Startup Addict Musings

Version 2.0 of StartupAddict is finally up and running. I want to thank everyone who waited patiently as SA was converted from a custom php/mysql application to Drupal 5.x. To see why I chose Drupal for the Startupaddict platform check this earlier post. StartupAddict is community driven and only as good as its’ users, so please signup and provide feedback of where you would like to see SA go in future versions. SA’s user interface should get more aesthetically pleasing over the coming weeks now that we are rocking and rolling.

I have ambitious plans for the funding tab and plan to offer micro-payments and peer2peer lending components for investors and entrepreneurs. In addition early fall we plan on migrating to Drupal 6 and implementing OpenID to simplify signing in to SA and “going open” for third party social network integration.

Enjoy!

Tags: Drupal, StartupAddict.com by Startup Addict

Day two of Drupalcon was just as amazing as Day one. It’s astounding to see the diversity of Industries and number of people that comprise the Drupal ecosystem. The only thing more impressive than the diversity is the rapid rate at which the Drupal community is growing and the pure dedication everyone offers to better the overall community. Some of my favorite seminars involved case studies of enterprise-level Drupal deployments, companies like Lifetime Network and FastCompany have poured tremendous resources into Drupal based sites that are rendering heavy traffic. Hopefully StartupAddict will become a case study of how to go from bootstrap to enterprise-level Drupal in less than 2 years –time will tell.

Later in the evening we all gathered at an industry networking event at Felt in Boston which was sponsored by Acquia Dries’s new company that will service the Drupal community as it grows. The concept is similar to what Red Hat does for Linux and what Sun does for Mysql (you can read my earlier post on Acquia here). I met some interesting Drupalers including Benjamin from Agaric Design who is a wealth of knowledge on Drupal and often shares his “blood and tears” tips from the trenches on his website. I used a few of his tips to trouble-shoot a module on StartupAddict several months ago.

The development of StartupAddict has forced me to learn more about Drupal than I probably ever cared too….but now I’m hooked (no pun intended). The only disappointment from this year’s DrupalCon was that I had to leave early for other business obligations (ah…the life of a startupaddict).

Tags: Drupal by Startup Addict

Drupalcon 2008 got underway today and a great day it was. Dries Buytaert the original founder of Drupal kicked off the event with a Keynote about the release of Drupal 6 (only a month ago) and a discussion on where Drupal 7 is heading. Like any conference my head is still spinning from information overload as the next generation of the various Drupal components are discussed.

As Day 2 looms, my decision to delay the launch of StartupAddict.com by 5 months in order to migrate the code to Drupal 5 is a better decision than I even imagined. SA 2.0 is officially ready as of yesterday, but will not likely go live until next week when the dust settles from the conference and the servers are provisioned correctly. Future updates and features should be very rapid for StartupAddict and I look forward to everyone’s feedback. More importantly what you think really works and what you would rather see eliminated.

I have to run to a networking event…but more to come and plenty of “semantic web” fodder from this conference that will fill at least a month worth of posts and discussion.

Tags: Drupal, StartupAddict.com by Startup Addict