The next step

Artimedia has been around for a long time in Internet years. It started as a project in 1992, running a multimedia centre in Batley, West Yorkshire. In those days a Tory government thought that you needed to invest in deprived communities, in order to build a big society - hmmm. This was so long ago that initially the multimedia centre didn't have any Internet connections at all; multimedia was something you produced in Photoshop or After Dark, on standalone macs. It did get six phone lines with 9600 bps modems in 1996 and by 1997 it had made it up to a pacey 2400bps before investing in an ISDN line. Using what now seems like ancient technology, we did a lot of interesting projects, introducing create ICT into schools, care homes, and community centres.

In 1998 we gave up on the multimedia centre because it was already clear that the price of kit was dropping and most people no longer needed to travel to a centre just to use a computer. We spent two years heavily involved in a project with the local authority - Kirklees Metropolitan Council - to deliver public service via television using NTL's web system for TV. Again, I think we did some valuable work pushing the idea that content would be more meaningful if we got local people involved in production. We continued this theme into the next phase of work, which was focused around building online archives. We had actually been doing that from the early nineties, starting a project called COMMA - community multimedia archives - which then developed independently. We produced community archiving tools for West and North Yorkshire archive services, using PHP and MySQL to produce custom data-driven web applications.

Throughout the noughties we were moving away from grant-funded activity to become a 100% sales-based organisation, albeit with a strong interest in providing services to non-profit clients. We developed some simple content management system software for small organisations and that got us interested in CMS applications in general. We stumbled across Drupal almost by accident, following an unsuccessful bid to sell our own CMS to a local authority. Looking around at Open Source CMS we realised that they had moved on hugely from our first attempts to use them in 2002 and it was no longer realistic to try and build an independent system to deliver the functionality and performance of a system like Drupal.

The use of Drupal was again slightly by chance in that we started a technical contract supporting a company that used Drupal but we became increasingly immersed in the Drupal World. The reason for this is that Drupal is really a cross between a CMS and a software development framework, which means that you can build almost anything in Drupal. Although you have to invest a lot of time in mastering Drupal, you are investing in a software project with a really active community so it's constantly moving forwards and growing.

So that take me to the present and the decision to join forces with other Drupallers. It's been a privilege to be involved in some of Artimedia's work, but now I want to commit totally to Drupal projects and to learn from the expertise of all Drupal lovers. You can achieve a lot by working independently but not nearly as much as the new company can deliver, with its ability to assemble a powerful team of programmers, designers and project managers. So, if you've got a project that might be a good fit for Drupal do get in touch using the contact form here or just by visiting www.codeenigma.com