Something is Drupally in the State of Denmark

Now that I am fully recovered from jet lag, I am able to reflect on how enjoyable the recent Copenhagen DrupalCon was. Before going any further, however, I have to gratefully acknowledge the team of Drupalers who organized the conference and related activities. They all did an amazing job ensuring that the event was a great success. Thank you!

It seems that while many technology conferences are suffering a bit with their attendance, there is no stopping the Drupal community. With almost 1200 attendees, the Copenhagen conference was the most well-attended European DrupalCon yet, likely due in no small part to the promise of a custom-brewed beer and our own bar to drink it in. Suffice it to say that Drupalers work and play hard.

This hard work has paid off quite a bit, as enterprise-level interest in Drupal seems to be at a high. Many prominent publishers, government agencies, and large, global consulting firms are using and promoting Drupal, and the future is bright. In his DrupalCon keynote, Dries Buytaert, Drupal's founding developer, reiterated his vision of a future with varied offerings in the form of Drupal distributions that will better compete in vertical markets, and it seems that projects like Open Atrium and Drupal Commons have made great strides in fulfilling that potential. Open Atrium has led by example with their polished, customizable "intranet in a box" distribution, and projects like Drupal Commons, Acquia's community-building solution, and Phase2 Technology's Open Publish platform are clearly following suit, making quite an impact at DrupalCon. For probably obvious reasons, I was particularly intrigued by the out-of-the-box usability improvements and inventive features in the newest version of OpenPublish, and I am anxious both to test drive it myself, and to see the future development of this project.

Drupal is also behind quite a few interesting software as a service offerings that could do wonders for Drupal adoption on both small and large scales. Since their launches earlier this year, hosted Drupal platforms Buzzr.com and DrupalGardens have already made lots of fans for their ease of use and nifty user experience, and have the potential to bring Drupal to the masses, much like Wordpress.com has spread the use of WordPress. Both Buzzr.com and DrupalGardens are positioned to assist small to medium sites get up and running very quickly, and I expect to see great things from both. DrupalCon provided an opportunity for the soon-to-launch Pantheon service to generate quite a bit of interest, and Pantheon team members Josh Koenig and David Strauss had DrupalCon all a twitter during their presentation on the technologies behind Pantheon, which will launch very soon, and promises to ease Drupal deployment in the cloud, while ensuring a stable, secure and scalable foundation.

It's an exciting time to be a Drupaler, and I encourage everyone to check out some videos from DrupalCon to see what all the excitement is about. Most of the videos can be found at the Internet Archive, and the Drupalcon schedule is at http://cph2010.drupal.org/sessions/timetable for reference. Additionally, there are a few videos which will be useful to Drupalers and non-Drupalers alike. Enjoy!

the command line is your friend - Addison Berry

git fundamentals - Sam Boyer and Randy Fay

The Design of HTML5 - Jeremy Keith keynote

I would also recommend taking a look at varnish http cache server - by poul-henning kamp if the video becomes available. And finally, just for fun, here's a clip from Dries Buytaert's keynote. I recommend jumping in around 4:30. :)