients?

Here are some links with information for our current clients to explain what this means for you and your website, and what open source software is:

Open Source Tendenci FAQ for Current Tendenci Clients | From the Tendenci Blog

What is the Difference Between Tendenci Enterprise and Tendenci Community? FAQ

Open Source Hosting Prices and FAQ with the Tendenci Community

Download, Deploy and Host Your Own Open Source NonProfit Website with Tendenci CMS

We have set-up a public repository on Github for Tendenci where you can access the software for those looking to host their own Tendenci website here:  https://github.com/tendenci/tendenci/.  The Tendenci CMS is written in the Python programming language within a Django framework.

Visit Tendenci.org for information and help with our open source CMS.

If you have additional questions, comments, concerns, etc. please don’t hesitate to contact us, or post them in the comments below.

Get All the Open Source Tendenci News

Sign up on our email list below to receive  the latest updates about the open source release of Tendenci – The CMS for Non-Profits and Share the news with your friends!



Drupal and WordPress at SchipulCon: One Stage, One Open Source Love

Open Source Discussion with the Founders of Drupal and WordPress from Schipul – The Web Marketing Co.

“People being told what to do and working for money are never going to match people working for passion and a community.”
~Matt Mullenweg

“With every cell in my body, I believe that Open Source is the way forward.  Especially when it comes to websites, but also beyond just websites.”
~Dries Buytaert

We were beyond honored to host Drupal founder Dries Buytaert and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg at our SchipulCon 2011 event.

Guided by David Stagg, the open source conversation survived epic microphone turmoil  years of open source competitiveness to showcase the true brilliance and passion of these open source leaders.

Dries Buytaert and Matt Mullenweg share the SchipulCon stage

Around Designers vs Developers Flocking to WordPress and Drupal (Respectively)

Matt:  “I learned a ton about code and programming and back end systems… mainly because I had sort of a vision of something that I wanted a user to realize…. and so we made certain design choices from a technical view that to me are more intuitive.

There were two big pressures early in WordPress’ life:  1) everyone wanted us to adopt a templating system because everyone at the time had one  and 2) they wanted us to go a strict object oriented model.  So you could extend everything WordPress does through classes essentially.

We took an action oriented plug-in approach… which is perhaps not as correct from a programmer’s point of view, but easier for beginner users.”

Dries:  “When I started Drupal, I was in college to get a computer science degree – almost an engineer.  So I wasn’t too concerned about user experience – more obsessed with the architecture and the right APIs and all of these things.

When I finally released Drupal as open source, it really attracted an audience of developers.  The initial community was a developer community and began to expand to more and more developers.  That emphasis on architecture was reinforced.   [We’re] trying to change that and it’s slowly starting to work – it’s very much historical.”

>>> Cool side notes:  Matt has been a Drupal member for 8 years and one week.  His interests on his profile include typography and simplicity (the only person to include this in their profile).  Years back,  Matt gave a credit to Drupal and reminded Dries that he had some code in WordPress very early on — time for Matt to contribute to Drupal!

Wordpress and Drupal at SchipulCon

What Do you Wish you had Done that the Other Did?

Dries:  Matt did a lot of things right, he started his company sooner, WordPress.com is a tremendous asset to get more people involved and his focus on design and usability is key – a very important thing to do very early on.  In a way, Drupal is paying the penalty for not doing this early on.

Matt:  When I look at the Drupal community, the thing that I like is that the software runs the community itself.  The bug tracker is Drupal, the forum, the issues – everything is Drupal.  Also the 3rd party developer community – even though WP has more websites, we have fewer of the large consulting firms.  Drupal has a lot more large development firms building these giant websites, that’s not as common with WordPress.

How Do you Benefit from the Other Existing?

Dries:  If WordPress wins, Drupal wins.  Because that means Open Source is winning.

Matt:  Competition is good.  Anytime any firm or product does something amazing, the bar has been raised.

Want more SchipulCon brain candy and memories?

