Drupal

In our previous blog post, we briefly mentioned that we had a new staff member joining the team here at Consult and Design. Nathan Lawson joins us as our new Junior Front-End Developer through University of Sunderland's Graduate Internship Programme.

Nathan graduated from Sunderland earlier this summer, and has now been working with us at The Hayloft for a couple of weeks. During this time we have expanded Nathan's existing skillset through a number of Drupal training courses, delivered by our own team here at Consult and Design.

Consult and Design are VERY proud to be a founding Supporting Partner of the Drupal Association - continuing our commitment to the development of the leading Content Management System.

Supporting Partners are businesses who financially support the Drupal Association's key community initiatives that help Drupal thrive and grow. One such initiative was the recent sprint that upgraded Drupal.org to Drupal 7.

We are proud to work alongside these participating partners to support and grow the Drupal community and project. Current partners include Microsoft, Lullabot and Acquia representing some of the leading companies in the world of Drupal.

So here we are, just a few days to the biggest Drupal event in Europe this year, Drupalcon London 2011. Having been to the last 4 Drupalcons, this is a particularly important one for Consult and Design for a number of reasons:

1. We're very proud to be sponsoring Drupalcon this year
2. Our own Adam Hill is playing an important role as Volunteer Co-ordinator
3. It's the first Drupalcon since we founded Drupal North East
4. Its the biggest European Drupalcon ever, almost doubling in size since Copenhagen last year

As you can imagine its a busy time and we're all really happy to be so involved in this event, its going to be the best yet and we're looking forward to sharing all the goings on when we return.

Consult and Design are very proud to have founded the Drupal North East user group along with two other local Drupal development companies.

Drupal North East is a user group for developers, themers, designers, administrators and users of Drupal to meet up with like-minded people and share all things Drupal.

After meeting up regularly through networking events, Drupalcons in Paris, Copenhagen and Chicago and discussion on IRC, three local Drupal enthusiasts have come together to help get the meet-ups started and hopefully get a regular monthly meeting arranged by everyone involved.

It's still early days and we're looking forward to input from all the local Drupal people, but its expected that the user group will involve:

We are really excited. I mean REALLY excited! Drupal 7 was finally released today. Its been 3 years in the making, with over 1,000 developers contributing to it and it really shows with massive improvements across the board.

Drupal version 7 features the latest web technologies and remarkable improvements to user experience. Drupal 7 is already in production use by sites such as Examiner.com, which is among the top 100 in the United States.

You can read the full release information here: http://drupal.org/drupal-7-released

There are many high quality and innovative Content Management Systems out there, and we've tried many of them both in testing and in production. However after years of this, there is one framework that we seem to come back to time and time again.

Consult and Design International build web applications on Drupal software which has a significant impact on the success, usability and security of the platforms we create. Drupal is a powerful, quickly-changing and adaptable platform that provides enhanced integration and a fast evolution.