Drupal – and heeeeere we go!

Have been away most of June but am back now and ready to properly take on Drupal…

We installed Acquia Drupal over a month ago now and will soon move from “playing” to the real, nitty-gritty work of configuring a master Drupal installation to run our 70-odd sites. Basically, we have installed Drupal in the cloud and will use this one Drupal install to run our main site plus our 70 affiliate sites. The question(s) that face us now are many and filled with minutiae that relate to how we currently manage our sites in the Dreamweaver world. One of the biggest challenges I see so far is to think differently about how we work. There is no de facto reason why we have to replicate exactly the work patterns, workflows and systems we currently use. Perhaps Drupal has a better way!

I’m finding the following difficult:

• organizing my team – until now, I’ve just given rough parameters for each programmer and turned them loose to play; now, however, it’s time to reign everyone in and get some focus. Tricky stuff…
• recognizing dependencies between possible ways of doing things: if we choose x or y method in Drupal to manage a or z how will the first decision affect the latter, and how to know!
• prioritization: themes then content? or get the systems for content in place then worry about how they look? etc.

We have about 3-4 months for the “programming & implementation” phase before we are scheduled to enter the “deployment and testing” which includes data migration. Are we insane or can this be done in that amount of time?!

Laika’s MedLibLog and EAHIL 2009

My colleague in the Netherlands has an excellent blog where she was kind enough to write a post about the course I taught last week in Dublin at the EAHIL Workshop on Web 2.0 and health information. It is a great summary of the course. I highly recommend subscribing to her blog if you are interested in anything related to medical librarianship, Web 2.0 and health information and many other topics.

I will do as she has done and embed my two Slidecasts below. Thanks, Jacqueline for the summary of my course and great finally meeting you in real life! (we originally only knew each other on Twitter)

Web 2.0 course at EAHIL Dublin

Right now, I’m at the EAHIL (European Association of Health Information Libraries) Workshop in Dublin. On Tuesday, I taught a Web 2.0 course here – it was held in one of the libraries at Trinity College Dublin – very cool

I think it went well. I might have rambled a bit, but it’s easy to do when talking about web 2.0 tools and apps, especially Twitter which I have a particular fondness for as of late. Some of the issues raised by people in my course that I thought were of interest:

• How does one have time to use all of this web 2.o stuff? – good point. I say use as much as little as you like and ONLY what benefits you.
• What about security? – good point, not everyone should “tweet” everything their org or company is doing!
• What if you are behind an annoying firewall or intranet that won’t even LET you use these tools? – I have no answer there. Become friends with the IT folks!

The presentations are here if you’re interested.