Last week we organised a Drupal meetup in Maribor (the second largest town in Slovenia, where Agiledrop has the second office) in cooperation with Student Council of Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in Maribor. As a member of Drupal Slovenia, we organised two presentations and sponsored a reception with networking after the event. The event was well received, as attended by more than 50 people, mostly students of the faculty interested in starting their career in web development and Drupal.
Are you interested what those two lecturers were about?
Bostjan Kovac: "Introduction to Drupal for Beginners"
Bostjan Kovac, Drupal veteran and Development director at Agiledrop, summed up everything Drupal was and what it is today. Drupal, like any technological phenomenon, began in the room of a student, who wanted to change the world. Initially was thought of as a system for setting up forums, but today it is used by companies and organisations around the world, to build digital experiences for their users and customers. It’s an open source system, based on PHP programming language. It is easily accessible to anyone who wants to develop complex solutions in a simple way.
Mitja Krope: “Simplify Drupal Projects with Distribution”
Mitja Krope, TDX product developer and head of the Agiledrops office in Maribor, revealed that when we decide to set up a new website in the Drupal, we choose between two options:
- installing Drupal from scratch,
- installing Drupal using a distribution.
Drupal does not have a large set of functions in its core. However, it is a development framework that can be modified and upgraded unlimitedly. But how to avoid wasting time by configuring and developing the same functionality on different projects all over again? An alternative to this is using a distribution, but none of the existing ones met our requirements. That's why we, at Agiledrop, developed our own. We’ve developed a distribution that allows us to save up to 100 hours of initial development in every project we are working on and bridge the gap between the user experience and the editors. We named the project Tailored Digital Experiences or shorter TDX, and we published it as an open source project, which can be used by everyone. The TDX distribution allows us to build pre-installed components quickly and offers flexibility in setting up complex content types.
Thanks to both lecturers for such interesting presentations, thanks to the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science for an invitation and hosting, and last but not least to a large number of event attendees. There is another event happening in Maribor this week, a free Drupal course, and we can’t wait.