Drupalcon

I'm fresh off the plane from an amazing experience at Drupalcon in Washington D.C. This conference had more direct impact on my day to day work than any I have been to before. The size, diversity, and talent of the community was shocking; there were 1400 Drupal geeks in attendance, and everyone I met was very good at what they did, whether it was development, theming, design, IA, or every just running a business. Intimidating in some respects, yes, but even more inspirational. The following sessions really stood out for me.

Dries's Keynote

Apparently Dries's bi-annual State of Drupal talk always follows a set pattern, but since this was my first Drupacon, I found it very interesting. Aside from being a surprisingly witty and charismatic presenter, I got a great sense of Drupal's past, present, and future. This will help a great deal in answering the question, "when should I use Drupal".

Features via Context and Spaces

This one really blew my mind. The folks at Development Seed are working on a way to bundle a set of modules and configuration settings into a single "feature" which can be deployed as a module on one or more sites. There are two modules, Context and Spaces, which enable this, along with some custom scripting and exportables. The custom scripting is used to setup node types, taxonomies, etc. Exportables are items you define once and then export to reuse like Views, Imagecache presets, etc. Imagine, for example, that you need to setup an image gallery. Most savvy Drupalers would approach this by creating a custom node type and fields using CCK, then create one or more Views, perhaps create a custom formatter, configure blocks, etc. Easier than writing a bunch of code from scratch, but a bit of a pain. And this would need to be repeated for each site. Instead, create the image gallery once, bundle it into a Feature, and distribute to all your sites!

Geo and Geocode

The team from Advantage Labs have developed a pair of tools that allow you to turn your Drupal site into a geocoding engine. Geocode is an API for, you guessed it, geocoding data from an extendable set of items such images (via exif data), trx files, a postal address, and really any single or set of points. This data can then be stored natively in MySql in a LINESTRING data type which can then be queried for distance, intersection points, etc. This is possible via the MySql spatial extensions, which are available in version 4.1 or later. The possible applications are endless, ranging from the mundane plotting of a single point on a map, to rendering a complete map of the US using views and and SVG. And there are no external dependencies - very cool!!!

Why I Hate Drupal

James Walkah, one the earliest Drupal community members and current Lullabot, gave an insightful and thoroughly entertaining presentation on Drupal's shortfalls. Some of these are well known within the community such as Drupal's usability problems for new users and questionable core modules like forums and aggreator, and others, such as code duplication through drupal_alter() maybe less so.

Conclusion

• I was finally able to connect monikers and online personas with names and faces. I suspect this will make future virtual collaboration much more effective.
• Picked up a fat stack of business cards of potential partners and collaborators.
• Learned where Drupal came from, where it is now, and where it is going (at least some the different possibilities).
• In addition to a better understanding of the Drupal big picture, I picked up some tips and tricks which will add both efficiency and innovation to my work in Drupal.

All said, that's time and money well spent!