billk2

This year I was lucky enough to be offered a chance to go to Drupal's annual conference, this year hosted in Barcelona. Drupal is an open source Content Management System (CMS), that I've used on a number of sites and is currently being rolled out for the Interactive Investor site. Nader Cserny flew over from Berlin to join in the fun. The following is pretty much a day by day appraisal of the conference and the sessions I attended.

The conference lasted for four days across four conference rooms with six sessions a day. That's a choice of ninety-six possible sessions!

The timing of my flight arrival meant I missed part of the first session I was interested in, 'Site review: New York Observer', but apparently technical problems used up some of the allotted hour. There's already a quite in-depth review of how they set up the site on the Drupal website, but it was reassuring to hear that most of their problems were due to bad initial design, rather than the limitations of Drupal. Part way through the build they were informed of a requirement to publish new content in 'editions', i.e. save content to be published in one go at a specific time of day.
http://www.archive.org/details/Site_review.New_York_Observer

The next session I went to had little to with Drupal. 'Advanced Javascript Development' explained how jQuery is now integrated into Drupal and gave examples of tools for debugging Javascript in Firefox and Internet Explorer. In particular he recommended MS Visual Web Dev 2005, which is free to download and Firebug and Firebug lite. He then went on to explain some advanced Javascript techniques. Javascript 'currying' was something that sounded very clever, but was complex enough that I, along with ninety-percent of the audience, wouldn't be able to think of situation where it would be useful (if I could remember how it worked). Basically, it seems to be a revival of an old programming technique for altering the scope of an existing function.
http://www.archive.org/details/Advanced_JavaScript_development

Lunch was supplied by the conference and consisted of a variety of sandwiches. Unfortunately the conference centre was situated in a suburb of Barcelona called Cornellà and good ten minute tram ride from the centre of that town. This meant we were pretty much stuck where we were, and the sandwich selection didn't change from day to day. Needless to say it didn't take long for some of us to discover the local shopping centre and it's McDonalds.

'FormAPI 3: The Adventure Continues' was the third session I attended. This was an in depth introduction to the improvements made to the Drupal form handling code that's built into the core. Presented by Drupal star Jeff Eaton it features LOL Cats in a variety of situations. Though I can't say I've had any experience programming with the form API, a major improvement was for creating multi-step forms, e.g. 'wizards'. If we intend to create mulit-step forms any time soon, we should develop in Drupal 6 rather than the current version. Incidentally, Jeff Eaton bears a more than slight similarity to a certain DBA we employ.
http://www.slideshare.net/eaton/form-api-3

The conference centre closed at 5pm with the conference security swiftly emptying the place. It was a shame the the organisers hadn't provided any after-conference facilities or suggestions for get-togethers, as I can imagine those that came on there own would have been pretty much left in the lurch. Luckily Nader and I found our own entertainment by walking so far our feet ached.

Those of you not familiar with Barcelona may not know of it's renowned night-life. The centre of attraction is a long semi-pedestrianised street called the Rambla, which stretches for at least a mile and seems to contain the whole population of the city once it gets dark. During the weekend of the conference the city's big annual festival started and an indication of the extend of the Cataluñ-an staying power was made clear by the city's temporary provision of a 24-hour metro service. Light-weights like myself were branded as such by leaving the festivities early. Leaving a bar before 2am was considered disrespectful and the atmosphere at that time felt like the equivalent to about 9pm back home.

A slight mishap with my alarm clock meant I missed some of the first session I'd intended to see. A talk by one of the Google Summer of Code sponsored students about combining SVG with Drupal, 'Graphic capabilities of Drupal'. However having seen the video, I think SVG is still struggling for penetration and the potential for application within Interactive Investor (graphs, sparklines, etc.) are pretty limited with the module in it's current form.
http://www.archive.org/details/Graphic_capabilities_of_Drupal

One of the most informative presentations was by Earl Miles, a well respected Drupal contributor also responsible for the Views module. 'Panels 2: What it is, what you can do with it and where it's going' was a presentation of the new version of the popular Panels module. The current version is yet another module I'm not familiar with, but I can see some potential for use on Interactive Investor. Basically it allows non-programmers to easily set up panels of content on pages around your site. The new version makes this process even easier and includes some useful drag and drop Ajax stuff. Unfortunately it's not even released in beta yet.

