Drupalcon

I'm a bit late in linking to a podcast interview that I had the pleasure of being on recently.

DrupalEasy, an organization focused on training and consulting around making Drupal easier to use, runs a podcast interviewing various folks in the Drupal community. My interview was about my work on Drupal, my business in general, Cocoa desktop and iPhone work, my Drupalcon presentation, my career history (in brief), and a lot more.

I had a great time being interviewed by Ryan and I hope you'll take a listen!

I'm currently at the biannual Drupal worldwide conference, Drupalcon, in Washington, DC. I hope to write more later about the amazing people and innovative technologies that I'm seeing here this week, but for now I just wanted to post an entry for folks arriving here looking for information about the talk I gave yesterday: Beyond The Web: Drupal Meets The Desktop (And Mobile).

I will be posting more information later on the resources & projects mentioned in the talk, but for now, watch this page for that info as I'm able to post it. I covered a number of technologies that can connect Drupal websites to desktop and mobile applications, be they in Cocoa (for the Mac & iPhone) or any other language that you might want to integrate with a PHP-based Drupal site.

Hope to see you at Drupalcon!

I wanted to take a moment to point out two items of mention related to Drupal from the past week.

First, congratulations to the United Nations World Food Programme, which recently relaunched their website in Drupal! Congratulations as well to both Phase2 Technology and Workshop friend Development Seed for the outstanding job on this beautiful and functional website.

WFP's new Drupal-based website

I had the privilege of working with the WFP a few years ago in preparation for Walk the World 2005. The website for that project was one of the very first Drupal sites that I programmed on (having administered a few before that). I'm glad to see that Drupal has made inroads into the WFP's structure all the way to the top since then, allowing them to maintain this great new website and further their humanitarian efforts around the world.

The other bit of info is about Drupalcon this March in Washington, DC. Today, the final ticket was sold, and the attendee count will be 1,300 people! The tentative session list, based on submitted proposals, is now out. I hope to be involved in presenting two sessions, my own proposed Beyond The Web: Drupal Meets The Desktop (And Mobile), which is likely to become a panel presentation on the topic, and Miglius Alaburda's Introducing a new File Framework, which is likely to become a joint session on file handling in Drupal. I also hope to be releasing a new Drupal module in the next week or two in these areas, so stay tuned.

The amount of momentum around Drupal right now is pretty astounding!

Nothing like a vacation followed immediately by a European software conference to get things off track! I'm a little behind, but I'm starting to catch up and I wanted to post about a number of things, the first of which is Drupal.

I was fortunate enough to travel to Barcelona last week for DrupalCon, pretty much the ground zero for all things Drupal (more on my work with Drupal here). With over 400 people in attendance, the growth in the community has been tremendous and after three years working with the software myself, it's really inspiring to see both others picking it up as well as the future directions in which things are headed.

I attended a number of excellent panels (which I hope to blog about soon) including topics such as multilingual websites, advanced JavaScript, asset management, publishing workflows, database abstraction, new things in PHP 5, feed aggregation, and the scaling of the Drupal website, itself running Drupal (of course).

I had the pleasure of traveling and working with the team behind the project featured in this panel -- essentially, open source software in support of humanitarian and stabilization operations around the world -- as well as seeing Workshop friends and fellow DC residents Development Seed as they proceeded to tear up the conference with a multitude of outstanding sessions highlighting their amazing work. Read more about Development Seed's work on their blog and you might even see a cameo by yours truly!

Lastly, I was inspired to participate in Friday's Lightning Talks with a quick presentation of the Boost module, which I now co-maintain and have talked about previously. Will White from Development Seed was kind enough to capture a couple photos of me presenting the Environmental Working Group site. You can check out more of Will's DrupalCon pics here.

I'm looking forward to next year -- and if you're interested in Drupal, leave a comment and I may be able to point you in the right direction, be you a coder, site maintainer, or just a curious tinkerer!