Dries Buytaert and Matt Mullenweg jumping like mad

We’ve got some great SchipulCon speaker videos going live in the next couple of weeks, just be sure to keep an eye on our SchipulCon video gallery! Matt and Dries chat photo album has lots of great photos of these great guys and be sure to find yourself in all of our albums from the event.

Thanks again for being such a special part of SchipulCon!

DrupalCon Day 2: A whole lot of nerdery

DrupalCon Day 1 was a blast with a ton of good information, but Day 2 was a whole lot nerdier in our sessions. So, as with our last post, there may be a nerd alert necessary.

Making Maps Beautiful

If you’re a Drupaler and want to make sure your maps look beautiful, we attended a session on ways to make Drupal maps beautiful. Hint: You don’t always need to use Google Maps.

  1. Check out the OpenLayers module. It’s an open source javascript library that allows theme-ing of maps so you can make them look way more beautiful.
  2. Open Stream Maps is an open source mapping system that is similar/rivals Google Maps. There are (believe it or not) instances where clients cannot use Gmap (or Drupal’s Google Maps module); Open Stream allows for another option.
  3. Bring it all together by using the MapBox module which allows you to provide layers (e.g. selected boxes that show/hide information) on your maps (even Google Maps!).
  4. And let’s not forget about TileMill. You can use it to create custom tile sets—it’s a WYSIWYGish editor to create a look for a map and map interactions. As they say, they’re a “a modern map design studio
    powered by open source technology.” They do all the heavy CSS-lifting to making your maps pretty. USE THIS.

Drush Make

I was completely, totally, and utterly humbled by dmitrig01. Here’s the nerdy part: Below is a basic Drush Make file (there’s a lot that goes in before this, but hit up Schipul and we can help you out). The idea is that within literally a few lines of code, you can launch a “News” site or a “Video” site, all using Features and Drush.

By the way, dmitrig01 is a 15-year-old 10th grader who is an incredible speaker and actually wrote Drush Make. He spoke at 12-years-old at DrupalCon. I was still learning what women were when I was 15.

A basic, annotated Drush Make file

Hopefully this can get you started:

core = 6.x (Tell it what version of Drupal you're using)
api = 2 (What version of Drush Make we're running, found on Drush Make download page)

projects[cck] = 2.9 (Tell it which version of the module you're grabbing)
projects[features] = 1.0
etc...

projects[news_item][type][module]
projects[news_item][download][type] = get
projects[news_item][download][url] = URL (can be localhost, e.g. http://localhost/...)
projects[news_items][subdir] = features

We’ll be back tomorrow to drop some more nerdery on your ass!

DrupalCon Day 1: The future of Drupal, HTML5, and the Media Module in D7

We’ve come to the end of Day 1 of DrupalCon in Chicago. Al Hughes and David Stagg are back at DrupalCon (big ups to San Francisco last year!), ready to share some more Drupal knowledge with you all.

Al Hughes, Kieran Lal, David Stagg, and Dries Buytaert at DrupalCon Chicago
Al Hughes (PM at Schipul), Kieran Lal (Drupal Community Adventure Guide from Acquia), David Stagg (Creative Director at Schipul), and Dries Buytaert (Drupal Founder and Lead) with our man Morten Heide taking the photo at DrupalCon Chicago

Day 0: Party!

Of course, at the end of Day 0, the Drupalers gather at the local hotel bar and go to town. We have to give mad love to all those we partied with: Kieran Lal, Morten Heide, Dries Buytaert, Liza Kindred, Jonathon DeLaigle, Marco Carbone, and more!

The Future of Drupal (8)

  1. For the most part of the keynote, Dries hammered home the fact that Drupal 8 must work for all devices (no longer the desktop); the number of smartphones in the past year has increased exponentially and it would be egregious to miss that market.
  2. Dries also wanted to note that if you have two platforms, Drupal and some other CMS, the one that always wins out is the one with the better “ecosystem.” For example, the reason the iPhone wins out over competitors (that might even have a better product or coverage), is due to the ecosystem they’ve created: the App Store, the Apps themselves, the culture, etc. Dries wants to ensure that the Drupal ecosystem is not just stable, but thrives moving into the next generation Web platform.
  3. When creating Drupal 7, Dries met with 20 major market CTOs (e.g. Time Magazine), and asked them what the biggest issues facing the then current state of Drupal was. He said two bubbled to the top: Configuration and Administration. These were added directly to the direction of D8.

