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Meet Addison Berry, a woman who traveled a roundabout path into tech and is now one of the most visible leaders in the open source content management world of Drupal. My thanks for Addi for agreeing to answer some questions and let us get to know her. Q: Let's start off with Drupal. You work for Lullabot, a company that does Drupal books, podcasts and videos. And, you're head of the Drupal.org documentation team. How did you become so interested and involved in Drupal? A: Well I was a Wordpress user for a while and had started doing little side jobs building sites with it. I managed to do quite a bit with it. Then at my old job, in the midst of redoing the website there, I told them that it didn't make sense for me to hand-code the whole thing and be the only one who knew what was going on. I convinced them that we needed to use a CMS instead. The only problem was that I didn't know of one to use. I quickly realized that Wordpress would not stretch that far for us. So I sat down and started reviewing open source CMS. I needed to decide quickly and honestly Drupal just made more sense to me, more quickly than the handful of others I was looking at, so I put my stake in the ground and started building. As chance would have it, a few months after I decided on Drupal, Lullabot offered their first Drupal workshop and it was located in Washington, DC - literally three blocks from my office. It was an easy sell to the boss. After the workshop, I really grasped the full potential of Drupal and got really excited about what I'd be able to do with. That got me excited about the software and they mentioned some community stuff, but ya know, I needed to get my work done. Several months after that a new thing called the Drupal Dojo started up and I plunged in full-speed ahead. It was a great learning opportunity, but more importantly I really got to know people and finally engaged with the community. The Drupal community is just amazing and once I was there, I jumped in everywhere I could. Lots of people helped me and so I did what I could to help others. That ended up coming back to me in a job offer from Lullabot that allows me to work with Drupal full-time. Q: Tell us about the book, Using Drupal, you just finished co-writing for O'Reilly. When can we get our hands on it? A: Using Drupal is basically a recipe book that shows you how to build different kinds of sites using Drupal modules, without needing any code. Each chapter walks through how to build a site and, in doing so, explains not only how to use the modules we selected but why we chose them. It starts with a simple brochureware site that highlights many pieces of core Drupal, then gives a solid foundation in CCK and Views (two fundamental building tools for most Drupal sites) before it moves on to things like a review site, wiki, image gallery, ecommerce, etc. We also have chapters for creating a multilingual site and the basics of theming. There were a total of six authors, all Lullabots, and I'm really excited because most of the books on Drupal to date have focused either on code or the very basics of Drupal. A lot of people get Drupal installed and then go "So, now what?" Drupal has so many contributed modules now, it's a bit overwhelming - even for those of us who live and breathe it every day. The book is intended to guide folks through those next steps of snapping modules together and explaining how to find the modules you need. The book will be out in December of this year. We are hoping they can get it out before our Do it with Drupal seminar begins, December 10, but we're cutting it very tight. At the latest it should still get out before Christmas. Q: How did you get into video tutorial production? I know you write a lot of tutorials, too. Do you think the video route is more effective? A: The first videos I made were actually at my old job. Part of my job was training. I would write up very detailed instructions but we had quite a
