About the Authors
Benjamin Melançon, as a co-founder and principal of Agaric (agaric.com), helps people create and use powerful web sites. He and Agaric look to work with companies and organizations that value openness and freedom and share a passion for creating collaborative networks that scale. Seeking the most power possible for all people over their own lives (as a working definition of justice and liberty), Benjamin lives to connect ideas, resources, and people.
Albert Albala began dabbling in Drupal in 2006, after completing a university undergraduate degree combining linguistics and computer science and. After two years with Joomla, he co-founded Mediatribe.net, a partnership offering Drupal consulting services. In 2009 he joined Koumbit, a Drupal-oriented not-for-profit collective in Montreal. Being part of a larger team has allowed him to concentrate on Simpletest and Features, two areas that are reinforcing the quality of Drupal sites as the platform matures. Albert's other activities include small-scale international development projects through Terre des jeunes.
Greg Anderson is one of the co-maintainers of drush, the Drupal shell. He also runs the Developer Technical Support Group in the Americas for Ricoh Corporation. Greg uses Drupal in both his work and in his personal life. He did the Drupal conversion of the web site for The Great Dickens Fair, where he and other performers bring the spirit of Christmas to life. He is assisting with another large migration of many web sites for The Society for Creative Anachronism, a historic recreation society where he and his wife run the children's program. He also works with a community school district support group and writes an environmental blog with his wife.
Sam Boyer led the Drupal project's migration from CVS to Git and continues to lead the efforts of the Drupal.org Git Team to expand Git-related features on Drupal.org. To that end, he is also a member of the d.o infrastructure team.
Sam's core contributions were light prior to D8, but he now devotes a fair bit of effort to a scattering of Drupal's lower-level, critical path systems. In contrib, he co-maintains Panels and CTools with merlinofchaos, and he leads maintainership of the Version Control API suite of modules.
Ed Carlevale is a long-time web developer at MIT, working in the area of energy and sustainability (mitenergyclub.org, sustainability.mit.edu). As the founder of the nascent MIT Drupal Group, he has hosted many Drupal events at MIT, including Dries Buytaert's State of Drupal (MIT World, 2009), Boston Design4Drupal Camp 2009 and 2010, and the monthly meetings of the Boston Drupal Group, led by Moshe Weitzman.
George Cassie has built a variety of sites and tools with Drupal, starting back in version 4.7. He currently works as a Client Advisor at Acquia with a focus on Drupal Gardens.
Nathaniel Catchpole has been using Drupal since version 4.5 and has been a regular contributor to Drupal core since 2006. He contributed more than 400 patches to the Drupal 7 release alongside extensive code profiling, and he maintains the entity cache and performance hacks contributed modules.
Stéphane Corlosquet holds a master's degree specializing in Semantic Web from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Ireland. He currently works at the Mass General Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease (MIND), MGH, as a Software Engineer focusing on the Science Collaboration Framework, a Drupal-based distribution to build online communities of researchers in biomedecine.
Stéphane has contributed to Drupal 6 and is one of the top 30 contributors to Drupal 7 core. He maintains the RDF module in Drupal 7 and is a member of the Drupal security team. Since joining the community in 2005, he has been a speaker at many DrupalCons and DrupalCamps, mostly on the topic of RDF and Drupal. He co-authored “Produce and Consume Linked Data with Drupal!” which won the ISWC 2009 Best Semantic Web In Use Paper award.
Stéphane lives in the Boston area with his beloved wife, Diliny, new-born son, Kiran, and hyper-active dog, Maya.
Kasey Qynn Dolin is an anthropologist with extensive experience studying (and organizing) the growth and survival of communities and not-for-profit projects. She received a BS in Anthropology, with minors in Latin American Studies (focus on Brazil) and International Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her published works include “Candombléwords, Sounds, and Power in Jamaican Rastafari” and “Yorùbán Religious Survival in Brazilian Candomblé.”
Robert Douglass has worked with Drupal full-time since 2004. He wrote the first book that was published about Drupal (Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and Wordpress; Apress, 2005) and has been the technical editor of all three editions of Pro Drupal Development (Apress, 2007). Through teaching and personal influences he has helped hundreds of people transition into careers as Drupal developers and service providers. In 2005 he led Drupal's involvement in the first Google Summer of Code program and has been active as a leader and mentor ever since.
