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DrupalCon DC 2009 Wrap Up

March 10, 2009

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My Background

I attended DrupalCon DC 2009 as a member of the press, in order to report on it (this blog post), but also so that I could get a general feel for the Drupal community & their own style/take on a conference.

You see, I’ve never used Drupal, nor been involved with it at all. I’ve had a few friends who used it religiously and sang the praises of it but I never really had a situation where it seemed the right tool for the job.

So I was really looking forward to this.

Overall Impressions

I’m extremely impressed with the Drupal Community, and the conference blew me away. First of all, the conference had 1400 registered attendees, though I’m guessing that with the number of stragglers who had lost reservations (me) or last day access, that they were closer to 1500. That’s three times bigger than the best PHP conferences. It’s amazing that they got that many interested people together. At the same time, I think the reasons can be very clear.

For one thing, the conference only cost $150 to attend (actually the price varied a bit over time). At that price, especially if you were ‘in the area’ it would have been silly not to attend. I talked to the conference organizer a fair bit about this, and in the end it turns out that they had some amazing sponsors who contributed a lot of money to them to make sure that the conference costs were low. Plus the DC Convention Center costs less than the Bay Area.

But also, most PHP conference are design to appeal to specifically programmers, and maybe technical/project managers as well. Because of Drupal’s nature, it’s community is much more broad. It includes a large number of ‘configurators’, who are people who run Drupal Websites, and might make a very good living at it, though they are not developers. They simply know how to install Drupal websites, add in and configure the various modules that exist, and end up with a fully working website at the end. There is also a large number of designers, or ‘themers’ as well who work on making Drupal look pretty.

Put all of this together, and you see why it why DrupalCon got 1500 people there

The Drupal Community

The community that has been built up around Drupal is extremely friendly and welcoming. It’s very deeply routed in the ‘basement hacker’ who started with installing it once, and now years later has written some modules and continues to give to the community. Versus the PHP community which may be more considered more rooted in the ‘Computer Science‘ mindset (whether or not the members are classically trained as such). The Drupal community is therefore extremely accepting of anyone who is willing to share whatever knowledge that they have to offer. While experts are great, they especially love to hear members of their own community talk about the experiences that they have had, and to share that data.

The Conference Itself

There were a number of great sessions at this conference, I will admit that I tended to attend the ones that were not Drupal specific because otherwise they were over my head in regards to Drupal knowledge. In my opinion there are a few talks that are worth pointing out:

First of all, before the opening keynote even happened, There was a session titled “What’s New in Web Development?” given by Konstantin Käfer. This talk was a great overview of new technologies that are either in formation or early adoption phases, and had much of the room going ‘ooh ahh’. It covered topics such as HTML 5 (with the new form elements, structural markup, and the canvas), Google Gears (showing the example of running Quake in the browser), and CSS 3 (which had the designers really excited with mentions of border-radius, box-shadow, text-overflow: ellipsis, and more)

The DrupalCon Opening Keynote itself was extremely informative to Drupal-newbies like myself. As it had Dries Buytaert, the original creator of Drupal, giving a full history of Drupal and DrupalCon. They then went to show some new features coming in Drupal 7 which had the crowd clapping and cheering. It then ended with the Knight Foundation giving out grants of $485,000 to be divided to 6 different Drupal Developers in order to help further the effort. I’m not sure enough press has been given to that fact, but it’s always great when Open Source software can be supported like that.

The rest of the first day was filled with other great and entertaining sessions. A jQuery talk by Dmitri Gaskin that used a great concept, HTML pages that were running jQuery and live editable, so that he could demo what jQuery did easily in front of everyone. Also a session on “Drupal 7, What’s Done, What’s Coming, and How You Can Help” by Angie Byron (webchick) that gave great details not only on new things coming in Drupal (PDO DB layer, SQLite support, requiring PHP 5.2) but also went into depth on how Drupal is developed, the process behind it, and the idea behind the Drupal DO-ocracy. (In other words, if you want something in Drupal, DO it, and then it’s in Drupal)

The rest of the conference was no slacker with numerous excellent sessions. One’s that stand out to me include an entertaining Keynote on whether Drupal is Moral by David Weinberger. Another was a session “The Business of Open Source” that was given by Liza Kindred which discussed a number of Drupal based businesses, and how they are quite often very community (and eco) friendly. Many of them in fact have their employees spend up to 50% of their time giving back to the Open Source communities that in turn make their job possible.

The last big event of the conference, was a Keynote by Chris Messina, called “Our Identity Online“. He went into great depth about how our online social networks are becoming part of our identity, and our online services need to reflect that. Also about how the idea of having a separate ‘online’ versus ‘real life’ persona is dissapearing as they rapidly merge. People are finding that gap narrowing down, as you get all your local friends on Twitter, your coworkers on Facebook, etc. A very insightful talk, and something quite worth watching the recording of. It was augmented by the occasional outbursts from people playing a foosball table that had been setup just outside the room.

Summation

In the end, it was a spectacular conference that was put on in an inexpensive manner and yet lacked none of the rich packed schedule of sessions that one expects from a good conference. Though in this case, a schedule quite full of talks about a specific product. I definitely recommend that anyone attend future DrupalCon’s, especially if one happens to be close-by to you. The next DrupalCon has been announced for September 2009, and will be held in Paris, France. Though it’s unsure if the infamous foosball table will be making a return visit.


About Eli White

Eli is the DevZone Editor-in-Chief & Zend Community Manager. He is a speaker at many conferences and used to work for Digg.

View all posts by Eli White →

2 Responses to “DrupalCon DC 2009 Wrap Up”

  1. _____anonymous_____ Says:
    March 11, 2009 at 10:34 am

    Added to <a href="http://DrupalSightings.com">DrupalSightings.com</a&gt;

  2. Jonathanz Says:
    November 6, 2009 at 7:59 pm

    good article.
    Thanks