Blog Entries by Frans Kuipers

Since July 2008 the NABUUR.com website is driven by an Open Source CMS (Content Management System) called Drupal. Open Source software is free. "Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of "free" as in "free speech," not as in "free beer". It just means we can use it, change it to our requirements, and make it the best website ever.

Also Drupal is made, extented and maintained by Volunteers!

The development of Drupal as an open source platform is driven (almost) completely by volunteers. People who like to give their time and talents to produce the best web application possible. They are passionate about it. All communication between the developers of Drupal is online, via the website drupal.org, IRC, blogs and email lists. They are coming from all over the world, just like the NABUUR.com neighbours. Since Januari 2005 they organize a Drupal conference (drupalcon) twice a year, once in the USA/Canada and once in Europe.

Frans, Roy and Kester attended drupalcon Paris from 1-5 September. While at the first drupalcon 2005 only 50 people attended, now we were with 850 amazing people, all share our passion for drupal.

What was in it for the nabuur development team.
With more then 100 sessions in 5 days we had to select the sessions which we think can help the development of NABUUR.com in the near future. The highlights of what we took away from the drupalcon:

• Networking with developers, themes and people who can help NABUUR.com to an higher level. We met someone who has a lot of experience with digital story telling. We made an appointment to investigate if we can use his expertise and methods on our website.
• A session about social media, how to connect our website to other social websites like Facebook, Myspace, Flickr and hyves. For example how we could make it possible to login on NABUUR.com with your Google, Yahoo or Facebook account.
• Important new modules for drupal that can help the development of the new site. An example is a new web application as OpenAtrium, a drupal based web application, easy to use and adjusted by non developers. Maybe we can use it as the new base for NABUUR.com or we can learn a lot from it how to make the user experience much better.
• We had 2 sessions with "Drupal for Good" and "Drupal for NGO's". Here we connected with people who are passionate of using drupal to make a better world. We talked about working together, exchange knowledge and experiences. One of the ideas was to make a drupal distribution, aimed at NGO's, which can be used by small (poor) NGO's to put their cause on the Internet easy and without the need of (expensive) developers or designers.
• A lot of sessions about development practices, new exiting drupal modules (there are 4000+ now), how we can the user experience of drupal based sites better.

It was an awesome experience to be with so many like minded people, sharing the same passion. It is the same passion I feel in our NABUUR.com community, where we all share the passion for a more just world.