Drupalcon Planet

Hello everyone, if your wireless drops or if you do not have a laptop just use your smart phone. The mobile site has a useful interface to view the schedule by day and by track.

I am hosting a BOF in room 206 at 4:15pm today, Monday to present how we created the mobile version of the DrupalCon website. The mobile version will automatically load for all webkit based smart phones.

Like many Drupalcons, I spent nearly the entire conference preparing my presentations. This is no fun, but we’ve been so busy trying to get the new gallery feature in Drupal Gardens released that it was the only way. Anyone else have this experience? Read full article »

Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions have quickly become an integral and essential feature of the evolving Drupalcon format. The open BoF format provides a platform for participatory discussions and focused collaborative work sessions. For many topics not included in the official Drupalcon schedule, this format is much more appropriate.

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I've recently returned from an amazing time at Drupalcon Copenhagen, and wanted to highlight some of my favorite sessions, events, and departing thoughts (this also serves as preparation for the impossible task of summarizing such an epic and comprehensive conference in 15 minutes for this week's Portland Drupal group). While I can't cover them all, the complete list of videos from Drupalcon Copenhagen can be found here.

Jeremy Keith, not only touched on the core functionality and concepts of HTML 5, but also spent a great deal of time focusing on the history and reasoning behind the design.

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It’s by sharing knowledge with others that the Drupal community continues to grow and flourish. In that spirit, DrupalCon Chicago will be offering pre-conference training courses and workshops to attendees interested in gaining additional hands-on knowledge on a variety of topics related to Web and Drupal development. We are looking for talented, professional trainers who can share their knowledge at pre-conference training courses and workshops.

These courses will take place on March 7, 2011, before the main conference begins and will be held in the classroom facilities of the University of Chicago’s Gleacher Center, located steps from the conference venue. We are looking for sessions and workshops that touch on all aspects of Web development, from Drupal site-building, module development, user experience design, and beyond.

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Richard Jones of iKos gave a presentation on simplifying and streamlining the development of Drupal sites. His team observed that they were creating the same basic sites over and over again. To this end, rather than starting from scratch each and every time, the team created basic sites to start from and rapidly built out the basic site for a client in several weeks. This allows the client to start entering data early in the process - which means come theming time, you are working against real client data. This is a plus when you are trying to achieve the results your client is seeking. In the iKos model, design comes last and is somewhat subject to the functionality that has been developed.

iKos set the the goal to reduce Drupal development time by 80% - to radically reduced the repeated effort that the company engaged project after project. They created a model of a site "startpoint" that begins each new client effort.

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Ryan did a session on the new version of the D7 Commerce Module. He was the original writer of the Ubercart package - a main stay of ecommerce sites in Drupal 6. His self deprecating humour at the beginning of the session was charming as Ubercart was his first segue into many aspects of Drupal and it has become the defacto leader of the pack for Drupal ecommerce sites.

His new offering is looking very slick, making use of fields in core for example, and while Ryan tells us it isn't quite ready for primetime (he's still building out features) it looked pretty good.

Video from this session is below in seven sections. The original first video was only 4 seconds long.

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With Drupalcon Copenhagen now behind us and Drupalcon Chicago approaching, I've found myself thinking about what Drupalcon is and how it's changing.

My first Drupalcon was in Barcelona, I was lucky enough to get to tag along with the guys from Bryght. I had an absolutely amazing time and met dozens of people, many of whom are now quite close friends. To top it off I also met my now fiancee and a future boss (no longer my boss, but still a good friend).

Since then, the twice yearly Drupalcons have consistently been highlights in my year. It's often the only time I get to see many of my friends in person.

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Many thanks to everyone who made Drupalcon CPH happen. The final session is a suitable (if silly) ending to what was a very productive week for me. Lots of meetings, reconnecting with old friends, and sessions.

The greatest silliness and fun in the session were the Kitten Killers - you can see just that piece of the presentation here (again and again and again).

If you just want to see the final session from beginning to end - I've posted the entire session below. The second to last is the Kitten Killers.

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Have we replaced the Drupal Song? At the end of the final session, the Killers played a new song, "I Can Be Your Module, You Can Be My Theme". It was a fun and silly way to end the main part of the conference and segue into the sprints.

The song was fun and sounds like it would be really easy to sing again and again and again.

Here's hoping it has been placed in the public domain.