HTML5

D.Stagg attended a session by the wonderful speaker Jen Simmons about the future of HTML5 specifically in regards to Drupal. Rockin’ HTML5 with Drupal provided a number of good insights:

Coming up: Nerd alert!

  1. You can use ARIA (short for Accessible Rich Internet Applications) roles for descriptions, e.g. <nav role=”main-nav”>, to target and separate your HTML structures.
  2. Rule of thumb: Use the new <section> tag to group similarly related items (e.g. footer link menus), and use <div> tags to group somewhat unrelated items (e.g. a main content area and a sidebar).
  3. Really cool tip: On <input> fields, add type=”url” or type=”email” to change the keyboard layout on smartphones.

Media Module for Drupal 7 only

Albert Hughes spent some of his time in a session that discussed the way Drupal 7 will handle and update media in the Drupal system:

  1. Media is now treated closer to what one would consider a “node”, e.g. you can add fields like “caption”.
  2. You can also now upload a file and reference it throughout the site, as opposed to have it attached to a custom content type node.
  3. “Uploads” or the “File Attachments” have been taken away to make things more clean and streamlined.
  4. However, one of the main reasons this was taken away isn’t because of the Media module, but because the FileField module in Drupal 6 was added to core.

“Monster (Drupal Remix)”

And of course, both A.Hughes and D.Stagg spent a lot of time throwing out moocards getting people to visit http://bit.ly/drupalmonster. And if you don’t want to click, we’ll provide the embed for you 😉

“Monster (Drupal Remix feat. A.Hughes and D.Stagg)” from Schipul – The Web Marketing Co. on Vimeo.

“Monster (Drupal Remix feat. A.Hughes and D.Stagg)” music video released

Last year, A.Hughes and QCait dropped a Drupal remix of Successful by Drake for Schipul’s bi-annual conference SchipulCon in 2010. We were lucky enough to have Dries himself link to the video.

This year, though, A.Hughes teamed up with writing partner D.Stagg (both Schipul employees), taking it up a notch, dropping “Monster (Drupal Remix feat. A.Hughes and D.Stagg)”, complete with video, for DrupalCon 2011.

“Monster (Drupal Remix feat. A.Hughes and D.Stagg)”

“Monster (Drupal Remix feat. A.Hughes and D.Stagg)” from Schipul – The Web Marketing Co. on Vimeo.

Mad love to Brian Potter for the editing and direction.

Lyrics

D.Stagg
CMS is a monster
Blue on ya monitor
site bombin on ya
Now look where Drupal poppin up
As look through ya pocketbook
Site need a new look
try a Drupal sample
Hughes’ll demo an example

Hook
Drupal Drupal gotta lotta users
I’m a need to see a lot sites on this movement
I’m a need to see more Drupal sites watch us prove it
I’m a need to see more Drupal sites watch us prove it

Drupal, Drupal, everybody Drupal (x3)

A.Hughes
took my first site live on Drupal 5
that was ’08 i was trying to survive
got my suit straight and bought 2 ties
the lord blessed me with a gig now we on the rise
html i knew css
dreamweaver jquery and a cms
on my resume and in my cover letter
everyday i’m goin in and i’m getting better
up all night i done learned php
I’m on that on lullabot for a phd
in the Drupal game i’m a do my thang
managing projects on my way to fame
and we don’t see the same i got better views
in different regions doing fields like some soccer shoes
yeah its a.hughes i’ll replace ya name like a token
and you better back up before your site is broken

Hook
Drupal Drupal gotta lotta users
I’m a need to see a lot sites on this movement
I’m a need to see more Drupal sites watch us prove it
I’m a need to see more Drupal sites watch us prove it

