Drupaldelphia offers low cost conference for open source CMS this Friday

Updated, July 27, 8:06 a.m.: Co-organizer Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg informs us that though it was rebranded, the conference has been rebranded as Drupadelphia as of last year, the event has been taking place for four years.

As is often the case with software releases, outside of the immediate community of users, there was little fanfare about the latest release of Drupal, which came out in January.

But last year at Drupaldelphia, Philly’s first conference dedicated to the increasingly popular open source content management system, it was making its way into the conversation among the 140 attendees.

Presenters — plucked from local Drupal web development shops like Rock River Star and Zivtech, who together organized the event — were gearing up for the release. After all, it promised improved usability in its user interface and more. And for content management systems, ease of use has become paramount.

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Zivtech launches Houston Command Center open source glue for Drupal, Salesforce, other connectivity [VIDEO]

A demo of Houston Command Center, a tool designed to integrate common local and cloud-based systems, has been released by Zivtech, the Old City Drupal design shop behind the project.
“The main idea behind Houston is to create a single application out of a couple of disperate systems,” said Zivtech co-founder Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg. “The whole is bigger than the sum of its parts, so it creates, in some sense, a central command center for all of your local and remote apps.”

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Zivtech, Old City Drupal shop, hires half of Canary Promotions + Design

Old City Drupal and Alfresco design and application shop Zivtech announced today they’ve hired the co-founder of a smaller, competing, if friendly, design firm.

Mason Wendell, whose cultural website work we profiled in March, will take on the creative director role at Zivtech’s new design department, leaving his post as principal designer at Canary Promotions + Design. Wendell founded the firm in 2001 with his wife Megan Wendell.

It’s an amicable divorce on the professional side, as Wendell the fairer will maintain the publicity side of Canary Promotions and, so far as has been disclosed, marital bliss remains in place.

Wendell of Zivtech is a leader in the region’s Drupal community, as a co-organizer of Drupaldelphia, an event that was led with Zivtech co-partner Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg, who has also had a prominent hand with his brother in the Young Philly Politics blog community. Wendell’s Drupal background and design focus made it an important hire, Urevick-Ackelsberg told Technically Philly.

For one more intersection, take note that Urevick-Ackelsberg’s fellow partner Jody Hamilton formerly worked for Canary, which was once based in Mount Airy but moved to Glenside, Montgomery County in May.

Friday Q&A: Judah Levine of the Philadelphia Union

Union fans cheer at the MLS SupeDraft, which was held at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

Those trying to bring Google Fiber to Philadelphia ought to learn a lesson from the Sons of Ben, the supporters club of the Philadelphia Union.

Before the soccer team was even announced, the “Sons of Ben” invented chants and songs and happily sung them at Washington’s and New York’s MLS games. Their passion helped to convince Major League Soccer to award the city a new franchise, beating St. Louis, among other cities.

After a rough start in week one, the team is preparing to play its first ever home game tomorrow at Lincoln Financial Field before eventually moving in to its new stadium, PPL Park, in Chester.

Since the team’s name and logos were announced in May 2009, the organization has made a priority to nurture its already vibrant fan base, taking an active role in using social media tools like Twitter and Facebook. Between the two platforms, the team has over 30,000 followers, more than enough to fill its new stadium in Chester.

We exchanged emails with Judah Levine, the man behind the team’s social media outreach to ask what tools he uses, who he admires in the social media space and why we should go to tomorrow’s home game.

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Mason and Megan Wendell: from indie record execs to husband-wife branding and design Drupal team

Seems like ditching the record label for the branding and design firm was the right way to go.

Mason and Megan Wendell, the husband-wife team behind Mount Airy-based Canary Promotion + Design, met at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

“We started our own record label (Solarmanite Records) to release our own music and some other artists, and more and more bands started coming to us for advice on everything from how to publicize a release to how to get a barcode,” says Megan, 35, who handles the marketing side of the firm.

So they started a business doing just that outside of New York City, where she was working for a dotcom and Mason was handling Web work on Wall Street. By early 2002, the duo moved to Philadelphia and found a niche in the region’s arts and culture community.

Now they have a heavy hand in the look and feel of the Philly arts scene and open source content management system Drupal is their tool of choice.

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