Robert has been a member of the Drupal Association General Assembly since 2006 and has actively participated in many Association activities, including the organization of DrupalCons and DrupalCamps. In 2008 he co-founded the Drupal-Initiative, Germany's non-profit for the promotion of Drupal. After a two-year tenure as the Vice President of that organization, he helped coordinate the election of a new Board and handed over control in 2010.
In 2007 Robert founded and built goPHP5.org, an initiative to bring open source PHP projects and Webhosts together in order to speed the upgrade to PHP5. One result of this is that Drupal 7 relinquished PHP4 compatibility, allowing the core team to do things like add the PDO database drivers. Over 100 software projects and over 200 web hosts joined the movement and it received a lot of press.
Robert's largest code contributions to Drupal have come in the form of the Apache Solr module and the Memcache module, both of which began in 2007 and which he still maintains today. In addition to being a full-time consultant and Advisor for Acquia, Robert also serves on the advisory boards of Commerce Guys and ICanLocalize, where he helps with business, product, and marketing decisions.
Stefan Freudenberg is a back-end developer with some experience in Linux system administration. Drawn into developing web sites with Drupal and into the community in late 2008, he has spent most of his commercial and volunteer activity on it. His debugging and profiling skills make him popular with his teams while arguing for simpler architecture and standards compliance is what he enjoys most but is not always as well received. Stefan is a principal at Agaric (agaric.com).
Dmitri Gaskin is a Drupal contributor who is perhaps better known as dmitrig01. He started coding when he was 8 and started with Drupal when he was 11. Since then, Dmitri has become very familiar with Drupal, PHP, JavaScript, and jQuery. He maintains several modules (including Drush Make) but mostly works on Drupal core patches. Dmitri has talks at Drupalcon, Badcamp, and Google. When Dmitri isn't coding, he's writing music, listening to music, or attending the tenth grade.
Mike Gifford founded OpenConcept Consulting Inc. in 1999. He has been particularly active in developing and extending open source content management systems to empower people to have more control over their own sites. Mike has been very active in building online campaigns for progressive organizations and politicians in both Canada and the United States.
Since 2005, OpenConcept (OC) has been developing exclusively on Drupal. The OC team has contributed a number of modules to the Drupal community and promotes the use of Drupal within the government and non-profit sectors.
Mike has been involved with accessibility issues since the early 1990s and is a strong advocate for standards-based design. Since 2009, he has contributed to the accessibility enhancements adopted by the Drupal community, including improvements in Drupal 7 core. Mike has presented at DrupalCamp Toronto & Montreal, most recently on OC's work on accessibility enhancements.
Dan Hakimzadeh is an original co-founder of Agaric. Dan spends his time and energy building on this mystical phenomenon popularly called the Internet. He believes in the principles of free open source software and develops primarily using the Drupal content management framework.
Michelle Lauer (aka miche on drupal.org) started her Drupal adventures in 2006 and quickly became known for her incredible sense of detail while possessing the ability to see the big picture. These innate skills allowed Michelle to cultivate her specialty of site architecture and multi-phased deployments. In addition to custom module development and theming, she develops and implements the strategy for complex content architecture from the end user experience to the manageability by web site administrators. Michelle's resume includes presentations at DrupalCon Paris, DrupalCon San Francisco, and DrupalCamp Montreal, as well as coordinator and curriculum author for DrupalCamp NH Training Day. Learn more about Michelle on bymiche.com and follow her on Twitter @bymiche.
Florian Loretan started working with Drupal in 2005, a passion which turned into a full-time job two years later. As a Drupal developer, he has worked on many large social networking projects and has provided consulting services to many well-established web development agencies. His contributions include modules and themes as well as many core patches. Originally from Switzerland, Florian has also been an active member in many communities worldwide. He was a core organizer of the first Drupal Dev Days, a track chair for DrupalCon Copenhagen and he has participated in the organization of many other events. He has given presentations at DrupalCons, DrupalCamps and various local communities from Geneva to San Diego. Florian is a co-founder of Wunderkraut, a company providing Drupal coaching and consulting services for the European market. He occasionally writes on his personal blog at happypixels.com.