Drupal, Drupal, everybody Drupal (x3)

D.Stagg
Drupal Drupal got a lot of users
Gotta build a site that’ll scale like weight losers
Gotta load fast using solr and some views
Gotta look better like Bentleys over land cruisers
Weak CMS sites boy we be trashing them
Call EMS those sites Drupal bashin them
Like Perez Hilton talkin’ trash bout yo fashion
Gotta have a clean back end like kardashian
Source code on LSD all tabbed out
Using css3, I’m a brag about
The Drupal 7 drop, stagg’ll always be about
Killin these sites with some node templates maxxed out
Give me a fresh install and an IDE
Hooked on hooks, modulating like I’m Whitney
Hook_form-alter like I’m doin’ plastic surgery
Takin’ these sites to a level like you never seen

SW Drupal Summit: Recap & Review

Schipul SW Drupal Summit
Photo Thanks To The SW Drupal Summit

What better way to kick start the new year than to attend this year’s SW Drupal Summit? I know, I know; most would be content to start 2011 by just waking up January 1st with out a ‘headache,” but here at Schipul, Drupal is not only one of the new, shiny toys out there for Content Management, but it’s robust, constantly evolving and one of Mashable’s top 10 sites to watch in 2011.

As a newbie here at Schipul, I did not attend this particular Drupal shindig, but I know plenty of lucky ducks who went, saw and geeked-out at this year’s SW Drupal Summit. What were their favorite parts? What Drupal-tastic knowledge did they walk away with?

David enjoyed giving a presentation and…

‘The opportunity to teach about Location-based Views and Managing Client Expectations was an honor.   Since we ran into a number of pitfalls in project management when we first started selling Drupal, it was a pleasure to pass that knowledge along—we’d much rather make all the hard mistakes so you don’t have to!”

Scooter had a great time and enjoyed others’ “views” (he he) on Drupal projects.

“Chatting with members of the Houston Drupal Community was the best part. I especially enjoyed conceptual sessions, like   Tom McCracken’s ‘Scrum Revolution” and ‘Building Online Leaders with Drupal.”   I was able to learn concepts that I can ‘Schipulize” and use within our culture and processes.”

JMO was impressed by the diversity of the crowd in terms of experience and knowledge.

“My favorite part was sitting around during a break and ‘talking shop” with several of the other Texas Drupal guys (Level Ten and Four Kitchens). It’s great to be a part of a community that shares knowledge and helps each other rather than tearing down one another.”

Alex opens up about open source fundamentals.

“I love sessions that leave me inspired about the work I do at Schipul. This time, that inspiration was definitely from ‘The Business of Open Source” by Liza from Lullabot,   a very successful company that uses some non-traditional business models.   We talked about the principles of open source and how they apply to business. Bravo to the red robots!”

Derek is excited about new user friendly Drupal 7 features!

“For me, the most interesting event was hearing first hand from Drupal 7 core maintainer Angie Byron about new features in Drupal 7.   The biggest updates I noticed were the improved usability, organization and the sub tool bars based on roles; all of which should increase Drupal’s popularity.”

Robyn was overwhelmed by so many favorites, that she could write books on this year’s SW Drupal Summit!   For now, here’s (one of) her most favorites:

“My favorite was the Panel: Managing Client Expectations.   It gave people a taste of what it is like to be a client, have a client and run a company based on clients.   The team was able to relate to everyone –   The client, the developer, the project manager and the CEO all based on a Drupal development and   I feel the panel was able to connect to audience as a whole.   I also enjoyed learning about Integrating Drupal with social API’s.”

Albert and Jennifer also attended the conference…

and soaked up as much Drupal-icious tid bits as they could.   Schipul was not only a proud presenter and attendee this year, but also was happy to sponsor this year’s Drupal event.   All in all, it sounds like some pretty awesome people had a pretty awesome time! Thanks to all who spoke and participated!

SWDRULA-SUMMIT