Last weekend, I attended DrupalCamp LA. This is an annual conference that is held on my campus, UC Irvine. It’s free and a great way to learn not only about Drupal but web technology in general. I’ve attended many technology conferences over the years including many years of MacWorld Expo, DrupalCamps, WordCamps and UCCSC. What I find interesting is that you often come away learning something not directly related to what the conference is about.

This year’s DrupalCamp nugget of knowledge has to do with a handy little app called “Little Ipsum”. They had a great session called CMS Bakeoff where four different developers showed how to create a basic site with four pages in just a few minutes. The contenders were Drupal 8 Beta, Backdrop CMS (the Drupal fork), WordPress, and a really cool flat file CMS called Grav. I saw Grav presented last summer at UCCSC and it’s come a long way in terms of usability.

The a-ha moment came during the Drupal 8 demo when the presenter grabbed her dummy text from a menu bar on her Apple laptop. Instead of going to a website, she was able to pull down and choose how much Lorem Ipsum content she needed. It may be silly, but if you use this type of text much when mocking up websites, it’s a big time saver. When I got home I searched the App Store and found it. It’s called Little Ipsum and it’s free.