The Pratt Center for Community Development works for a vibrant, livable, and sustainable New York City. We’ve been working with them for five years, on everything from deploying multiple web sites and blogs, to consulting on various online services, to producing web site content. As we’ve worked together, the Pratt Center has begun to seize the potential of online publishing and promotion. They’ve been demanding more from their online tools, and it was becoming inefficient and costly to rely on us to manage their content.

Well last month we helped the Pratt Center take the biggest leap forward in the organization’s online history when we launched their new Drupal-powered web site at prattcenter.net.

The new site sports standard Drupal goodies like multiple types of content, arbitrary groupings of content with separate RSS feeds, and a powerful interface for administering the site. We also developed many custom content types and fields that fit the Pratt Center’s specific needs, using some rockstar modules contributed by the Drupal community, like FileField, Imagecache, and Embedded Media Field.

We tied it all together with a custom theme built around the Pratt Center’s branding, custom menus, whatever content listings we could dream up thanks to Views, and CCK node and user references.

All told, the Pratt Center now has an incredibly powerful platform for managing their own online presence and publicizing the great work they do. All of the day to day content management is in their hands, with many site features handled automatically by Drupal.

This allows us to serve the Pratt Center much more efficiently: we’re in a more administrative and consultative capacity, applying software updates, supporting their usage of the site, and helping them make architecture and policy decisions about this amazing technical platform at their fingertips.

PrattCenter.net now runs on Drupal.

I had a great time at DrupalCampNYC6 today! I got in on sessions about mobile Drupal sites, the Token module, Drupal and the Semantic Web, and mapping and geocoding in Drupal.

It’s fun to get together with fellow geek open source developers and share experiences about our favorite content management system. It’s also excellent to start putting faces and real people with folks I’ve only interacted with digitally. Too bad we can’t make it to DrupalCon DC.

Many thanks to the event sponsors, all the session presenters, and Eric at OpenFlows and all the other volunteers who organized the event.

[EDIT 3/2: Check out the write-up in today's NY Times!]

Last fall we mentioned that there were some geographic changes on the way, and here they are… As of this summer, I’ll be heading to the east coast and joining Rhys in Brooklyn!

For our Seattle-based coworkers, colleagues, and clients, I’m sorry we won’t be able to meet face to face too often anymore, but we don’t anticipate any other changes to our working relationship. If you have any concerns or questions about this move, please get in touch.

I’m excited to be joining physical forces with Rhys again after many years of living and working 2000 miles apart. It’ll be great to be geographically closer to some of our clients in New York, too.

This will mean some down time for me this summer — mostly during the month of June. We’ve already been discussing this with clients we’re actively working with. For anyone else who knows they’ll need work completed around that time, please let us know.

Wish me luck!

Last week we helped the Pratt Center launch a new blog called The Eminent Domain. From the site:

This website is a news, information and networking resource for New Yorkers working to influence the shape of their neighborhoods and make sure that development is an asset to their communities, not a force for displacement and destruction.

The site is built on WordPress, which serves as a simple content management system as well as a blogging platform: in addition to publishing blog posts about NY neighborhood development, the writers can manage the site’s pages and administer the site from WP’s administration area. It’s a powerful tool and we look forward to seeing The Eminent Domain’s contributors use it to promote just and equitable development in NYC.

Check out the site at theeminentdomain.org.