BIO:

After college, Jay spent 2 years in China teaching English and began dabbling in part-time web development work. When he returned to the states in late 2006 he was still working on Drupal projects part-time but got full-time employment in Little Rock, AR working for a web shop that built e-commerce PHP applications for the state of Arkansas. He worked there almost 3 years before decided to find full-time employment in his first passion, Drupal.  For the last 2 years he has worked for Mediacurrent as a Lead Drupal architect and has enjoyed getting more involved with the community.  

INTERVIEW:

How did you discover Drupal?
After returning from China, I had a partner state-side who was the ‘business end’ of the operation and so we evaluated several frameworks and CMS’es and he is actually the one who mentioned Drupal which was in version 4.6 at the time. I looked at several frameworks: Blueshoes.org, Ruby on Rails, Django as well as CMS’es: Wordpress, Joomla/Mambo, etc and concluded that Drupal was by far the best. The thing that drew me to Drupal was that the theme layer was very easy to manipulate which was very important to me because I had already jumped on the CSS/table-less bandwagon. Also, plugging in a Wysiwyg for site managers to manage content was very simple. I read some docs on how to create a module and even though my knowledge was very simple on that subject I knew enough to get by and that was good enough for me.
Talk about the OpenChurch distribution of Drupal? Why did you create that?
I have had the opportunity to work on a couple OpenPublish projects, including a large project with the Phase 2 team and that really got me to see the benefits of utilizing a distribution. After working on a couple small church websites including HarpethHills.org we decided to roll those features into a distribution to fill a need we saw in that space. There wasn’t really a polished, robust church distribution available for Drupal. And after talking with many developers at DrupalCamp Atlanta and twitter that perception was further solidified. I hope that with the initial release of OpenChurch we can start with a solid set of features and expand on those features in the future. If I never make a dime it will still be a good service to both the development and faith-based community.
Can you talk about the mechanics of building a distribution? What were the biggest challenges?
I wanted this distribution to be very flexible so for the theme layer we chose Fusion. Fusion utilizes both Skinr and 960gs which means that our sub-theme is very light and extensible. I decided also to rely heavily on Features so that the installation profile is much simpler and aspects of the site are more easily separated. I took the features we used from HarpethHills.org and another church website and in some cases stripped features down to be more applicable a wider audience. The sample content was definitely the most difficult aspect of the project. Many distributions do not have much sample content which makes it difficult/frustrating for new users to learn the platform. Drupal content is not at all simple to store and reload for many reasons which are too many to elaborate here, but suffice to say that was definitely that was the most difficult part of the project.
Outside of Drupal and Family, what occupies your time and attention?
While those 2 things do take up a lot of time, I do have a few hobbies. Maybe my favorite is following my Dallas sports teams even though every season seems to end in misery.
What is one thing you would tell a new Drupal user?
I think playing with a distribution like OpenChurch or OpenPublish is a great entrance into Drupal. Other than that I am a big fan of video tutorials, many of which are free. I think that is a great way to learn Drupal whether you are a site maintainer or a new developer.