Around this time last year we were contacted by Whitley College to provide a quote for implementing their new website. They were evaluating whether to go with Joomla or Drupal.  But it wasn't until early October 2009 that we were engaged to proceed with the project.

Whitley College had already undertaken substantial work on information architecture by working with internal stakeholders, and an external designer. So in many ways much of the hard work was already done by the time we came on board.  This project reinforced my belief on how important it is to think through the info-architecture right from the start.

Rodney Gedda at Techworld has just published a case study on the Whitley College move to Drupal.

Uni college ups grade with open source CMS project: Requirements scoping can be like Voodoo

The design was created by Chantelle Baxter - Creative Contingencies created a custom Drupal theme from design mockups and HTML/CSS provided by Chantelle, and implemented the site. The college has now also used that theme for their intranet. We also conducted staff training, and have an ongoing support arrangement. 

This project was really enjoyable thanks to the honesty and commitment of the college Community Relations Director, Kerry Cook who managed the project so effectively.

Project partners

• http://whitley.unimelb.edu.au
• http://www.chantellebaxter.com

 For over a year now, Peter and I have been working on re-developing our web based conference management codebase with Drupal. The opportunity to do this for a real conference with a real need arose when we were asked to join the technical committee for the 2010 Australian Computers in Education Conference.

I first registered the domain name for ACEC2010 on 12 December 2006 to put up a placeholder web page, and Creative Contingencies agreed to provide pro bono technical consulting to the conference in early 2008. We subsequently were engaged to develop the conference website in early 2009, but have continued to assist with a range of technical issues along the way.

The conference opens in a little over a week. The program chairs, Dr Donna Gronn and Dr Geoff Romeo have done an extraordinary job of sorting, sifting and arranging the program. The formal refereed call for papers opened in late February 2009, and the conference proceedings CDs have already arrived! Ready to be packed in to attendee satchels next week.

Visit the website at http://acec2010.info

Simplenews is a quick and easy way to set up and manage newsletters on Drupal, but if you add it to a site which already has users, you might want a way to quickly subscribe all your users to your newsletter.

Rather than click through all users and manually subscribe them - which can be a little bit boring if you have thousands of users - you can run a few SQL queries to mass-subscribe everyone in one go.

It was a drupal filled week.  We set two new Drupal sites free into the world, and signed up to sponsor DrupalSouth.

DrupalSouth is happening in Wellington on the weekend of 23-24 January 2010. It promises to be New Zealand's largest gathering of Drupalppl with Australia and elsewhere due to the proximity of linux.conf.au taking place the week immediately before hand. The totally fabulous Angie Byron and Emma Jane Hogbin will be speaking, as will scores of other great Drupal professionals, and not-so professionals.  After attending Melbourne DrupalCamp earlier this year, I am really looking forward to participating and getting to know more of the local community.