I have the distinct pleasure of attending DrupalCon 2008, which is being held in Boston, MA this year. This year’s attendance has blown out the attendance levels of previous DrupalCons, and it is a testament to the growing popularity of Drupal as a content management system.
The sessions I attended today were:
Design on the Edge of Drupal
This session was principally for designers, and talked about taking inspiration from architecture to build Drupal websites that are anything but standard. The point of the presentation was that a Drupal site does not have to look like a Drupal site, as long as users of the site have an expectation of how to navigate and get around.
Enterprise Theming in Drupal
As the engineering manager for Greenopolis, an environmentally-themed social networking site built 100% in Drupal, this session was very informative. We have thousands of nodes and users, and the purpose of this session was how to take a very large site and segment it thematically for the purposes of monetizing your audience.
Mapping Business Requirements to Drupal Modules
This session covered the basic problem of taking what the customer has asked you to build, and applying a development planning process for meeting those business goals.
Drupal Multimedia
As I continue to work on Greenopolis, one of the challenges I face is how to implement multimedia, especially in user-generated content. Performance and security are always major concerns, and this session provided a wealth of information regarding the options available to Drupal developers, as well as techniques for accomplishing some of this kind of functionality.
I will be attending DrupalCon on Tuesday and Wednesday, and post more information as the conference progresses.