'Drupal and the future of News' was an interesting presentation and panel discussion about various news websites using Drupal and the future of the newspaper medium versus online in general. I was impressed by the wide variety and high standards of the sites discussed. Nader has a list of some of them on his site.
http://nader.cserny.com/2007/09/20/news-websites-built-with-drupal/

I also went to 'Building High Traffic and Scalable Businesses with Drupal', which though interesting seemed to be a sneaky honey-pot to lure high-traffic site developers together to discuss and compare strategies, but also to enlist help in creating an area for Drupal users to compile notes, best practices and discussion. It seems there are plenty of high traffic sites out there, but most of them have had to solve there own problems. Judging by the speed of things, the site is probably already up and running. Yep:
http://groups.drupal.org/high-performance

'What Makes Websites Work? Bringing Information Architecture into the Drupal Development Process' was had very little do with Drupal apart from the fact the presenters worked with it exclusively. They ran through all the usual stuff, site maps, content matrix, wireframes, user stories, etc. They explained that the Information Architect represented the user during the project specification period. Very waterfall. Not very agile. I probably would have been better off going to the 'How to contribute to Drupal' session.
http://www.civicactions.com/blog/what_makes_websites_work_bringing_infor...

Next I went to the 'Drupal podcast live' session, mainly because of the antithetical title. To me, a podcast is something I listen to days, months or even years after the event. I have occasionally listened to the Lullabot podcast so it was interesting to see some of the faces behind the voices. Though witnessing the equipment used I wasn't surprised to find the audio quality was appalling in this case. They did a sum up of the event so far and had a panel of various Drupal celebrities. Point your iPod here if you're interested:
http://www.lullabot.com/audiocast/podcast-47-live-barcelona

I then saw a presentation called 'Automatic drupal site generation, module creation and site clonage'. I'm not sure I've come across the term 'clonage' before, but this was quite an interesting talk by a British company that creates, hosts and maintains websites for small non-profit organisations. Their problem was that their clients wanted very cheap sites, and their solution was a cookie-cutter approach using Drupal. The had a number of 'template' Drupal installations that they used with some proprietary (now open source) code they wrote called Drool (Drupal Tool). This allowed the create a single file package that was easy to copy and install. It also accepted a set of image files that it used to automatically theme the site with the client's colour scheme, logo, etc. Very simple, cheap and fast. They knocked out a new themed site in a couple of minutes.

'Using Drupal itself to prototype your Drupal based web application' sounded intriguingly interesting. Unfortunately it turned out to be a long-winded explanation of an application the presenter had written in Drupal for tracking a web projects and tasks. There are many better commercial and free open source equivalents (Nader recommended one I've forgotten), I've a page full here:
http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Project_Management/Open_Sou...

'Drupal and change management' also sounded interesting. Unfortunately a mix-up with the rooms meant I missed it. However, it seems it was more geared to core Drupal developers and contributors attempting to develop the best approach for Drupal in general. So I'm sure they managed without me.

The final day of the conference was set aside for the Drupalshow. Which was an open day for the local public to come and find out about Drupal. The morning started the mayor of Cornellà visiting the newly opened conference hall followed by The State of Drupal presentation by Drupal's equivalent to Steve Jobs / Linus Torvolds, Dries Buytaert. He outlined what he hoped to include in the next release of Drupal. The rest of the day's sessions were basic Drupal showcases and demonstrations.

All in all the conference was very interesting, though after four days it became a bit overwhelming. I was very impressed by the skill and commitment by the developers to Drupal and amazed by the breadth of knowledge conveyed by the people there. Obviously the cream of the Drupal world were in attendance there, and I can now fit faces to various names I've heard (though it would have been a good idea for attendees to put screen-names on their conference badges). I also now have a better understanding not only of the best features (various contributed modules), but also the shortcomings and how these are being addressed in future releases. I got an incite into the nature of an open source project and how ad-hoc thoughts can quickly be taken up, absorbed, integrated and rolled out. The conference demonstrated the power and flexibility of Drupal, but also acknowledged the potential problems of this and any CMS and the considerations needed in growing and building on the existing code. Probably the most important message was that, as with a lot of software, the code is a moving target that's constantly evolving. Open source has huge benefits, but the cost of maintenance mustn't be underestimated and the cost of contributing back to the community should also be factored.

I'm looking forward to the next one.