Note: Most (all) of the sessions now have the videos up for you to watch, w00t! 

Day 3

I started the day off with probably one of my favorite sessions, Why I Hate Drupal done by one James Walker. The title of this session pretty much says it all... this was a straight up hour long constructive bash fest on Drupal. Walkah bashed everything from the name, icon, drupal_alter, and how there are really only 2 or 3 people who have commit access to Drupal with a "who you know" system. He touched on how Drupal is more of a do-ocracy rather than it's clam as a merictocracy. Besides not being afraid to point out the issues, James is a great and entertaining speaker.

Next and in the same room (which ment I didn't loose my power, w00t!) was Promiscuous Drupal: Building Your Site With Web APIs by Jeff Eaton. This was another good broad overview talk about how Eaton suggests we use Drupal. I really hooked into his idea of "taking it up a notch" by encouraging users to externalize as much of your sites services as possible. We should be using Amazon to provide existing product information, using your YouTube/Vimeo/Flickr/Picasa accounts to handle media, delicious for bookmarks, and integration with sites that do better social networking. There are so many great modules out there to tie all of these services together that unless you have to internalize everything (proprietary content/crazy license restrictions) or trying to compete, let those who are doing it (and most likely better at it) handle all the work. He mentioned a pretty cool site you should check out, Programable Web.

For the next couple hours I focused on media and Drupal. First up was Drupal Multimedia presented by Aaron Winborn. Starting with existing modules that are already out there like the audio, video, and image modules to making custom playlists with XSPF Playlist, moving all kinds of media around with Media Mover, and CCK emfield. This is a highly recommended session to check out for a quick overview of what media options are out there with Drupal. Next was the Media Mover: File Processing and Storage session by Arthur. This shit is cool! We are using media mover over on Urbana Public Television (UPTV)'s new web based media submission system brought over from the Open Media Project. This module does exactly as expected except it doesn't must move files around it will do file conversions as well. It will convert Microsoft Word doc files to Adobe pdf's and using ffmpeg can convert nearly any video, image, and audio file into any format you need.

Following my media binge was Friday's Keynote speaker, Chris Messina's presenting on Our Online Identity. Having a lot of similar idea's as Chris bouncing around in my head more and more lately, I got pretty amp'd during this. He was full of cool little quotes that I am not going to get right, but I am going to share with you anyway:

"Technology is becoming humanized"

"Humans are becoming technologized"

"We are becoming cyborganic"

"Twitter is a form of social grooming"

"We are social creatures who aren't actually addicted to technology but rather to our friends and technology is helping us with that additction" This is a butchered quote of Chris quoting someone else :)

"We have had 8 years of technical opacity in government. It's time for a changing goverment that is transparent and modifiable... an open source government."

"Work on stuff that matters. Work on something that matters to you more than money. Create more value than you capture. Take the long view."

For the rest of the day I bounced around to various Birds of Feather (BoF) meetings that were going on. I ended up getting pretty stoked to work on Drupal's current missing Display Name issue. This is a pretty trivial fix currently under a bit of contention within the community regarding it's implementation. I ended up hooking up with a small group of 5 or 6 led by Dave Cohen who's doing the work on the Facebook Integration module. With Facebook (as well as other social services) and outside authentication systems needing this feature Dave has already started working on some patches to Drupal core for us to review.

Oh yeah, it was my birthday today too, w00t! After the conference ended a group of us (Josh, Lindsay, Lori, John, and I) all headed back to Sigfried and Galia's house at Takoma Park (where I had been crashing) for some awesome Burmesee food. Then Brandon (who I hadn't noticed was missing on our trip back) rolled from the kitchen with this amazing dark chocolate cake with raseberry filling from Cake Love, various delicious cupcakes, and a strawberry rhubarb pie (my favorite pie!) with everyone singing happy birthday. Following more wine and desert Josh, Lindsay, and I headed back downtown to kick it with the Drupalistas at the Lullabot after party. Although full of awesome people from the conference, this place was pretty bland and sports barish so we jetted and ended up in Chinatown kicking in the steps of this huge old building talking the night away. It was a great way to end an awesome day! 

Day 4

This whole day was code sprints (bunch of a code hackers cramped into the same room coding all day) and no sessions. I was able to briefly meet up with Dave Cohen again and found out that if we are able to get a good code patch up soon it's likely it could get committed into Drupal 7x! For lunch Brandon, John, and I met up with Lori, Sigfried, and Solomon (see earlier day 2 entry regarding the kids ass I wiped!) at Ben's Chili Bowl (that place Obama visited in January) on U-Street. This place is dangeroulsy good... you should check it out. After, we all headed back to Sigfried's and Brandon and I did some more coding on on the back deck (it was like 60 some degrees!) before heading back home. 

It was definetly one of the more awesome conferences I have been too. It was not only fun as hell but the knowlege gained in such a short amount of time was crazy. Thanks to everyone I traveled with and to all those new faces I met!

Some links to check out:
http://drupal.org/project/activity
http://drupal.org/project/daylife
http://drupal.org/project/media_mover
http://groups.drupal.org/node/2424
http://youdrup.com/
http://drupal.org/project/xspf_playlist
http://drupal.org/project/flag
http://drupal.org/project/Kaltura
http://groups.drupal.org/open-media-project
http://groups.drupal.org/media
http://www.tubemogul.com/
http://drupal.org/project/media_player
http://drupal.org/node/188734
http://drupal.org/node/102679
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrys/3333486097/in/photostream
 

You know it's going to be a good day when while you are enjoying a quiet breakfast a cool 3 year old says  "I have to poopie". Being the only other adult up at 6am, a couple minutes later I had cleaned my first rug rat butt, w00t! This definetly set the day. By the time the sheets took me over I had devored my first bit of ethiopian cuisine, kicked it in a basement with free beer and vegan delights,  watched a girl cry, met some awesome people, played some foosball, rocked an awesome conference, and of course cleaned a baby butt!

