Dries Buytaert

FrOSCon

This weekend, I will be giving the keynote presentation at FrOSCon in Sankt Augustin Germany, near Bonn. There will be a dedicated Drupal developer room there on both Saturday and Sunday (August 22 and 23). FrOSCon is a relatively new, but rapidly growing conference covering open source technologies of all kinds. This is the fourth year that Drupal has been involved and it has become one of the most important Drupal events to attend every year in Germany.

On Saturday we'll we having a Drupal 7 code sprint, coordinated via IRC (#drupal at FreeNode) and Twitter so that local and remote developers can cooperate in real time. Angie Byron, my Drupal 7 co-maintainer, will be with us the whole time live on IRC from Canada. She is pulling an all-nighter for us, so let's make sure to get some hot patch action! Anyone whose time zone is remotely compatible is invited to join us – the sprint will run roughly from 10:00h to 18:00h European Central Summer Time (6 hours ahead of US Eastern).

On Sunday, there will be several Drupal presentations in the developer room as well as lots of chances to meet other Drupalistas, get support, install Drupal on your machine and so on. There is a planning wiki for the Drupal side of the event at: http://groups.drupal.org/node/24601. My keynote presentation will be at 12:45h on Sunday "The Secrets of Building and Participating in Open Source Communities."

Keynote abstract:
Everyone knows that the most successful open source projects and vendors benefit from a thriving community. But how exactly is this done? In this session, Drupal project lead and Acquia co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert will share his secrets for building and participating in a thriving open source community, including its commercial ecosystem. He'll describe the mindset, mechanisms, and practices that are essential for a thriving project and community.

Hope to see you there!

DrupalCamp Köln wrapup

Last weekend, I attended DrupalCamp Köln in Germany. It was great to put my feelers out in the German Drupal community and to talk with so many Drupal users and developers. Executive summary: the German Drupal community is going strong. Thanks for your hospitality!

DrupalCamp Köln

On January 17-18, I'll be in Germany to attend DrupalCamp Köln (aka DrupalCamp Cologne) and hang out with the German Drupal community. DrupalCamp Köln is organized by Thomas Narres, Daniel Niehaus, Jürgen Brocke, Torsten Zenk, Florian Latzel, and others in the Köln/Bonn users group.

The venue is sponsored by GFU, a leading German IT training organization. Other sponsors include Host Europe, the Kölner Internet Union, O'Reilly, Packt Publishing, APress, Martinsfeld and Acquia.

With so many good presentation proposals, it's hard to point out just a few. An incomplete list of sessions include SEO, fields in core, Acquia, SimpleTest, Ubercart, performance optimization, installation profiles, Solr, module writing, theming and many more.

This is the first ever Drupal-specific camp (or Drupal un-conference) that Germany has ever seen, and so far a little more than 150 people have signed up. The organizers are expecting to max out the venue with around 180 participants. Prominent German Drupalistas attending and/or presenting include: Konstantin Käfer, Hagen Graf, Daniel Juling, Ben Birkenhagen, Gerhard Killesreiter, and plenty of other great contributors. International Drupalistas coming include: Morten (King of Denmark), Mikkel Høgh (Denmark), Florian Loretan (USA / Switzerland), Roel Demeester (Belgium), Jo Wouters (Belgium), Damien Tournoud (France), Joeri Poesen (Belgium), and many more.

Three people from Acquia will be present; Robert Douglass, Jeffrey McGuire (aka Jam) and myself. I'll do a keynote on Drupal. Robert plans to demonstrate the latest ApacheSolr improvements and will give a first glance at Acquia's hosted search solution. Robert and I will also be holding an Acquia Q&A session, and Jam will be ready to help with your Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 upgrade problems, pesky Views 1 to Views 2 conversions and hosting a moderated discussion on Upgrade as a Barrier, and how to move adoption forward.

Two other things you shouldn't miss are the Drupal.org upgrade and redesign hackathon -- your chance to get your hands dirty with the big Drupal.org redesign project -- and the Ubercart workshop that takes place on January 19 and 20, right after Drupalcamp Köln. The Ubercart workshop is organized by Commerce Guys and AF83.

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!

Die Zeit using Drupal

Just like Die Welt (The World), Die Zeit (The Time), a widely respected German newspaper, recently launched a Drupal powered community website at http://uni.zeit.de. Go Germany, go!

Playboy using Drupal

The German Playboy website is using Drupal now: Next Drupal conference at the Playboy Mansion? ;-)

Die Welt using Drupal

Die Welt (The World), a big German newspaper published by Axel Springer recently started using Drupal at Welt Debatte.

Talking about Bill Gates, their second blog post coincidentally talks about Bill Gates and Drupal -- but in an informative way. They seem proud to be using Drupal.