Dries Buytaert

Drupal at FrOSCon 2007

FrOSCon is a two day conference on Free Software and Open Source, taking place on August 25th and 26th at the Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin near the city of Bonn in Germany.

With the help of the Drupal Association, Robert Douglass is organizing a strong Drupal presence: we booked two rooms for a dedicated two day Drupal track (at least 12 Drupal presentations), we'll bring in Drupal experts like Gerhard Killesreiter (core committer), Gábor Hojtsy (core committer) and Robert Douglass (Drupal book author and Lullabot employee) himself, as well as several Google Summer of Code students.

We still have some slots left for Drupal speakers, so make sure to get in touch with Robert if you want to present about Drupal. The deadline to submit your session proposals is July 1st. We're fully committed to make this a great Drupal event so people giving a Drupal presentation will have their hotel room paid for by the Drupal Association!

Good job, Robert!

My first Drupal workshops

For the first time in my Drupal career, I'll help teach two Drupal workshops.

The first Drupal workshop is organized by Roel De Meester as part of the Belgian Drupal User Group activities. The workshop will take place in Antwerp, next Saturday, March 10th. It is targeted at people who are new to Drupal: we'll show you how to install and configure a Drupal site but deliberately won't cover any advanced developer topics. The workshop is free to attend but seating is limited so hurry up and check Roel's announcement for more information.

The second Drupal workshop that I'll assist with is the Drupal performance and scalability workshop organized by Lullabot. At the workshop, James Walker (Bryght), Jeremy Andrews (CivicSpace), Matt Westgate (Lullabot) and myself will share tips and information on getting the maximum performance out of Drupal and the infrastructure that your Drupal site runs on. The workshop takes place on March 24th, directly after the Open Source CMS Summit at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, California. It is not free but all profits from this seminar will be donated to the Drupal Association. (We're not getting paid for it.)

Why am I doing this? Because I think it is fun, and because it is a great opportunity to learn from what Drupal users have to say.

Drupal Association launched

For many of us, Drupal is very much a labor of love. It's a story of having fun and working hard. If you follow what we do, it's easy to understand what we're all about -- making it easy to build websites, both for users and developers. Passion spreads and as a result, Drupal's size and scope has grown beyond what an ad hoc group of volunteers can realistically manage.

Organizing last summer's Drupal conference in Brussels would have been a lot easier with some financial backing, for example. Maintaining, scaling, upgrading, and improving the Drupal.org infrastructure is becoming a monumental task.

In response, we're proud to launch the Drupal Association. The Drupal Association is a non-profit organization with one goal: to support the Drupal project.