Guildford From Afar - the cathedral stands tall above the rest of the picturesque town.

Calling all Drupal fans near Guildford

14 Jun 2011

Written by
Barry Fisher
Technical Director

Did you know?

Pivale used to be known as Real Life Digital, and before that Real Life Design. This article contains references to Real Life Digital or Real Life Design which are names we traded as before becoming Pivale . You can read more about our rebrand here.

Are there any budding Drupal aficionados in or around Guildford? I've been aware for quite some time that there appears to be a whole load of web designers and developers in and around Guildford, but not so many Drupal developers specifically or even people who have heard of Drupal! Or is that just that I've been unlucky not to find you yet? 🙃

Perhaps it's the development learning curve that keeps other web design companies within their comfort zone of proprietary content management systems. Now, I don't mean to put down anyone else's custom built CMS (in fact before we started using Drupal we were happy with our own CMS) however... there are some great (huge) benefits that come from the whole Drupal development eco-system.

To name the one aspect of Drupal that stands out for me is the community of users and developers alike and this cannot be understated. Drupal thrives on community collaboration and sharing of ideas, however, it is my impression that the Drupal development community in and around Guildford is either demonstrating a typical Surrey quietness (or politeness), or could it be that I'm totally wrong and there is a Drupal party going on right next door?

There have been attempts to arrange regular meet-ups on the Surrey group on drupal.org.uk. It appears a handful of people met up in Guildford early last year but nothing has happened since.

So..... if there are any developers, designers, themers, users..... or anybody else involved in creating websites who would be interested in getting some kind of regular meet up in Guildford (or another town close by), please drop us a line on our LinkedIn page, or Tweet us @RLDTweets. If there is enough support then I'll try to arrange an informal meet and greet to discuss a plan of action.

If you live in or near Guildford (e.g. Farnborough, Farnham, Aldershot, Fleet, Woking, Godalming, Haslemere, Dorking etc.) it will be good to hear from you. I don't want to exclude any place in particular so please tell me if you're interested but maybe a further distance from Guildford. It would be good to meet any of you that are going to Drupalcon 2015 in Barcelona. Four of us from Real Life Digital are going (Darren, Damien, myself and Julia) so it will be good to see some of you there.

If you're interested in learning more about Drupal and the types of websites that we design and develop, then I'll be only too happy to chat over some examples.

Viva la Drupal!