DrupalCon
DrupalCon Szeged
Good news! The next Drupal conference (DrupalCon) will take place in Szeged, Hungary from August 27-30. If you want to learn more about Drupal, or if you want to capture and absorb the passion and enthusiasm behind the Drupal project, this is the place to be.
DrupalCon Szeged will bring together hundreds of Drupal users and developers from all around the world. Whether you are a Drupal professional or an enthusiastic user coming to find out more, you're invited to join us in Szeged. Mark your calendars!
This will be the first Drupal conference in Central Europe, and I'm excited by that. There are a lot of Drupal people in Central Europe, probably more so than in Western Europe, and this is a great way to reach out them. Plus, I've been to Hungary twice and liked it very much.
State of Drupal presentation (March 2008)
Last week at DrupalCon Boston I gave my traditional state of Drupal presentation in front of 850 Drupalistas. The video of the presentation is provided below, and you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 15 MB) as well. The video is available in alternative encoding formats from archive.org.
Source: archive.org.
Topics I talked about: the Drupal 6 release, the state of our union, the need for a drupal.org redesign, the Drupal 7 killer release, the Drupal 7 development cycle, usability, test-driven development, the future of Drupal and the semantic web, etc. There is a lot of material in this presentation and during the course of the next few weeks, I plan to decompose this presentation in a number of extended blog posts. Stay tuned!
Acquia launch party at Felt
At DrupalCon Boston, Acquia sponsored a launch party at the Felt club in Boston. Jeff Robbins from Lullabot performed live with its former rock band Orbit, and Acquia's Jay Batson took the crowd deep into the night with progressive house and trance music. Great parteeh!
Some of the Acquia employees at the Acquia launch party at the Felt in Boston.
Drupal usability testing
When I predicted that there would be a big and concentrated effort to further improve Drupal's ease of use in 2008, I was cheating a bit ... The past months we've been preparing some formal usability testing for Drupal that will be conducted at the University of Minnesota Office for Information Technology's usability lab. The university has a professional usability lab that will allow us to record eye-tracking data and video which will be provided to the Drupal community. Très cool!
Chad Fennel and Cody Hanson of the University of Minnesota Libraries have taken an incredible lead in this; they secured the lab, they prepared test scenarios, they recruited test users, they are coaching us how to do usability research, and last but not least, they are footing part of the bills. Needless to say, this is a significant contribution to the Drupal project -- and hopefully one that will have big impact on Drupal 7.
Needless to say, formal usability testing is only one way to make Drupal easier of use. There are a lot of usability findings out there already (example 1, example 2), and many of us know first-hand which changes need to occur to improve Drupal's usability. All it takes is a knack for usability, some development skills and a lot of time and effort. Ultimately, everyone can help -- with or without a professional usability lab.
The past years, I've pushed hard to make usability reviews part of the development and patch review process. I strongly believe that usability reviews should be tightly integrated with the software development process; rapid usability feedback and incremental usability improvements allows us to build better software faster. And it is working -- every major Drupal release has become significantly easier to use.
Nonetheless, there is a lot of work left to be done. I hope that the formal usability testing at the University of Minnesota Libraries will provide us with a fresh perspective and that it helps train the Drupal community's eye for usability. Because more than anything else, I want to us to flatten the Drupal learning curve.
More information about the usability testing will be made available shortly. The goal is to share some first results at DrupalCon Boston next month.
DrupalCon Boston registration open
The DrupalCon Boston 2008 registration is now open! You can register at http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/.
$195 USD for four days of tremendous fun, to (re-)connect with other Drupal users and developers, to share information and to learn from the best Drupal developers and Drupal companies in the world. Heck, lunches and coffee are included in the price. All run by Drupalistas, for Drupalistas so it doesn't get much better than that. And in case there is a surplus from the fees and sponsors, the Drupal Association will use that money to gear up its activities in 2008.
Sign up now, because you always win! ;-)
Boston Convention and Exhibition Center
Last week, we went to the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center to inspect the rooms that have been allocated to us for DrupalCon Boston. As you can see from the video above, the venue is rather nice -- not to mention humongous. (In case you are wondering, that is Kieran Lal laughing in the background.)
DrupalCon Boston
Good news! The next Drupal conference (DrupalCon) will take place in Boston from March 3-6. If you want to learn more about Drupal, or if you want to capture and absorb the passion and enthusiasm behind the Drupal project, this is the place to be.
The last Drupal conference, DrupalCon Barcelona, was capped at 450 people and sold out so this time around, we're trying to accommodate 700 Drupal people. Yes, these numbers blow my mind.
In other words, DrupalCon Boston will bring together hundreds of Drupal users and developers from all around the world. Whether you are a Drupal professional or an enthusiastic user coming to find out more, you're invited to join us in Boston.
Furthermore, DrupalCon is being held at the same time/place as AIIM International Exposition & Conference, the largest content management technology conference in North America. The goal: introduce Drupal to thousands of potential new Drupalers.
Organizing a conference of this size obviously takes a lot of resources; if you are interested in being a sponsor, please get in touch. Kudos to the DrupalCon Boston team and the Drupal Association for taking on this massive amount of work. This is not something we should take for granted. Thanks!