Dries Buytaert

State of Drupal presentation (September 2007)

Robert Garrigos from the Drupal Catalan user group just uploaded a video of the State of Drupal presentation that I gave at DrupalCon Barcelona 3 months ago. The presentation shares the results of a survey that I conducted in August; the survey ran for 30+ days, collected more than 1000 responses, and should do a pretty good job capturing the Drupal Zeitgeist.

Have a look at the video below (my presentation starts 12 minutes into the video) and/or download a copy of my slides (PDF, 14MB).

DrupalCon Barcelona attendees

© Ana Calvo

DrupalCon Barcelona wrapup

On my way home from DrupalCon Barcelona ...

Executive summary: DrupalCon Barcelona blew my socks off.

I have yet to process all the inputs but these are some of the highlights:

• September last year DrupalCon Brussels had 150 attendees. Exactly one year later, DrupalCon Barcelona had 450 attendees. We tripled in size.
• There were 84 presentations but I only managed to attend 6 of them ... I've been really busy.
• I've been to Barcelona before, but I was instantly reminded about what a great location Barcelona is.
• Adobe relaunched their Flex showcase using Drupal and announced it on stage at the Drupal conference. This will go in history as the first strategically timed release/announcement at a Drupal conference.
• Sun Microsystems was a gold sponsor and is working on integrating Drupal and Java (legacy) applications as well as industrial grade deployment of Drupal sites on SAMP (Solaris - Apache - MySQL - PHP). Impressive technology!
• NowPublic is going to help drive the development of regression tests for Drupal core. They hired testing talent Rok Žlender to write these tests in the open and hope other people in the Drupal community will start collaborating.
• Raincity Studios committed to helping us redesign drupal.org.
• Robert Scales (CEO of Raincity Studio) wants to organize a Drupal conference in Shanghai, China.
• There were more Drupal users from Belgium, than there were Drupal users from The Netherlands. This might be the last time as the Dutchmen made plans to do more outreach in The Netherlands.
• Robert Garrigos, Bert Boerland, Dries Knapen, the Drupal Catalan user group, the Drupal Association and Citilab did a great job organizing and facilitating this conference. Thanks!

Peter Van Dijck at DrupalCon

Peter Van Dijck (blog), author of the IA book and the XFML specification, will provide a presentation at DrupalCon Barcelona! The topic of his presentation is: "i18n information architecture: how to organize global websites".

Let’s say you are localizing your Drupal install. How can you create an alphabetical ordered list in Chinese, which doesn't have alphabetical ordering? Your taxonomy might have problems: “Public schools” means almost the opposite in the US versus the UK – now what? How do you handle sites with 2, 4 or 50 languages or locales? What to do if an article hasn't been translated?

More than 300 people paid and registered to attend DrupalCon Barcelona. Already, this the biggest European Drupal conference to date. Makes for a lot of sangria!

Drupal and Flex

The past year or so, I've been dabbling my toes in Adobe Flex, a software development kit that makes it easy for application developers to build Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). As an early beta tester I've kept in touch with Adobe and under the guidance of Mike Potter (Adobe Flex team), Adobe has since funded Scott Nelson to work on the Drupal services project and the Drupal AMF PHP project. In the process they have also written code that fixes bugs for loading and saving content in Drupal, and more. Thanks Adobe!

A couple weeks ago, I invited Adobe to present at DrupalCon Barcelona and they accepted our invitation: Christoph Rooms will provide a keynote presentation to show how Flex and Drupal can be used together. Furthermore, they'll show how Adobe is using Drupal and Flex for the new Flex website that they hope to launch at DrupalCon Barcelona!

Also, next week on September 5th at 17:00h CET, Mike would love to talk with some Drupal developers about Flex and the code that Adobe has contributed back to the Drupal project. So if you are a Drupal developer interested to learn more about what Adobe is doing with Drupal and Flex or if you have some Flex-related questions, let me know in the comments, and I'll try to get you an invite for the conference call and the online demo on September 5th. (You never know but you might be able to score a free Adobe Flex Builder license key.)

State of Drupal 2007 survey

Each Drupalcon, I try to provide a State of Drupal presentation to communicate our current Zeitgeist and to share my ideas about what I think is important for Drupal. Next month's DrupalCon Barcelona is no exception.

This time around, I'd like to do something slightly different, and incorporate direct feedback from all Drupal users, contributors, developers, evaluators, and everyone else who has an interest in Drupal's future.

Whether you are a long-term Drupal developer or a recently joined new person to the Drupal community, I'd like to invite you to take part in the State of Drupal 2007 survey that I created. The goal of the survey is to better understand our needs, and to help prioritize our efforts. If you can't attend DrupalCon Barcelona, don't worry; I'll make sure to share the results after the conference.

DrupalCon Barcelona

This post is long due but I'd like to invite everyone to join us at the next Drupal conference held in the beautiful Barcelona (Spain). It will be a 4-day conference from September 19-22, 2007. More information is available at the DrupalCon Barcelona website.

Every year, we try to organize two main Drupal conferences; one hosted in Europe and one hosted in North-America. This year's North American event took place at Yahoo!, and now the European event will take place in Barcelona. (I'd love to do a third annual Drupal conference in Asia or South-America.)

Being one of the main Drupal events, DrupalCon Barcelona 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 Barcelona.

Kudos to the Catalan Drupal user group and the Drupal Association for taking on the organizational work. It's great to see that others do a much better job organizing a Drupal conference than I ever did. For example, I don't think we ever managed to open registration three months before the conference when I was a (co-)organizer. Good job!