I’m sitting right now in the main presentation room here at DrupalSouth Wellington January 2010, the second ever Kiwi Drupal conference. This is my second time representing Digital Eskimo at a Drupal event (previous one being DrupalCon DC last year), and my third Drupal conference. I was super-excited to be attending the first-ever Drupal event in Australasia to feature international guest speakers. After a full weekend of presentations, hack jams, mingling, and beverage guzzling (in no particular order), things are just about to wrap up.
For those of you whose first language is English rather than binary: Drupal is a software product called a Content Management System (CMS for short). It’s used to power dynamic web sites with features such as blogging, media integration and community participation. Digital Eskimo has been using Drupal for several years, and we’re proud to support Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and its largely volunteer community. In terms of ethics and philosophy, Drupal is closely aligned with Digital Eskimo. We’ve launched several successful Drupal sites recently, including our “experiment full of experiments” live local.
Quick wrap of my favourite presentations this weekend:
- Liz Henry: Abandonment Issues. First talk of the conference, and in my opinion the best. Liz came out here all the way from the USA, to discuss with us the cold hard fact that Drupal sites need to be maintained, often for a very long time, and that developers often don’t stick around for terribly long at all to do so.
- Angie Byron (webchick): Drupal 7. D7’s mega-enthusiastic lead developer (especially visiting from Canada) gave us a terrific demo of the highlights of the upcoming new version, which is currently in alpha. Angie also invited us all round to her place last night for a hackfest, where I learned how to write about 2% of a core SimpleTest.
- Chris Burgess: doesn’t play nicely. Just when I thought there was nothing new to hear about Drupal module development gotchas, this talk (which rapidly expanded into a facilitated discussion) clearly summarised some issues that Drupal coders experience far too much, and talk about far too little.
- Giuseppe Maxia: Blaming the unknown. Database guru Giuseppe’s talk was more of a general coding talk than a Drupal-specific talk. His basic message hit home to everyone: “it’s always your fault”. We always blame first what we least understand. Honest, upfront, and very informative.
I also gave a quick lightning talk, in which I gave a demo of the Migrate module, which (of late) I’ve been working with extensively here at Digital Eskimo. I’ll be blogging in geekier detail about the conference on GreenAsh — I’ll post the link in the comments (below) when it’s written.
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