Last week Dr. Sameer Verma invited me to give a presentation on using Drupal's CCK & Views modules at an all day open workshop he was giving to promote FOSS use in preparation for Software Freedom Day 2009 here in Jamaica. It is very nice to see Drupal being recognised as a substantial member of the FOSS comunity.

Kieran of Acquia also blogs about Dr. Verma's use of Drupal in a course at the San Francisco State University where business students are taught to build online businesses using Drupal. The workshop took place in a seminar room at the Mona School of Business at the University of the West Indies Mona campus. The workshop also touched on the following topics: Voip/Asterisk, LTSP/Ubuntu, CMS/Drupal and Education/Sugar.

Asterisk allows attached telephones to call one another, and allows connections to other telephone services such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services.

LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) allows the Ubuntu operating system to be tailored to the needs of large organisations. We saw a demonstration of a LTSP server that was installed in 30 minutes and used to boot networked thin client desktops with a custom Ubuntu desktop environment. The thin client passed along the bulk of its processing needs to the main server.

Drupal is the content management system of choice here at OpenConcept. Dr. Verma introduced Drupal concepts such as modules, themes, and multisite installs. I followed up with a quick section on using the very powerful and popular CCK and Views modules in Drupal. I was able to demonstrate how easily one can use these modules to create useful website features such as a photo gallery. My talk went well because the audience seemed very interested and they engaged me with several good questions. One such question asked about how views can take in arguments. It was good to see members of the local Drupal group present.

It is always a positive learning experience for me to share my experience and to hear about how other members of the community are using Drupal.

Photo originally from DevelopmentSeed

This Drupal segment was followed with a quick demonstration of the Sugar environment. “Sugar is the desktop environment originally developed for the One Laptop Per Child computer/education project.”(wikipedia). An OLPC project has been started here in Jamaica at the August Town Primary School. The project will equip third grade students with OLPC laptops to be used as high quality educational tools for them. In this effort, Dr. Verma is also training teachers to use this technology.

I went along with the team involved in this OLPC project to visit the August Town Primary School. It is summer time now so no kids, but I did snap a few photos, seen below.

An OLPC laptop "in the field" at the August Town Primary School.

Sameer Verma(right) of SF State University and Maurice McNaughton(left) of the Mona School of business discuss OLPC project details at August Town Primary School in August Town, Jamaica.