I’m at Software Freedom Day, Melbourne today. It’s a fairly small event which attracts some interesting people (yes, geeks) to listen to talks and discuss open source software.
Kathy Reid gave a talk on beginner’s WordPress. She’s an assured presenter and did a great job of guiding us through its basic features and how they can be used to edit the content of a website. In her advanced session later in the day I picked up some practical tips on improving the security in WordPress – WordPress balances out the need for security with the need to keep the product simple and there are ways to improve this. By the way, Kathy’s also a top knitter.
Simon Hobbs from Em Space is now presenting about Drupal, with a very visual, diagrammatic presentation explaining how this CMS works. I’m intending to use Drupal more in future so this demonstration is a useful primer. Em Space have done some great websites for nonprofit clients.
I’m hunting round trying to find someone who can support an open source product called CiviCRM because a nonprofit organisation I visited recently are considering using it. It’s a client relationship application that can sit behind Drupal on an organisation’s website. Anyone out there know someone who supports CiviCRM?
I went to a talk last week on CiviCRM, where the director of a small not-for-profit called Living Streets Aotearoa (LSA) spoke about her experience from the organisational side, then the developer took us on a guided tour. Liz from LSA had some useful insights, which I’ll write up soon.
The open source world being as well connected as it is, I’d suggest asking the aforementioned developer, Peter Davis at http://www.fuzion.co.nz for anybody he’d recommend over your way.