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Training Drupal at Jimma
The day after I arrived at Jimma it was time to start the training, a driver picked me up and dropped me at the University of Jimma where I met Girum, the ICT development Officer. It is his team I will give training to. We drink a coffee and discuss the program. It's a warm welcome and talk.
Day 1:
How to install Drupal.
The first part of the session was theoretically, I went over all the steps to create a Drupal site on a LAMP stack and went through the main anatomy of Drupal. Meaning, nodes, users, taxonomy, blocks and modules. It's a very long talk if you want to go over everything. So in the second session I made it more practical. Installing Drupal on their own portable was the task. Every trainee has a portable with Debian installed on it, so this was a good starting point. After creating a web folder and extracting Drupal on it, we could start with the apache and mysql configuration. Once that was done, the actual install of Drupal was possible. And by the end of the day everyone had a working copy. Not bad for a first day I think.
Day 2:
For day two, the main university site was used as starting point for explaining and adding new Drupal features. This was a good repetition of the first day, installing a Drupal, but this time we deployed an existing installation. At first the administration part of the site was revamped. Adding the administration menu and the Rubik theme made the admin already lots more user friendly. Also adding a WYSIWYG and IMCE for images, made the site more usable. For the second part of the day, we focues on SEO. Meaning installing and configuring Path, Pathauto, Nodewords, XMLSitemap and Google Analitycs.
Day 3:
On this day I had a first throw on custom modules. They wanted to know how to make a custom block showing the latest news items. After a rather chaotic explanation about hooks and module anatomy, a block with the latest news appeared in the screen. While we were on that topic, I was very aware that we were building something you could do with much less effort and a lot quicker. So I decided for the second part ot the day to switch to the Views module and explain it in detail. After seeing the power of this module, the direct need to create own modules was tempered. But could continue on that later, when the basics were known better.
As you can read, the training is a search between doing the needed and providing answers for needs on the main site. After 3 days, the knowledge and appreciation for Drupal was starting to grow and we could start with building a blog site as a project. But more on that on another post!
greetings from Jimma!
Some images from Jimma - Ethiopia
I wanted to share some pictures from the trip with you, there are some images showing Adis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia and Jimma, the city where the university the drupal training is taking place.
You can find more pictures here
Arriving at Jimma
It was a long and tiring flight To Jimma. I left Saterday in Antwerp at 4 PM ( CET +1 ) to arrive Sunday in Jimma at 12PM local time ( CET +3 )
I had to take two flights, from Brussels to Addis Ababa and from Addis to Jimma. The first flight made a stop in Paris, so that meant 9 hours of sitting at the plane seat. Once arrived in Addis, I had 5 hours to kill before I could board the plane to Jimma. At least, that's what I tought... When I checked in almost 4 hours later, I had to board immediately! Ow, I forgot about the hour difference :S I almost missed my plane! But I still got it and arrived in Jimma as planned.
I was picked up at the airport by a staff member of the Jimma University. The greeting was very warm, and so was the weather ;) I was dropped of at the Jimma Central Hotel, where I could check in and get some rest and prepare for my first day of training. I was exhausted, I slept 2 hours at most at the plane.
So I enjoyed the rest of my Sunday at the hotel, on the terrace, in the sun, next to the swimming pool! For those who wonder, it is indeed the complete opposite with the rest of the town, which is rather poor and misses lots of things we take for granted in Europe.
More to come soon!
Preparing for Jimma
A few months ago Jean-Marc asked me if I would be interested to give Drupal training in Ethiopia. Without asking further information, I agreed immediately! And now Saturday, it's finally coming. Of course, in the past few months I did gather the extra info. At the University of Jimma I'm gonna give training to the the ICT Development Office and ICT members from colleges. The initiative for the training comes from UGent, who has several training tracks in co-operation with VLIR-UOS. We will be splitting the training in two phases. A technical track and a usage track. And this spread over two weeks A non-exhausting list of topics in the training:
- Installation
- Server configuration
- Development and production environment
- Security
- Drupal install
- Drush
- multisite
- multi language
- contributed modules
- Views
- CCK
- Community
- SEO
- Profiles
- Build your own module
- How to start
- Hooks
- Form API
- Services
- Security
- Drupal theming
- Templates
- Regions
- CSS
- JS
- Drupal 7
- Site management with Drupal
- Create content
- Taxonomie
- webforms
- Media
- User management
- users
- roles
- rights
- Blocks
As you can notice, it will be a rather busy agenda. Well, I'm fully preparing for my departure now. My flights leaves Saturday at 17h40 CET from Brussels Airport. And I'll arrive at Addis Ababa (Ethiopian capital) 6:20 AM. This still puts me about 330km from Jimma, and the quickest way is an national flight. I'll arrive Sunday in Jimma at 11:55 AM. And what happens next? We'll see. But I'm excited to find out!More info at:
Inuits on Stage
As an Open Source company we are proud to have different of our consultants to be active in the Open Source community, contributing to different projects and presenting about their experiences at different conferences around the globe.
Next week, 6 and 7 february the 10th edition of Fosdem will take place in Brussels, for some of our consultants it will indeed be the 10th time they will be at that conference.
Inuits will be presenting differen talks at Fosdem, and other upcoming conferences.
Stijn Beauprez will kick off the Embedded Devroom on Saturday with a talk titled Rich Mobile UI Designs: do's and don't
On Sunday you can attend a talk by Frederic Descamps about Daily Maintenance of big databases/tables in the MySQL development room, followed later that day by Kris Buytaert talking about MySQL High Availability in that same MySQL Devroom.
