Hermed et lidt forsinket godt nytår fra Genau! Der har igen været stille på bloggen, og igen er det fordi vi har travlt.

2011 blev året hvor Drupal slog igennem i Danmark, hvor flere store spillere har taget cms’et til sig. 2012 bliver formentlig endnu større, og vi har selv gang i tre spændende Drupal-projekter, som snart bliver lanceret.

I 2011 fik vi også etableret flere gode partnerskaber som vi ser frem til at gøre brug af endnu mere i 2012. Vi vender snart tilbage med flere updates – det må være et nytårsforsæt!

In early June we launched a redesign of our long-term partner www.sjaeloer.dk. The site had been online for about two years and needed a brush-up with a more corporate and official touch.

Here is a screendump of the design from 2009 to 2011:

And the new design:

We recently held two Drupal workshops for the Danish IT workers union PROSA.

The first workshop was at PROSA Superhelt and concentrated on when to use Drupal compared to WordPress. We are often faced with this question: Drupal or WordPress? Here is a great recent article covering this question – but often other factors like money and time will have an impact on the choice.

The second workshop was held at the local PROSA Odense. During a three hour hands-on session we built an online newspaper with different content types and a team of different editors – all with the help from Drupal 7. Here is a screenshot of the prototype design:

We like to teach so get in touch if you need a Drupal workshop! Read more about our Drupal courses in Danish here.

Finally the official version of Drupal 7 is here!

So far the experience of working with Drupal 7 is very positive, and it is amazing what you can build with this framework.

The best thing about Drupal 7 is that so many things work out of the box, and you no longer need to install 15 extra modules to make a working website. And the whole interface has become more simple to use. Another great thing is that it loads faster than previous versions.

One thing that many people will probably miss is a rich text editor like the one used inside WordPress. Drupal 7 still ships with no editor at all.

In this world of web development things tend to change very fast. On the opposite, the work on Drupal 7 has taken such a long time, so it will be interesting to see if Drupal can keep up with the pace and requirements of other internet players.

Here is a video introduction to Drupal 7:

We look forward to using Drupal 7 in future web projects. See you at the party tomorrow!

It has become a tradition for us to write up a small summary of the year passed by. Look here for previous years:
2009
2008
2007

Building websites with Drupal
During the year we launched four websites running on the Drupal CMS: Niche Vine, Netværk for Yngre Planlæggere, Cousin.fr, and Foreningen af Byplanlæggere
Two of the sites included a webshop set up with the module Übercart – a new thing for us.

Regarding web development it got a lot easier to integrate traditional websites with social media activites. A strategy for impact will often involve a website combined with a presence in social media – easily done by integrating conversation from Facebook, Twitter etc in the website. During 2010 we did this ourselves by creating a page on Facebook dedicated to all Genau activities – and then we put a facebook fan box on the front page of the website.

New design line
In a previous blog post we talked about the new design for this website. Actually it is not only the website that has a new design. We redesigned everything including our business cards, twitter icon, invoices etc.

Events
We organized and assisted in organizing a few parties this year. Some of the events were spontaneous and very participatory, while others were made possible with financial support and therefore a little more tightly executed. We especially remember the very sudden Pimp My Iphone day in early spring – documented on video:

And of course Pong Night. Inspired by Berlin’s famous ping pong bar Dr. Pong that we visited in June we decided to set up a ping pong night in the back of our office. It turned out great with some 50 participants playing table tennis all night. Some of it was captured on video:

On a larger scale we hosted a combined outdoor sunset concert and indoor club night in an old warehouse like building next to our office. The event was called Råt for Usødet and was mainly organized by our office friends in Glimt. 100+ participated in a very exclusive and high quality evening!

We finished the year off with an exhibition of old photographs from Islands Brygge showing how the area has changed completely in just a few years. The exhibition can still be seen online: www.historierfrabryggen.dk

Expansion of office space
The exhibition was also the launch of a new conference and workshop area in the ground floor of Bryggen 93. The new area includes a brand new restroom and other modern functionality. And we are planning to build a sound and video studio in one part of the area. In the future we will use the space for various activites like workshops, teaching, parties, meetings etc. And you can even rent the room!

Residents at Bryggen 93
As of January 31st 2011 White Walls of Decay are moving out of the shared office space Bryggen 93. WWOD have been with us from the start one and a half year ago. We wish you good luck with studies and travels!
Current residents are Glimt, Netseeds, Genau, and Obey Films. New people will move in soon.

2011
Currently we are working on a re-release of the first Drupal powered site we made – www.dofkbh.dk. The new site will run on Drupal 7.
As well as a few more web projects, we have some secret business adventures in the pipeline for 2011 so stay updated by following us on twitter, facebook or somewhere else.

Enjoy the last hours of 2010 and have a HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Our dear friend and partner in crime Ulrik from Obey Films did this short film about the Sjælør neighbourhood in Copenhagen. We made the project website some time ago, and we still do some consulting now and then – recently we helped them connect their facebook with the website.

The inventor of php gave a keynote about performance related to php and Drupal.

Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal was giving his keynote presentation on the DrupalCon Copenhagen, august 24.
He was talking a lot about the future perspectives for Drupal. In this clip, he is calculating on the release date for Drupal 7.

We are attending the Drupal conference Drupalcon in Copenhagen next week. Drupal is our favourite cms system, and the venue is really close to our office, so we are very excited. We are bringing several friends to the free unconference on the first day, so that might be something to consider if you can’t afford the conference ticket.

We have been using the open source content management system Drupal since 2006.
To showcase the use of modules and other Drupal functionality we have set up a kind of test environment where clients can log in. Go to genau.dk/playground and have a look at the first beta version. The front page will function as a blog with posts (in Danish) about Drupal functionality.

Now we are off on a short trip to Berlin. The trip will be used for teambuilding and inspiration, and we are going to visit the international design festival taking place at the old Tempelhof airport.