"building the capacity of public media and technology organizations"
hello there ctc vista project. things here at homeless prenatal are going right along-- i'm unofficially the interim technology manager. this means that i have been doing insane amounts of troubleshooting and teaching for both clients and staff.
i'm not sure if i have talked with anyone about this, but two weeks ago (i cannot believe how much time has gone by already) i went to an drupal extreme makeover. basically, i was feed for two days and taught the ins and outs of drupal. well, i was taught as much as you can learn in a crash course. i was also able to work one-on-one with a drupal expert to start the revision of our extremely outdated helping-sf. it was an amazing experience (& free for our organization too!) in the past two weeks, however, i have had about zero time to work on the website. this drives me crazy. currently, i am teaching class, helping in the technology center, doing general tech support for the office (meaning about 20 phone calls a day) and being a lead interviewer for my new boss (what?!?). i feel as though there is no time to actually work on the projects that i feel i was hired for. my job title would be more accurately stated as "master troubleshooter".
Comment from gariet cowin on December 5, 2006 - 2:57pm
Was this drupal training something that was done at your site, or did you go to a drupal conference of some kind? We're just starting to talk about doing a huge site overhaul over here, using drupal, and I'm still not totally clear on the drupal concept. Is it just a CMS? Can you add it to an existing site, keeping your presentation, but using drupal for content management? Or do you have to redesign everything within drupal?
I want to go to a drupal extreme makeover!
Comment from Aliya Abbasi on December 5, 2006 - 4:17pm
Kudos... so your job changed (maybe temporarily) and you are handling it. Good for You!
Now you get to pick your boss - Yeah!!
This is your chance to convert - give up programming and join the TANs!!!
or
if troubleshooting gets too tiresome and you want to get back to websites and drupal programming redirect help-desk to a technology organization - maybe Tim and Aspiration can step-in or help you look for a good tech assistance provider.
Comment from brittney fosbrook on December 5, 2006 - 6:28pm
i knew that you would be jealous of my extreme makeover! i suppose that i could give you a bit of information about the training:
i was invited from a random connection i made at the sf wifi project conference sponsored by nten. my drupal training was conducted at aspiration tech (where tim works). there were four of us non-profiters and about 5 drupal people (druppies?).
i would definitely not consider myself a drupal expert, but i do know that calling drupal *just* a content management system is an understatement! i feel like there are numerous modules that can be downloaded to fulfill a variety of different needs. the problem is knowing which modules to download, and that is where the drupal people came in. i am under the impression that you do not add drupal cms stuff as an extension of a website, but rather create an entire website in drupal. but i am not sure about this. i do know, however, that we did a complete drupal switch for helping-sf, but we drupalized much of theme and format of our old site to keep the design the same.
i hope this helps!