Drupalcon News & Articles

Welcome to the April installment of our what's coming from the open source projects in the next month.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

Welcome to the March installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next month.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

Hoping to present at DrupalCon 2010? The call for presentations is now open. This year's tracks are:

• Welcome to Drupal (news, site)
• Design, Theme and Usability
• Providing Professional Drupal Services
• Configuration, Set-up & Administration
• Under the Hood
• Leveraging Drupal for Your Business

In order to submit a session proposal, you need to have already purchased your ticket to DrupalCon and log into the conference site. Session submissions must be turned in by February 15, 2010. From there:

• The public votes on sessions from February 16 through March 1
• Speakers are notified on March 5
• The final schedule is posted on March 15

The conference itself begins April 17 with the Core Developer Summit and ends on Thursday April 22 with the Code Sprint. The event is being held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco -- a fine city to keep yourselves entertained before and after the festivities.

If you are in any way a Drupal (news, site) web cms fan, then the conference you need to attend is DrupalCon. The event is held twice a year -- once in North America and once in Europe -- and brings together, developers, designers and decision makers from across the community.

Of course, the Drupalcons of '09 are now history. The most recent one was in Paris, and the good news is that there's still a chance to see what went down -- a number of the conference sessions are now available online. As a plus, Drupal consulting firm Lullabot has pulled together some tasty interviews from the show floor, including chats with project founder Dries and Drupal 7 co-maintainer Angela Byron (aka webchick).

Installing and setting up a CMS might not be the most complex thing you'll ever do, but it's enough to cost many non-technical users a few chunks of hair. At DrupalCon Paris, Acquia (news, site) announced a new service that helps people create, configure, and launch a Drupal 7 site with relative ease.

Drupal Gardens, originally labeled Acquia Gardens, has been one of the hot issues at this year's European DrupalCon in Paris. Gardens is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) version of the highly popular Drupal web content management system.

We sat down with Tom Erickson, Acquia's CEO, to discuss the Gardens project, the Drupal Theme Builder, Drupal 7 and Acquia's pathways to profitability. Here's what we learned.

Many things happened at Drupalcon DC, the annual conference for the open source web content management platform. There were sessions, BOFs, parties, shirts, keynotes, zoo tours, sandwiches and frankly we probably don't want to know what else.

But for anyone who came to Drupal (news,site) new and lost and tried to use its documentation, something truly wonderful happened too. Jose Zamora from the Knight Foundation announced that, among other things, the Drupal documentation team got the funding they had requested from the Knight Drupal Initiative (KDI).

For those of you following the DrupalCon DC twitter frenzy, this is already known. For those of you who are not, handily, many of the DrupalCon talks and workshops are now making their way to the web in video format. As of the last check, there were about 20 sessions posted.

Some highlights include:

• Building APIs That Rock
• Advanced Theming Techniques
• Drupal 7: What's Done, What's Coming, and How You Can Help

Head on over to Internet Archive, cherry pick your favorite topics and get your geek on.

2009 brings about promise, hope and most importantly change. And change comes in the fashion of newly elected leadership for the open source Web Content Management powerhouse, Drupal.

With the New Year not quite two months underway, Drupal has gone through the process of electing new leadership to spearhead their push into the future of content management. 27 applicants, some of whom were existing members reapplying, led to six new permanent members for a total of eight on the board. This brings the number of permanent Drupal members to an impressive 30.

Only weeks after Drupal invaded Germany with much success (despite some site issues), they are set to take over D.C. And with nearly two months to go before the conference, DrupalCon DC 2009 is sold out.

That’s correct. Every last one of the 1300 tickets has been sold for DrupalCon DC. Participants are set to matriculate from over 25 countries to hear a keynote from Drupal founder, Dries Buytaert. But this year’s conference, with its record breaking numbers, is set to offer a large amount of goodies.

Additional featured speakers include Larry Garfield, Josh Koenig, Addison Berry and Moshe Weitzman. General topics on the plate encompass core code, performance, design and usability, showcase and strategy, the Drupal community and site building.

Unfortunately, for those who had wanted to attend or who had New Year’s resolutions to make more quality conferences…you’re outta luck. But look for some great things down the road resulting from DrupalCon DC 2009.

Media sponsorships and press passes are still available. For information go here.

Other upcoming conferences:

• UGCX Conference - February 9-10 in San Jose, CA
• AIIM International Expo and Conference - March 30-April 2, 2009 in Philadelphia, PA
• EMC World 2009 - May 18-21, 2009 Orlando, Florida

DrupalCon starts in Boston today and this afternoon at 2.30 pm EST, Dries Buytaert and Jay Batson (with Kieran Lal) will stand before the multitude to explain exactly what Acquia will offer, when services will kick off and what it all means to the Drupal project. VP of Marketing Jeff Whatcott took the time to brief us at CMSWire.com prior to the presentation and we bring you the skinny in advance of that presentation.

Acquia’s presentation looms large over DrupalCon: the future of the company is tied in so many ways to the future of the platform itself. Acquia’s model has the potential to drive forward the Drupal project to ever greater success and to a greater degree of credibility for enterprise Web CMS users. Equally, the defection of the Grand Wizard Buytaert to the commercial realm may arouse suspicion of conflicts of interest; of putting Acquia before Drupal, of leeching dollars from bleary-eyed OSS coders toiling in their basements.

Will Jay, Dries and the blameless Kieran Lal be tarred and feathered, run on a rail and dumped in the famous harbor? We can only hope so - it’d make for a classic YouTube clip, and make for an entertaining lunch-time spectable for the Coding Marathon. Disappointingly, the presentation is unlikely to invoke such fury. Attendees will want to hear of synergies, of their aims being supported alongside Acquia’s. And they will.

Because the executive summary of the Acquia project runs like this: Acquia needs a strong Drupal community. And the community needs the firm commercial hand of Acquia to drive the project toward greater levels of commercial adoption.

For super-techies, Drupalcon is fast approaching. And now there’s a miniature event for the casual coder: Drupalshow, which takes place at the same time.

You can hit either or both Drupalcon and Drupalshow at the Citilab in Cornellà, Barcelona.

Europe is the hot spot for techies this fall. Those going to the Plone Conference in Naples this October may find yet another reason to visit the Old Continent with DrupalCon coming up. This year it takes place in Barcelona, Spain.