Drupalcon day 4 - the couch bags proved excellent for a quick power-nap
Drupalcon Szeged 2008 is almost over, and I was wondering how to describe such an event for anybody who has no clue what to expect – as did we four days ago.
Inspiring
So what’s it like? For me this drupalcon was like getting to know Drupal on a whole other level. You get to see, meet and – if you like – work with amazing people from different parts of the world who work together to create something bigger and better than the sum of all parts. Very, very inspiring and educative. When you head home after four days of drupalcon, you’re head will be full with new ideas and plans.
BoF’s?
There is a very positive vibe going on with people relaxing on couch bags, plugged into the nearest power outlet with their laptop, or groups doing some spontaneous BoF-session. If you don’t know what a ‘BoF‘ (Birds of a Feather) is, well, so didn’t we. Actually it’s a type of spontaneous session were a group of people with a shared interest gather and chat and/or workshop through some topic.
Developers and end-users
As Dries’ opening keynote showed, most people (79%) at Drupalcon consider themselves developers. These developers are the beating heart of Drupal, and many people at Drupalcon are contributing code in one way or the other. A much smaller group of people are the end-users. People like us essentially – who use Drupal as a solution for our clients.
But this does not mean drupalcon isn’t interesting for end-users. Thanks to this drupalcon we really got a good feeling for the community and in which direction Drupal is heading. It’s clear that with commercial support by Acquia and the redesign of drupal.org, Drupal will be lifted to the next level.
Two thumbs up
As for us, this drupalcon really convinced us that Drupal is going to be *the* professional open-source content management system to use. Also we met some interesting people which made the warm evenings in the beautiful town of Szeged even more pleasant!
So for anyone who is somehow involved in Drupal I can really recommend the drupalcon experience, even if you are not a hard-core programmer or developer. Two thumbs up for the excellent organization and see ya at the next (probably European) DrupalCon!
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Drupal.org redesign with help by the community
Day 2 at Drupalcon Szeged (yesterday) was a pretty packed program. Yesterday’s highlight definitely was the Drupal.org redesign keynote by Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt. They are hired to redesign drupal.org. As Mark said: An enormous task with 100.000 clients who all are experts in the field and all have their opinion.
In my opinion they gave an excellent presentation which clearly pointed out the need for professional experts to handle this project instead of improving drupal.org bit by bit. Not being Drupalists themselves they have the ability to take a step back and look at the whole picture from different point of views (developers, end-users…) and they clearly have a good understanding of what’s usability is all about.
In the next four months when they will be working there will be some iteration steps in which the drupal community will have the opportunity to give feedback and help in their own fields of expertise.
At the end of day 2 we enjoyed a nice wine-tasting event, as you can see on these pictures.
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Drupalcon day 1 is over at the venue, but will continue at Port Royal in the heart of Szeged were the welcome drink will be held. In the meantime there is just enough time at our hotel for a short impression of Drupalcon day 1 – our first Drupalcon ever and first introduction to the Drupal community.
Drupalcon saves kitties
Kittens?
Keynote speakers of the day were Dries Buytaert – creator of Drupal – and Rasmus Lerdorf – creator of PHP. And according to both everytime someone hacks the core of Drupal or writes crappy PHP, God kills a kitten.
State of Drupal
But seriously, they both had nice presentations. I especially liked how Dries focused on improving the usability of Drupal as the #1 goal for Drupal 7 – and showed some tips how we can achieve this. The overall message was: we’re doing OK but we should move faster. Watch the video from this presentation ‘State of Drupal’ or view the slides.
Simple is hard
Rasmus Lerdorf’s keynote “Simple is hard” showed us a short history of PHP and a great performance comparison between different PHP frameworks including Drupal 6.4. His brief analysis showed us Drupal is pretty well structured from a PHP point of view but he also had some ideas for further optimization in future versions of Drupal. He also had some interesting tips on optimizing a PHP environment for better performance.
Drupalcon is really well organized, we already met some interesting people from all over the globe at the precon-meetup yesterday. Szeged is a great place and it’s clear that Drupal is powered by passionate people (who really care about kittens)!
See also:
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View from our hotel room
We just had breakfast in our hotel Tisza (also the name of the river that runs through Szeged) and are now catching up on some email in the hotel Lobby. The hotel looks great, barok-styled with big gigantic mirrors everywhere and – most importantly – excellent wireless coverage ;)
Szeged is truly a beatiful town with great green avenues, old buildings and a very mellow relaxed atmosphere. When we sat on the terrace on one of the squares decorated with palm trees, it wouldn’t be so hard to imagine yourself on one of the Italian plaza’s in Rome.
We’ve put up some pictures on Flickr. Today we’ll explore Szeged some more, and starting from tomorrow you can expect more Drupal related news. Tomorrow at 9:00 am is Dries’ keynote ‘State of Drupal’.
But so far two big thumbs up for choosing Szeged as the place for Drupalcon 2008!
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In a few hours, me and Erik are leaving for Drupalcon 2008 in Szeged! The conference starts on wednesday so we will have plenty of time to explore the city and it looks like the weather will be fine.
As Roel mentioned in the comments, there are also plans to meet-up with fellow Drupalists in the evening before, on tuesday, in grand-cafe Deac Ferenc, which sounds like a good idea! Count us in.
Now let’s do the checklist…
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