DrupalCon

Time is flying by. There is now only 7 weeks to go to DrupalCon San Francisco! I'm really looking forward to it I have to admit. Although I've visited the US a fair bit, I've never been to the west coast, not to mind say San Francisco. Dermot is coming over with me this time, and we're planning on taking an extra week to travel around and do some sightseeing. We're also going to visit a good friend of mine, Aimee, in LA, and then travel back up to Sacremento to visit other friends.

CivicActions is really excited to be a Silver Sponsor of DrupalCon San Francisco this year, and beyond our sponsorship, we're hoping to enrich everyone's experience with a variety of sessions proposed by our team members.  Take a few minutes to check out out this awesome lineup of session proposals.

If you don't want to browse the 2500+ photos from DrupalCon Paris on Flickr, but still want to see some photos, try these sets for the highlights instead;

• Bevan's Favorites on Flickr (215 in set) – a selection of highlights from all DrupalCon Paris photos.
• Elv's DrupalCon Paris 20009 photo set (179 set)
• Jeff Eaton's photos tagged "DrupalCon" (26 in set)
• Pedro Lozano's Drupal Paris 2009 photo set (94 in set)
• Bevan's DrupalCon Paris 2009 set (138 in set)
• Namo's DrupalCon Paris 2009 photo set (85 in set)

CivicActions is in Paris, and we are running some great sessions at DrupalCon Paris 2009;

• Day 2, Wednesday 2 September;
  • How to contribute to Drupal by Stella Power and Bevan Rudge
• Day 3, Thursday 3 September;
  • Projets Multilingues, multilingual internationlized projects too! by Doug Green and others.
  • Hosting meetups, camps, and virtual classes: building the community that builds Drupal by Stella Power and others.
• Day 4, Friday 4 September;
  • jQuery for designers and themers by Bevan Rudge.

We won't be at the job fair this year, but please hunt us down at the conference (we'll be wearing CivicActions t-shirts) if you're looking for work or want to join a first-class international and virtual team of world-changing Drupal developers. You can also contact us through the website for more info or if you want to make sure you don't miss us.

DrupalCon Paris 2009 is two and a half months away and I'm excited. My wife Marcia is coming with me, we've got our tickets, rented our flat across from Jardin Du Luxembourg, and will be there for two weeks! Vote on youtube DrupalCon for this video, and help John Albin with free admission, at 195-eu, a sweet deal.

Nearly four years ago (and 12 weeks - according to my Drupal.org account) I first came to know Drupal and the brilliant community that maintains it. Soon after, I attended my first DrupalCon "conference" in Amsterdam (October 2005) which I fondly recall though a somewhat smokey haze... At that time, DrupalCon participants didn't number more than 30 or so people in a dark room, hacking away at emerging Drupal 4.6 in all its glory! Since those early days, the depth and breadth of the Drupal community has blossomed beyond my wildest notions. Now it's commonplace to expect at least 800 attendees to fly around the world to the bi-yearly DrupalCon conference - and even see 200 at a local meetup such as San Francisco DrupalCamp last weekend! This September the Drupal community returns to Europe and descends on Paris! I personally haven't attended the last couple DrupalCon events in Brussels or Washington DC and I'm finding myself re-inspired to connect with the community. In my appreciation of the magic we build together, I just proposed a fun session/panel called How to Eat 15 Drupal Sites in 90 Minutes. This panel will be a presentation of some of the best Drupal sites the entire community has ever produced - in one wickedly fast session using a speed-geeking presentation format. I'm looking forward to seeing you in Paris - and I hope you'll take a minute to vote for the session and/or consider nominating your own site for the deck! See (and vote for) the rest of the Drupal Sessions too!

As you can see, we are quite a diverse bunch here at CivicActions, with sessions proposed for everyone from non-profits looking at using Drupal, though content managers, themers and module developers. We hope you will take a browse and vote for the ones you are interested in!

• Advanced Theming Techniques (Trevor and Bevan)
• Google Maps Mashups In <10 minutes (Bevan)
• Media Mover: File Processing and Storage for Drupal (Arthur)
• New node and taxonomy APIs in Drupal 7 (Nat)
• Drush - command line Drupal productivity (Owen)
• Quality Assurance and the Drupal Development Process (Fen and Nat)
• Intro to SimpleTest (Nat on panel)
• Paper Prototyping To Fix Usability Bugs (Bevan)
• Usability testing at the University of Baltimore (Nat)
• RarePlanet.org as a Project Management / Knowledge Management Tool (Doug & RARE staff)
• SEO & Drupal: Search Engine Optimization Tips, Tricks and Best Practices (Gregory)

CivicActions is proud to be a Silver Sponsor of the next North American DrupalCon in Washington DC, March 2009.

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.

I am co-presenting coder at DrupalCon Szeged with my co-maintainer Stella who has been co-maintaining coder for about a year. See the session write-up This presentation will be similar to the one given in Boston. But Since we have less time, and since we are co-presenting (meaning even less time for me), I'm pre-releasing parts of the presentation in this blog.