Jacine Luisi is a front-end developer, specializing in Drupal theme development. She's been working on web sites since 2004 and has been working primarily with Drupal since 2007. She spends much of her free time working on markup- and CSS-related issues for Drupal core; she also works on contributed projects such as the Skinr module and the Sky theme. She currently resides in Rye Brook, NY.
Forest Mars is a hypermedia architect who has been using Drupal since 2005—mainly in the space of media and business integration—and is extremely active in the Drupal community. As a member of the DrupalCon Paris 2009 team he built the infamous “Druplicon Road Trip” site. Some of his recent projects include architecting a video delivery platform for the world's largest television network and New York City's first civic engagement platform. In whatever time he has left over he gives talks on the Drupal API such as “Bongo for Mongo” and “The Horrible Truth about Drupal.” He lives in New York without his two cats.
Allie Micka has been an open source developer and advocate since 2001. She has worked on several open source applications, including three years of extensive development and participation in the Drupal project. Through her hosting and services work, she has provided active sponsorship and education in local communities and now works on education, infrastructure and open source development at Advantage Labs. Prior to this, Allie was the team manager of web development for a major online brokerage, which taught her to apply enterprise business strategies to sustainable community participation.
Robin Monks (robinmonks.com) is an avid open source contributor with over seven years experience within the Drupal community and is the founder of Podhurl Inc. He currently works on tools and services to expand the growth of the “Open Web.”
Károly Négyesi spent the 1990s as a columnist and editor of Hungary's then-largest computing monthly, Chip Magazine. After that, he turned to web programming. His life and Drupal got hopelessly entangled in 2004. Since then he has become one of the most prolific core contributors with a brief stint of being the first leader of the security team. These days he is the senior software architect for Examiner.com, one of the biggest Drupal-based web sites. He is very intrigued about cognitive sciences and considers Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game as the Book.
Dani Nordin (tzk-design.com) is a user experience designer who switched from Wordpress to Drupal in 2008. Since then, she's been active as a voice in the Design for Drupal community and has spent entirely too much time looking for ways to make design for Drupal more efficient and effective. She speaks regularly at Boston Drupal events, including Boston's Design for Drupal Camp. Dani is currently writing The Designer's Guide to Drupal, to be released in 2011. You can find her most often on Twitter, where she goes by @danigrrl.
Mike Ryan has given much to the Drupal community since first contributing in 2003. He's behind the Migrate and Table Wizard modules, and he specializes in migrating data to Drupal as part of Cyrve. He was also the original author of the Pathauto module, the extremely popular Drupal module for automatically creating friendly URLs for pages and thus greatly improving SEO.
Claudina Sarahe began her career as a front-end developer for both Pop Art and The New Group in Portland, Oregon. In 2007, she left the West Coast and set up shop in New York, where she began work at the Huffington Post. She then went on to become one of the founding members of UNICEF Innovation. It was at UNICEF where her interest in open-source technology strategies developed. She further pursued this at Method, leading interactive development for clients such as Charlie Rose, PBS, Scholastic, and Count Me In. She lead the strategy and initial product development for Vestify, a crowdfunding web application for entrepreneurs powering the MassChallenge Global Start-Up Competition.
For the last three years and counting she has been working with Drupal and loves the code but above all, the community. She still loves front-end development and is excited about the HTML 5 initiative and overall rise in concern within the Drupal community around front-end issues, including usability and accessibility.
Claudina Sarahe has turned a lot of her focus to bettering collaboration between clients and technologists and to Drupal education for less advantaged and bi-lingual middle to high school students. She believes the philosophy and practices of open source offer great models for society as a whole to learn from. She is currently a principal at Agaric (agaric.com).
Amye Scavarda is a project manager. She's been involved with Drupal since October 2008 and in that time has realized how much there is to learn. She runs Function, a consulting company focusing on open source, and organizes community events in her spare time. She lives in Portland, OR and you'll find her online as @msamye on twitter and amye in IRC.
Roy Scholten is an interaction designer and has a small design studio, yoroy. He lives in the Netherlands and speaks Dutch, English, and German. He is the UX maintainer for Drupal 7. Before Drupal 7 reached beta, Roy made a Drupal 7 site using only core functionality with a custom theme that is CSS only. It's in Dutch at gaghilversum.nl.
