Like any businesses, we receive numerous magazines from all sorts of places.  We have a little table full of magazines that don't get much attention.  (Frankly, most of them are too techy for me to read during my spare time...)  Yesterday, Kris was walking by this table and saw something that made him whip his head around and look twice.  "I swear I saw Druplicon..."  he murmured. 

As some of you might already know we have been holding classes in our office to teach our new guys the ins and outs of Drupal.  After a short time we had reached a crossroad of sorts though - and a decision needed to be made.

Yesterday was spent moving an old client's Lotus Notes based intranet (I use that term loosely) over to Drupal.  Actually the entire last 2 weeks have been focused on this to some extent, but yesterday was spent primarily bringing across a significant part of the old data.

Drupal has won the Packt Publishing 2008 Open Source CMS Award, Overall and in the PHP category!  The corresponding articles can be found here:

http://www.packtpub.com/article/2008-open-source-cms-award-winner-announ...
http://www.packtpub.com/article/2008-best-php-open-source-cms-drupal

Drupal has won the Overall award two years in a row, and The Worx Company is excited to be working with it.  The attraction to Drupal from our perspective, is that it is not only a great content management system for  clients who need the basic functionality to manage their own sites, but it is an excellent development platform. 

The Worx Company is a Silver Sponsor at Drupalcon DC!  We are excited to be sponsoring what looks to be a fantastic Drupalcon.  Of course, with the sponsorship, our attendance at Drupalcon has been confirmed - I will be attending, along with Kris (EclipseGc), Kurt (President of our company), and maybe Sue (CEO).

One of the really amazing advantages to being in Oklahoma is the fact that we get to learn everything about building a Drupal Community for ourselves.  Of course, that's also one of the bad things about being in Oklahoma, but I'm feeling "glass half full" today.  One of our basic principles as a company is "education".  There's a lot of really important points to make here, but the two I'm going to focus in on are the facts that:

1. There are companies in our market place that are taking advantage of the small to medium sized businesses in this market.
2. Open Source technologies are often head and shoulders above their proprietary counterparts.

Kris has been busier last week than any other week I can remember in the recent past.  The Worx Company has been involved in the Oklahoma State Chamber of Commerce this past year, working with them to get several websites up in Drupal.  There are several branches of the Chamber, I've learned, and we are working on two branches and the main Chamber of Commerce website.  Ultimately, the goal is to get their web manager fully trained in Drupal, so they will be self sufficient, and will be able to manage all of their websites. (It is so awesome when they come in for training, and at the end of it, exclaim, "Wow, that was so easy, I don't even have to take notes!"  But that's a different story for another time...)

FOWYDB - almost looks like a "bad word", doesn't it?  Well, it is something we have been telling ourselves the last couple of days.  Focusing on what WE do best.  The Worx Company started out as an .asp shop, and when it merged with Meridian Data, well, not much changed.  For several years, we stuck with our .asp content management system.

What was it Dries said at Drupalcon? Top two "most difficult things" for both novice and expert Drupal users were 1. finding skilled Drupal designers and 2. finding skilled Drupal developers. We have noticed that as our company grows, we are running into similar issues. Especially #2 - finding skilled Drupal developers has been difficult - in the Oklahoma web industry, Drupal isn't a common platform. Most people have never even heard of Drupal, so we have put much of our efforts into "evangelizing" Drupal in the community.

I spend an awful lot of my time in the Drupal community contributing however I can... whether that's with modules, or UI mockups, or just being available to help however I can, I do my best to available to help others in the community.  I don't say this to pat myself on the back because there are plenty of others in the Drupal community who do the same (and more).  I say this to illustrate some of the very evident differences between our community and others "like" us.