We have always told attendees of our Drupal 7 "Code-driven development" trainings that embracing the idea that configuration must be stored in files and not in the database would make their Drupal development future-ready: the specific processes would necessarily change but the concept would stay and be reinforced in Drupal 8, thanks to the nice work being done in the Configuration Management Initiative.

After the successful experience from last June, Nuvole is proud to join again the Drupal Global Training Day initiative on September 14th. This time we will hold the event in Parma, Italy, and, following the initiative guidelines, we will give a free generic introduction to Drupal, focusing on Drupal as a platform, its community, what can be easily done with the available modules and what can be reached with a bit (or a lot!) of customization.

At Nuvole we have always supported the idea that Open Atrium can deal with complex use cases. Modules like Spaces, PURL and Organic groups can push the limit of the platform far beyond being a simple-yet-powerful intranet software. We were already experimenting with building public websites and simple distributions-like mini-sites with Open Atrium for quite some time, but now the new Alfa Puentes project gave us the opportunity to blend together all those customizations in one powerful platform.

Nuvole is proud to join the Drupal Global Training Day on June 22nd but this won't be our usual, highly technical, training about streamlining Drupal Development that you may have seen at Drupalcon Chicago 2011, DrupalCon Denver 2012 and that is scheduled for DrupalCon Munich 2012 too. This time we will focus on Drupal as a platform, its community, what can be easily done with the available modules and what can be reached with a bit (or a lot!) of customization.

An extract from the new teaching materials we are preparing for our DrupalCon Denver 2012 pre-conference training, Code-Driven Development: Use Features Effectively.

You can use a single Open Atrium installation to create minisites, i.e., minimal websites with a simple structure, served at different domains, but sharing a centralized backend. Each minisite can be public or private and can have a specific theme and specific features. An anonymous visitor will only see a small, self-contained site, while site editors will be able to manage content on all minisites from the same backend.

Open Atrium's default set of features covers most of the common needs of an average organization, except one: a file repository with the familiar look and feel of a folders tree. The idea behind Atrium Folders is to have a very simple file repository application with no external dependencies that users can just download, enable and start playing with.