On to the good stuff.  On Day 2 I really focused on deployment and development.  Since I am already in Day 3 the rest is going to just be a list of links either new to me or that you should know about.

http://cwgordon.com/how-to-create-a-wiki-with-drupal
http://www.virtualbox.org/
http://drupal.org/node/102679
http://drupal.org/node/235457
http://drupal.org/project/DBscripts
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dcst4gnn_44g9pv9jgr
http://drupal.org/node/145164
http://blog.sternthal.org/2008/12/19/using-ant-to-deploy-drupal/
http://drupal.org/project/sniff
http://drupal.org/project/deploy
http://drupal.org/project/aws
http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr
http://groups.drupal.org/aegir/0.1
http://www.capify.org/
http://drupal.org/project/drupalforfirebug
http://www.trellon.com/content/blog/interface-module-part-one

Sitting here at a friends house kicking it after getting back from post day 1 social event for DrupalCon D.C. and thinking "wow!" today was rocking. I caught up with some old friends, met a whole bunch of new friends, and definitely had a full day of geekery.

Lots of highlights but here are some of the notable ones:
Sacha Chua totally enlighted me on how to accent my slacker ability in the session Totally Rocking Your Drupal Environment.  Not only are her and the audiences suggestions going to make me even lazier, they might make actually make a competent developer of me as well. You should definetely check out AEgir for managing large number of Drupal clients and Drupal for Firebug (two new things to me)!

Next up was Handling Asynchronous Data with Drupal w/Josh Koenig where he "demolished"  things showing us how to "escape the page paradigm".  Some modules to check out here are the AJAX, AJAX Submit, Javascript Tools, and editablefields.  On top of modules there was a nice quick little snippets to help get you started creating your own DOM handlers which you can find by checking out Josh's post @ Chapter Three's site.

Then we had the amp'd talk Drupal 7: What's Done, What's Coming, and How You Can Help w/Angie Byron.  I have seen some video's with Angie and man is she just as entertaining in person talking about how Drupal is a "do-ocracy", the new features coming up, and how I need to get all my sites upgraded to Drupal 6 by first quarter 2010 :)

After that I headed over to Business Analytics with Views w/Frank Febbraro and Irakli Nadareishvili.  This was a quick demo of the new Views Group By and Charts and Graphs modules.

Finally, I got new schooled by a 13 year old presenter and old schooled by a 40 year old in Install Profiles w/Dmitri Gaskin and Hagen Graf.

Some other modules there was talk about you might find interesting:
http://drupal.org/project/trash
http://drupal.org/project/outline_designer
http://drupal.org/project/context
http://drupal.org/project/custompage
http://drupal.org/project/slot_machine
http://drupal.org/project/simpletest
http://drupal.org/project/install_profile_api
http://drupal.org/project/live_update
http://drupal.org/project/ctools
http://drupal.org/project/deadwood

More tomorrow about day 2 I promise... time for sleep :)
 

At OJC (my day job) we embraced Drupal as our primary CMS of choice (or at least mine) going on a couple years ago. Locally, the University of Illinois and its various campuses and schools have started to do the same. With OJC being a familiar name around the school, my colleague Brandon Bowersox put together a nice list local centric Why Drupal? and of course why OJC :)

Units across campus are using Drupal:

· WILL AM/FM/TV, including PrairieFire http://will.illinois.edu/prairiefire

· College of Education, including IEP Quality http://iepq.ed.uiuc.edu/

· College of ACES, including http://students.aces.uiuc.edu/ http://global.aces.uiuc.edu/ and http://advancement.aces.uiuc.edu/

· Center for Global Studies, new website by OJC underway powered by Drupal

· UIC Institute for Health Research and Policy http://www.ihrp.uic.edu/

· Center for Prevention Research and Development AIMS http://www.aims.uiuc.edu/, existing design with Drupal implementation by OJC

· Department of Kinesiology, IPACS https://www.kines.uiuc.edu/IPACS/, design by Creative Services and Drupal custom modules and implementation by OJC

· Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, new website by OJC underway powered by Drupal

· CITES Ed Tech

· AITS (used for about 3 sites already with an RFP process with OBFS to select a tool for 30+ sites)

Two of the Four ‘Best of the Web 2008’ award winners at the University of Illinois 9th Annual Webmasters Forum were powered by Drupal. A 1-day “Drupal Boot Camp” in Spring 2008 hosted by the University of Illinois with OJC as a key presenter got over 80 attendees from units across the University.

Units across campus are migrating to Drupal because it is technical robust while also user-friendly for content updaters. Units with varying levels of technical sophistication are finding that contracting for support and maintenance from OJC allows them to have as much or as little support as they need to be successful with Drupal. Some departments such as UIC IHRP have internal staff who have learned Drupal and perform sophisticated enhancements on their own, while only occasssionally relying on OJC to ask questions or advice. Other units such as CPRD AIMS have no technical staff in-house who manage Drupal and rely fully on OJC to support the tool and keep Drupal running smoothly for non-technical content authors.

Drupal provides the full set of features that make it a robust and user-friendly CMS:

· In-site editing for non-technical content authors, who can simply click through the website itself and click the Edit tab to make changes

· Search-engine friendly and user-friendly URLs such as http://www.ihrp.uic.edu/researcher/susan-j-curry-phd without the need for numerical IDs (?contentId=8765.432 or obfshome.cfm?level=1&path=accounts&xmldata=accounts1), file extensions (.aspx or .shtml) , or escape sequences (latest%20news.php)

· Hundreds of robust add-on modules and a solid, secure open source foundation similar to other successful open source tools such as Linux or Apache.