Drupal Introduction for Denver Linux Group

Tuesday night the folks at CLUE South (in the Denver Tech Center) had a "CMS Panel" that ended up collapsing into a Drupal and Mambo/Joomla! discussion. As I was writing my presentation I happened upon Gabor Hojtsy's request for new maintainers for modules including the S5 module. It seemed like a nice coincidence and since I found the S5 module to be useful in preparing my presentation I'm now the maintainer.

So, you can now see the slides that I used last night as a Drupal book or as an s5 presentation - including Drupal style theming.

Drupal as Presentation Maker - s5 Module

This is, in my opinion, a real boon for conferences and organizations that host presentations. You no longer need to worry about "which slideshow technology do we use" or "where do participants go to download the slides. Now everyone can use html or markdown syntax to make bulleted lists in Drupal book pages and then click the "export to s5" button and your presentation is all set to go.

Once I figure out a few details to make the system easier to use and the theme a little stronger I'll be committing the changes, release an improved version of that Drupal s5 theme, and branch s5 for Drupal5. If you want to try out the s5 module for Drupal5 now, the HEAD in CVS is currently compatible with Drupal5.

Future of Drupal Presentations

In researching and preparing my presentation I was surprised and saddened by the stock material out there. There is some good material in the handbooks on the Presentations page and the Events section. What I'd really like to see is a more centralized hub of information - something like talks.php.net that would help put all this content together. And of course since Drupal is a do-ocracy I'm willing to help build that resource though I need to check off a few more things from my todo list first. If you are also interested in a hub for presentations like that please contact me (either via a comment here or in one of the myriad other ways).