Planet Drupal

Drupalcon Szeged was great, but as usual, we are looking forward to an even more awesome Drupalcon coming up this time in Washington DC, March 4-7, 2009.

The first hundred tickets were sold out in the first ten minutes, and the next hundred flew out on a per-minute basis. Amazing! You can still buy tickets for $175, but they are selling damn quick, so make sure to grab yours as soon as possible.

We'd like to hereby congratulate the team for the great website, their outstanding work on getting sponsors and collecting some session submissions way ahead of the website launch, so that you can see some of the topics which will most probably be covered this time around. Meet at Drupalcon DC!

As we have reported almost a month ago, we got some notices of missing, mislabeled and badly encoded videos from presenters and would be viewers. This happens when you need to encode dozens of videos to get on the net by the end of a five day event. We are keeping track of our reports and status of each in a publicly viewable Google Spreadsheet at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pHr6m7zVvdN_506My300MKg

If you find a video missing or broken and it is not listed there, please do report it to us. If you find the broken video on the list, and it is not yet resolved, please allow us some time. Our volunteers are of course back to their daywork and have less time to coordinate video re-encoding and uploading. Thanks for your patience!

Thanks to multiple reports from you, we are aware that a few of the published Drupalcon Szeged 2008 videos are tagged and titled improperly. Our volunteers are back at their regular work schedule, so it takes a little bit more time to figure out and fix the issues. Thanks for your patience, and please keep reporting issues, so we know about any new mislabeled videos you might find.

As we announced at the closing keynote at Drupalcon Szeged, Jacob Redding composed and posted a survey on Drupalcon Szeged on Drupal.org. We'd love to hear your feedback if you came to Szeged or not. It is valuable to know what you liked here, or why did you decide not to come. The feedback from this form will be used to make the future Drupalcons better, so please take the time to respond.

Drupalcon Szeged is almost over, we have the code/docs sprint going on and it is running great. In good spirit of sharing, we decided to put the slides for this session out as soon as possible.

Before this keynote, you might have had the pleasure to view the Flickr slideshow for the conference. If you'd like to see all the photos people uploaded (ordered by interestingness this time) just go to http://flickr.com/search/show/?q=drupalconszeged2008&s=int There was also some nice music going on while the photos were playing, and it was from one band from Hungary called "Jamie Winchester and Hrutka Róbert". You can find the music videos on Youtube of course: Sand in My Eyes, It's Your Life, Take Me Home, Better and One of Us.

There is of course videos of all the sessions going up for download now, and we are about to reach full coverage on all sessions really soon now.

In case you are wondering where are the different areas in the venue, or need some help which we talked about in the opening presentation, you'll find the PDF of the opening notes useful.

At Drupalcon we'll have a CAcert event organized by the people from erdfish. If you need some assuring you'll find them every day of the conference from 12:45 to 13:15 on the ground floor in the sitting corner near the registration desk.

We thought that now as the Drupalcon comes so close (OMG just 4 days and 20 hours as of this writing), you'd make use of a checklist for your best Drupalcon experience! Here are some things we thought would be important to think about.

1. Make sure your registration status page (in your profile area) says you paid your fees, and (if you bought a room on our site) you know your hotel location and exact booking dates (checkin and checkout).
2. Pack according to expected weather. http://koponyeg.hu/ has a nice two week lookahead graph, which as of this writing shows 15-28 degrees celsius expected for the conference days, with a little bit rain possible at the end of the week. Our website has a weather block showing current conditions and two day forecast.
3. Know how you will get to Szeged. If you bought a shuttle bus ticket, check when your departure time is (you should have received an email about this earlier). If you are going by train or car, check out our travel page. We have detailed information on how to get to the train from both airport terminals and where to buy train tickets.
4. Make sure to have Hungarian forints (local currency) by the time you need them. If you take the train, you'll need them to buy tickets. If you take the shuttle, you'll only need forints in Szeged most probably. Read the corresponding entry in our FAQ for more info.
5. For local communications, make sure your phone is compatible, or you are prepared to buy a cheap prepaid phone in Hungary. Read the corresponding entry in our FAQ for more info.
6. Check that you have the right power plug converters for your mobile charger and laptop. Again, we have more information on this in our FAQ.
7. Finally, although in Szeged lots of the places are in walking distance, we published a public transportation city map for you in the FAQ, and given that there are some detours around the conference venue area, we translated the detour map for you for better understanding. The most important information is that you'll find a 1V tram supplement bus instead of tram 1 at the train station, if you'd take public transport there.

We wish you safe travels, and hope that this little checklist helps ensure your happy Drupalcon experience. See you real soon now in Szeged!

The Drupalcon Szeged 2008 schedule page is up for some time now, but we recently did quite a few changes to it. First, we added night time events, then added exhibition day information, and for a better overview, we also added the code sprint.

Several people asked us on the forums and through our contact forms to have a printer friendly version of the program. Well, we sat down, crafted and tested a printer friendly stylesheet for the schedule page, which is now up. Just try printing the schedule and you'll notice that it will only print what is required for you to know. We tested Firefox, Safari and Opera. Opera proved to be the best printer, not breaking pages in the middle of table cells, so we suggest you try that browser for best results.

Another popular request was to have a personalized schedule with sessions you voted on. For this, we modified the voting widgets, so you can cancel your votes, and added a personalized version of the program which highlights (via thicker borders and boldface) the sessions you are most interested in. Of course you can print this page, and the thicker borders and the boldface should survive the print simplification.

Finally, a public service message about the program. If you have a BoF and you did not schedule it yet, you loose out on people picking their favorite topics to go to, so why not schedule your BoF now? There are almost 50 BoFs submitted, and only 16 of them are scheduled at the time of this writing. You can put your BoF to a specific room and timeslot by going to your BoF page and using the drag and drop controls on the schedule tab. Let us know if you have any issues or questions.

Less then one week until Drupalcon, looking forward to meeting you there!

Finding a conference venue with good wifi for hundreds of Drupal geeks is not easy. Since these conferences grew big, it was always a challenge to work out. This year, we also started planning early on ensuring good wifi coverage for the event. Our venue has some wifi coverage, but it was not adequate in itself. We asked for cable based internet for speakers, we set aside a BoF area with switches so if you bring your ethernet cables, you'll be able to plug in and we even ordered a computer cabinet with English speaking setups for those without their laptops.

But to solve good wifi for the Drupal crowd, we needed a professional partner. Thanks to university connections, and our venue's dedicated people, we managed to strike a sponsorship deal with Cisco, so we get the equipment to set up on the broadband university network. People at the university are working hard on configuring the network for us to ensure a good experience over all days of the event.

We also have some surprises for those staying for the code sprint this time. You might have heard that the second edition of Pro Drupal Development is out. We will hand out 15 free copies of the e-book version for code sprinters thanks to the publisher Apress! Another natural fit for code sprint sponsorship is ActiveState, makers of the popular Komodo IDE. They provided two Komodo IDE licenses and some Komodo shirts for hard working coders.

I'd like to hereby thank all three for their support for the conference and for helping us get stuff done at this Drupalcon again.