CivicActions

Have I ever told you how much I love data? After listening to Larry Garfield's talk Drupal Databases: The Next Generation, I now love data more than ever!

The database layer for Drupal 7 has been completely rewritten to take advantage of PHP's PDO extenion. Not only does it allow Drupal to work with many different database types it also simplifies how developers interact with the database.

Drupalcon Szeged is one week away. I am glad I am attending, and I am planning on leading a Birds of a Feather (BOF) during the conference. The focus of the BOF is creativity and programming. I want to discuss the weird mix of human behavior and code. Sounds strange I know, so let me describe in more detail.

Drupalcon Boston sessions were all recorded on video and have been made available on archive.org, thanks to numerous drupal community members and other Drupal resources.

(This is quite out of date now, but better late than never.)

Here are the videos from my talk on Scalable Theming: Theming for 100s of node types, CCK fields, and views:

Wow, what a great 2 days! We had over 80 people show up over 2 days for some great sessions at DrupalCampSeattle.

I think that the highlight, had to be Greg Dunlap's Deploy Module Presentation, again! And of course some great hallway conversation and little show and tells.

A big shout out to all the sponsors, and everyone who pitched in to help.

DrupalCampSeattle2008 started this morning at the Youngstown Arts Center in West Seattle. We have a great crew of folks here, and the sharing and learning is well underway. I just finished an intro to Drupal talk, it was billed as a "101" but I think that we hit some 102 and 103 level topics (CCK, Views, permissions and taxonomies). Arthur Foelsche is talking about Media Mover and Rich Media in Drupal to a rapt crowd, while a talk about CCK is going on in the theater.

Next week, Zoey and I will be at the NetSquared Conference in San Jose, CA and if you're one of the 350 lucky participants attending, we would love to connect with you!

NetSquared is a two-day event of innovators in social benefit initiatives & technology to advance change around the globe.

This is all about how NGOs can use social tools to collaborate, share information and mobilize support using FOSS (like Drupal), blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasting, user-generated content, twitter, and all the other key tools and buzzwords.

Also, take a moment and give our Mashup idea a "star" (vote) and help us support the Network for Good API.

I had the joy of attending Linuxfest Northwest on April 26 in Bellingham, WA. The weather was great (just like last year), and the atmosphere relaxed and fun.

Linuxfest is a 2-day community event, run by volunteers and free to the public. It is such a cozy atmosphere, and it is easy to interact with the speakers and the exhibitors.

Zoey and I had the opportunity to co-present a session on information architecture and the Drupal development process at DrupalCon in Barcelona this past week. Ron helped us prepare conceptualize the presentation which we gave on Friday in the PickTeck room to a fairly large crowd.

There were many good questions from the audience, and some conversations that continued throughout the day.

It was noted on the first day of Drupalcon that 93% of attendees are men. After talking with a couple of
other women working with CivicActions, I decided it was worth setting up a Birds of a Feather session: The Other 7% - Women and Drupal.

At lunch time today, about 12 of us met up and it was great to meet some women in the community whose names I see regularly online like karens,webchick, add1sun, Allie Micka. We took some time to introduce ourselves and discussed how to encourage more women to join the Drupal community.

Day one at the Internet Identity Workshop, or IIW2007, began with Eugene Kim - Chairman-elect of Identity Commons ("2.0", now with rounded corners), asking those attending their first IIW to stand up - over two-thirds of the 150 or so people in the room stood up. This is a great trend - the word is getting out!