Bojhan Somers is an interaction designer living and working in Amsterdam. He is passionate about designing complex (web) applications and physical things, and he is studying Interaction Design at Utrecht school of Arts. Bojhan is active as UX-Team Lead in the Drupal community, and he regularly speaks about open source, information architecture, and design on conferences. Bojhan has been involved with the Drupal community, helping form the UX team and taking a leading role in bringing user experience changes to the core software. He enjoys the challenges of designing in an open source environment.
Susan Stewart is an eight year Drupal veteran with a passion for community engineering. As Drupal's Support Team lead and president of Drupal Indy Group, Susan is always looking for new ways to grow the community and turn passive consumers into active contributors. She works as a Drupal consultant in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Greg Stout is Director of Technology at GlobalPost. Each month GlobalPost serves breaking and in-depth global international news to more than 6 million readers from its Drupal site.
A trained expert in user interface design and development, Greg has 16 years experience in web application development, web site development, product and project management, feature planning, specification, design, creation, and usability testing. He has worked on a number of high-profile commercial web sites including Sovereign Bank and Kinko's Print on demand B2B service.
Recently, Greg was part of the User Interface Development team at Ektron Inc., which produces the popular .N scalable web authoring and content management solution CMS400.NET. He holds a BA in Computer Graphics and Visual Effects from the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY.
Jake Strawn has been working with the web since 1998. He started with a brief background in HTML/CSS, moving into PHP/MySQL and web application programming. After almost eight years of PHP/MySQL programming, he discovered Drupal and his life was changed forever, as complex tasks were made simple with a framework built for extensibility and efficiency. Jake has extensive experience with the Drupal framework with over 1600 commits to his name (drupal.org/user/159141). He has been a speaker at many Drupal events including DrupalCons and DrupalCamps. Jake works almost exclusively with Drupal 7 now and has invested hundreds of hours into learning and expanding on the new Drupal 7 APIs, including upgrading his 960 grid-system—based Omega base theme (drupal.org/project/omega), which promises to be one of the most powerful base themes in Drupal 7. Jake also recently relaunched his blog (himerus.com) on Drupal 7.
Ryan Szrama got his start in web development through an online sales company based in Louisville, KY, his home of over 10 years. It was there that he nursed Ubercart through its infancy to its use on over 20,000 web sites as the Project Lead and community face of the project. Ryan joined Commerce Guys in 2009 and continued to lead Ubercart until switching gears into Drupal Commerce, a new initiative that empowers users to build e-commerce sites with the best new features Drupal 7 has to offer. He focuses most of his time developing the code base, growing the community of contributors to the project, and training new users online and at community events.
Brian Travis has been disassembling technology since shortly after birth. Before computers came along, he was content with household appliances. An advocate of the “learn by making mistakes” school, Brian is never afraid of doing just that. He lives in beautiful New Hampshire.
Kay VanValkenburgh is a Boston-based Drupal project director with a strong focus on training and mentorship. His latest venture is OwnSourcing, started in 2010 to develop hands-on training and project-specific documentation that help non-developers do great things with Drupal. Under the same aegis, Kay founded a mentorship program to help budding Drupal developers get their start (see ownsourcing.com/mentorship). Kay geeks out on usable software, how people learn, world languages, and competitive sailing.
Peter Wolanin's involvement with Drupal dates to late 2005 when a friend who had been a Howard Dean supporter involved him in a project to build a new web presence for the local Democratic party club. They started building the site using Drupal 4.7 beta. Peter soon became as much interested in the challenge of fixing bugs and adding features in Drupal core and contributed modules as actual site building. He became a noted contributor to Drupal 5, 6, and 7; a member of the Drupal documentation team; a member of the Drupal Security Team; and was elected a Permanent Member of the Drupal Association in 2010. Peter joined the Acquia engineering team in 2008, and enjoys the company of his stellar colleagues. Peter graduated from Princeton University, received a doctoral degree in Physics from the University of Michigan, and conducted post-doctoral and industrial research in Biophysics and Molecular Biology.