A bit further from our corporate Igloo Jochen Maes will be presenting about Djagios at Open Source Days 2010 In Copenhagen which will take place on the 5th and 6th of March at the IT-University of Copenhagen
Later that month, from 23 to 25 march, Kris Buytaert will give a session on MySQL High Availability with Pacemaker at the UKUUG Spring Conference , in Manchester.
At the NLUUG Voorjaarsconferentie 2010 which will trake place on may 6th 2010 in Ede, the Netherlands , Tom De Cooman will be presenting the Open Source Monitoring Tools session and Kris Buytaert will be evangelizing Devops, Devministration, Agile Administration, or How to Survive the 10th floor test.
So there's plenty of opportunity to meet us in person the next couple of months, don't be shy.
Devopsdays 2009
Late last october the IBBT in Gent was the host for the first edition of DevopsDays
The conference was announced as follows
"Some call this phenomenon devops, others agile system administration
Truth is that agile techniques used in development have an impact on the way operations organizes it work. Similar, operations and sysadmins are becoming programmers because of the virtualization and automation trend where everything is managed through an API. So if you are a developer with a interest for system administration, or a sysadmin interested in development."
This obviously triggered our interrest, so we threw in our support , and money, Development and Engineering are two things we combine a lot, we design and develop infrastructures, and we write code and we assist in building automated toolchains.
DevopsDays turned out to be exactly what we expected from it , a small but vibrant community where a whole range of different interresting topics were tackled. We discussed different Version control mechanisms , how to take an existing IT infrastructure and migrate towards a manageable and automated infrastructure , kanban for sysadmins, the different available cloud computing platforms, kvm vs xen and much much more.
DevopsDays was a good start of what undoubtly become a bigger conference in the next couple of years !
Enterprise Open Source Adoption Conference , BT, London,
Last monday some Inuits quickly crossed the channel for a day of speeches and talks regarding Open Source and its Adoption, the event organised at BT brought together a mixture of techies, legal persons and management to listen to and discuss about the current state of Enterprise Open Source adoption
The short introduction was done by JP of Confused In Calcutta , who mainly introduced Mark "I`m from outer space" Shuttleworth. Mark keynoted about Ubuntu .. he talked about Aubergine being the new Brown ... ranted (as everybody) about the Cloud , talked about a stronger focus to services rather than product building , talked about the ecosystem of "people close to you" for supporting solutions .
Steve Bouch, of the Synapse Project at BT discussed ao the decisions they had to make, the varialbes they took in to account when starting
to use Open Source , discussions such as the reputation of the project, the internal skill zet, the ease of importing and exporting data in and
out of the project, and the different license terms were covered.
Andrew Katz , legal guy , who's also working on the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review gave an overview of the legal impact of Opensource . We learned that his customers have similar questions as ours, such as when to publish the code, what code to publish, when to look for alternative licenses etc
There was avid discussion regarding the Affero GPL license and using Open Source as a key component to build your killar webinfrastructure while not contributing back etc.
During the pannel discussion questions like Software Patents, and the fact that Ubuntu One won't be fully Open Source were tackled For us , most of the event was confirmation that what we are doing is the right thing to do, And that is worth a lot !
Inuits Launches New Site
Inuits, the leading Linux and Open Source consultancy group is launching it's new website.
After 25 months Inuits decided a fresh new styled website, you are looking at it right now, was needed. The site comes with more interactivity for you, the user or customer. You can follow the Inuits Bloggers using the Planet feeds and you can follow us on Identica (the Open Source Twitter implementation).
Over those 18 months Inuits has grown both in numbers and quality and has managed to grow both employee base and customer base with some interresting people and customers. Our goal is to continue bringing quality Open Source stacks to organizations with an Open mind.
As for the technical part it comes to no surprise that our site is build on top of Acquia Drupal and is running on a Centos based LAMP stack.
Inuits is the leading Linux and Open Source integrator in Belgium. We help organisations design, implement, rollout, manage and support stable and scalable infrastructures and products based on Open Source technology. Inuits is operating from Belgium with Global Customers
The Inuit and the Penguin
On our family day INUITS adopted a Penguin in the Zoo of Antwerp. This sponsorship is an opportunity for our company INUITS to get involved in nature and to help the Zoo to feed this animal. The Penguin is well known for its magnificent teamwork in harsh conditions which is why we have chosen this animal. The Penguin symbolizes our technology “Open Source” and by adopting it we want to reflect our concern for this specific endangered animal.
INUITS is ready for the Zoo's "Green Commitment"
Inuits at T-Dose 2009
Brasschaat , Sept 2009, Inuits, the leading open source company is once again happy to announce
to have multiple presentations at T-Dose 2009 , next october in Eindhoven. Kris Buytaert and Jochen Maes will both be presenting at the conference,
T-DOSE is a free and yearly event held in The Netherlands to promote use and development of Open Source Software. During this event Open Source projects, developers and visitors can exchange ideas and knowledge. This years event will be held on 3 and 4 October 2009 at the Fontys University of Applied Science in Eindhoven.
Kris Buytaert will bring a presentation about the Impact of Open Source in VirtSec and CloudSec, with both Virtualization and CloudComputing being hot topics security is often an aftertought, his presentation will discuss the problems and opportunities for Open Source and infrastructure in genereal.
Jochen Maes will be presenting on the state of Djagios, Djagios is an open source Nagios web based configuration tool. The goal of Djagios is to make Nagios usable for non-Nagios admins, Jochen is the lead developer of the project
There be different other Inuits at the conference don't hesitate to talk to us !
