sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

I forgot to point this out before, but, in addition to my series of posts on this website, I also blogged about DrupalCon on the gnovis website.

Here it is:
Lessons from DrupalCon: Twitter, RDF, OpenID, and more...

After two very exciting days of blogging on Monday and Tuesday, everything slowed down a bit for me here on Wednesday and Thursday. There are several reasons for this, some good and some bad.

1. I'm exhausted, so I haven't been as excited to blog these last two days.
2. I've had some bad luck picking sessions, including a few that were just flat out boring and poorly done.

See! There's half of my face!

Original photo:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/themacgeek/2313361332/

First impression: Oooh... this looks a lot like the Firefox Web Developer toolbar (which I love and depend on), but for Drupal theming. That's hawt.

[Note: Requires separate download of Krumo to get the really pretty output. See Devel readme.]

Theming Notes for Drupal 6

I'm sitting in on a birds of a feather session for education. First observation: wow, there are a lot of people in here. I actually feel bad taking up a seat, because its crowded and there are definitely people at the back who can't hear. (I'm delighted to see Evergreen represented here! Woot!)

Takeaways

I'm enjoying the session on OpenID (which, I just realized, was yet another concept to come from the mind of Brad Fitzpatrick, the "Brad" who caused me to be known as "the other Brad" as an undergraduate).

Highlights from Dries Buytaert's keynote address.

• Overview of Drupal 6 - bigger community, better administration, easier theming, more secure, more scalability, easier to develop for, better localization. The State of Drupal is <strong>
• However, Drupal is still in the early adoption phase, and a transition to the mainstream is essential (and very difficult). What must happen:
  1. Redesign drupal.org
  2. Drupal 7 killer release
  3. Broad, strategic changes

These guys don't seem too organized. Twenty-five minutes in they were still just barely touching on the basics of Image, imagecache, and Imagefield modules. Zero energy, lots of clumsy half-demos of the modules, and no good guidance on top of the demos. Pretty disappointing start. People keep leaving the room.

Takeaways

• Image module: Creates image nodes, and is good for uploading and managing galleries and sites with lots of images that need to be navigated. Also has a number of helpers.

I'm on the ground in Boston. Tomorrow is the first day of my first DrupalCon. I've come here, in part, because I convinced myself that it would be a good precursor to my thesis research later in the year, as I'm going to need social access to the Drupal community in order to do my research.

In reality, though, I'm hear for two reasons, neither related to my academics.
1. My employer paid for a good chunk of the trip, after I convinced them (correctly) that my week here will more than pay for itself in increased output in the next few months.