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Last week, I attended DrupalCon in Copenhagen. Being relatively new to Drupal, but by no means a "newbie," I was hoping to both confirm that we're using Drupal well and to learn some tips, tricks and other insider info on how we can use it even better. I'm happy to report that it seems we are using Drupal "well" in that many sessions confirmed this - I was saying lots of "yep, know that module" and "yep, we're doing that with that module" to myself. It was all quite reassuring.

There were, of course, many new concepts, modules, configuration options, etc. that I learned about during the excellent DrupalCon last week. Some highlights...

Security

I attended an excellent session by Ben Jeavons on Drupal Security. Learning about the Security Review module was almost worth the trip to Copenhagen alone. Some other modules and links they mentioned:

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The first meeting in a Drupal-specific context regarding the Federated Social Web took place at the Copenhagen Drupalcon. It was very interesting both because of the range of people interested and because we got a first-hand account of developments from James Walker who is a key part of the Ostatus effort. This blog post is a brief write-up of what was discussed and links to further information.

The meeting started with a series of introductions by participants including the reasons they were interested in a federated social web. The answers were very encouraging because in addition to the expected concerns regarding breaking apart silos of information and control (I am thinking of you facebook.com) there were also some very practical needs regarding interoperability and decentralisation in enterprise environments. This is great because noble thoughts (and efforts) on their own a federated social web will not make.

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DrupalCon Copenhagen comes to an end, as does my blogging hiatus.

Two of my primary learning objectives here in Copenhagen were configuration management and deployment process.

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During the ending keynote I showed one of the emails we got during the work with drupalcon
I think it shows the other face of doing a drupalcon, but also is funny because its so filled with ignorance and all that the drupal community isnt :)

We are proud to announce that Clay Shirky, Jared Spool, and Dries Buytaert will be appearing as the keynote speakers for DrupalCon Chicago, which will be held March 7-10, 2011. As some of the leading minds in today’s ever-expanding new media landscape, these speakers will inform, engage, and inspire DrupalCon attendees.

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We are proud to announce that Clay Shirky, Jared Spool, and Dries Buytaert will be appearing as the keynote speakers for DrupalCon Chicago, which will be held March 7-10, 2011. As some of the leading minds in today’s ever-expanding new media landscape, these speakers will inform, engage, and inspire DrupalCon attendees.

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DrupalCon Rules! And here are slides, presentation text, examples and some other resources for my presentation in Copenhagen.

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Drupal 7 is just around the corner. Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert announced an estimated mid-October release for the next major version of Drupal in his keynote address at DrupalCon Copenhagen.

Drupal already powers many e-commerce websites – currently over 24,000 and counting. Its position as an e-commerce platform will be further strengthened by the release of Drupal 7 and Drupal Commerce, a complete enterprise e-commerce solution for Drupal.

Drupal Commerce is a completely new module package, providing all the systems necessary to build any kind of store on Drupal. It is being developed specifically for Drupal 7 by a group of six software companies, independent developers and lead by Commerce Guys, the leading Drupal e-commerce company.

Commerce Guys is happy to announce the first alpha release of Drupal Commerce at DrupalCon Copenhagen. All the major core systems are in place and will be fleshed out during the project’s alpha life-cycle. Our goal is to deploy Drupal Commerce on the same timeline as Drupal 7 itself.

Key improvements of Drupal Commerce over existing Drupal e-commerce solutions include:

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In the Driesnote here at DrupalCon CopenHagen there was much speculation as to where Drupal may be in 10 years. I really hope that 10 years from now we'll be able to look back at Dries' slides and giggle at our projections, but a part of me fears that if this community doesn't change our ways, that won't be the case.

WordPress as a platform has made it easy for the world to blog. As their community grows and ages, they are starting to see that the web is a great place to do a whole lot more than simply publish content. As demands increase, WordPress adapts.

WordPress is quickly transforming from a blog engine to a content management system. Drupal may be stronger, more secure, more flexible, more mature, more stable, and more technically awesome. But the Drupal community needs to recognize that these things won't guarantee our survival. WordPress has the brand, and the market. WordPress serves as the perfect introduction to web publishing, and once people are hooked it's hard to break their loyalty.

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Having just left DrupalCon's BoF session on the proposed DrupalCRM project, I thought I would take the opportunity to reflect on the progress we made and where the project will be going from here.

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