We usually check out News about Drupal either through our News section in Gloscon site and it always feels good to know how much the community is doing to spread Drupal around the world. Whether be it Camps or Conferences, Advertisements or seminars, any open source technology needs the support of its community in order to reach out to a wider audience.

In order to contribute our bit, we usually organize seminars, camps and most of the times, workshops, to reach out to a wider audience. August saw a new chapter added in our contributions to the Drupal Community where we took on the onus of organizing Drupal Camp. What a feeling to organize a camp at such a scale!!! The Experience - Fantabulous!!! We got almost 450+ people registered at the Camp (although only 200 turned up at the event) and we had lined up the best sessions both for the experienced drupal developers and Drupal Neophytes.

We found that there was a wide gap in the understanding of Drupal for Drupal enthusiasts in India and Drupal still needs lot of publicity in order for more people to be a part of the community. Time for PR team at Gloscon to get working and we immediately found partners in LFY - Linux For You. Eureka!!! ;p

LFY is one of the most famous Technology magazines focussing on Linux and Free Software that lists major linux user groups in India, publishes articles on free software and bundles open source software with each of its publications. Publishing a Drupal article in LFY would mean that Drupal would be directly reaching to all the Open Source Enthusiasts in India. As the magazines has its in reach in some of best Educational institutions in India such as IIT's and NIT's, there was this huge opportunity for Drupal to reach out to a wider and promising audience.

Dheeraj worked on the first draft and i think he really did a very neat job at that. Although a pro at Drupal he never had the chance to work on an article which was going to be published in a national magazine. Must have given him jitters... hehehe :D You know how difficult it could have been for Software Programmer to write an Article !!! But the article turned out to be quite well and was published in the August '2008 issue of LFY magazine.

The artile was appropriately titled "Getting Started with Drupal started off with an introduction to Drupal, who uses it and some facts about it. This was followed by some basic guidelines for installing Drupal, its requirements and configuration of your site. Topics on
Theme settings and User Management were also covered nicely in the article. Apart from screenshots for ease of understanding, lot of resources for learning drupal were provided in the article.

This series of Drupal articles in LFY - Linux for you magazine should go a long way in spreading Drupal across Asia. Since Drupal is an open source CMS, it does not have a Corporation which can fund its publicity requirements and articles such as these go a long way in increasing the visibility of any open source software.

We all are eagerly awaiting for the October issue of LFY which has the second part of the Drupal series. I could have provided into a sneek preview of that article but couldnt convince Dheeraj about it. So i guess we all have to wait till the next issue of LFY releases (or i might just get it through Roshan ;)

Ciao!!!

Rajat