Once upon a time on the Magic Animal Farm in a sparse corner of Colorado there was a boy who was raised by wolves, who grew up to be an accidental open-source evangelist and now lives in Portland, Oregon. I call him Dante Vatican. (That’s his Ron Mexico name. Suiting, isn’t it?) Everyone else knows him as that unpronounceable twitter handle @xolotl or the otherwise normal-sounding Nate Angell.
I like ALL of his personalities. =)
Nate has worked with a lot of open source platforms over the years, right now working as Client Evangelist for The rSmart Group, a company that focuses on the education industry. He also has an unhealthy love for Drupal, which is why the story of the boy raised by wolves now concerns you, my fellow Beer and Bloggies.
This Friday, starting at 4pm at the Green Dragon, Nate will be extolling the virtues of Drupal. I like to call it Drupal Magic Animal Farm because it makes me giggle. Specifically (but of course subject to change, such life and underwear) Dante, darnitImean, Nate will be covering:
- Why one might choose Drupal as a blogging platform over other alternatives such as WordPress
- Installing Drupal
- Drupal look and feel using themes
- Using OpenID with Drupal
- Extending Drupal to add additional functionality to your blog, including
- Aggregating content from other sources such as feeds
- Custom content types and views in Drupal
Wow! That’s a lot of Drupal knowledge to dispense!
If you can’t make the Drupal Magic Animal Farm, that’s okay. All your friends will be along shortly. The beer will flow, the laughter will bubble, and maybe you’ll have some conversations about blogging.





How long does he plan on speaking? I won’t be able to be there until 5:30 at the earliest. I’ve been thinking of switching to a CMS as an incentive to increasing my rate of posts rather than simply hand-coding the entire damn thing, and Drupal has been the forerunner.
Jeff:
Nate/Dante/Xolotl will be at the Drupal Magic Animal Farm (giggle) until 6ish.
If you can catch him before he leaves, introduce yourself (or come find me and I’ll introduce you — look for the very tall, dark-haired chick) and maybe the mulitple-personalitied one can impart some Drupal wisdom upon you!
mediaChick
Is this going to be yet another great talk (great speaker + great topic) ruined by all the noise at the Green Dragon? There have been so many where we just can’t hear the speaker or see their laptop screen. For educational Fridays, B&B really needs a quieter space with a better layout and a projector.
Hey Paul, we’re doing our talks at 4pm now so they are done while it is still quiet and we can be in close proximity. Then, people who show up after the talk can enter the discussions started by those who were there in the beginning.