Jacob M. Roufa

So, yesterday was the first day of DrupalCon, a bi-annual conference for the Drupal content management system. Never before have there been so many Drupalers in one place. Ever. Over 800 people here at this conference, we hit the maximum registration capacity about two weeks before the conference started.

For me, this means that I get to experience the community first hand. I've not ever participated in anything like this before...

By "this" I mean Drupal of course. I also mean Open Source, a tech conference, or this large of a gathering of geeks. Take your pick, but don't take offense at my name calling. I say that with the highest praise I could backwardly compliment someone. I am astounded by the friendliness of the community and willingness to help people and gifted with the opportunity to attend something like this.

So, enough about the conference. Everyone else is blogging about it. (Almost) Anything that I might have to say has a good chance at being completely redundant... but I'll say it anyway. Yesterday, the first session I attended (Drupal Multimedia) was decent, I got some great ideas from it. Dries' State of Drupal keynote (review here, actual slides to come soon) was great and I forsee a lot of development/support/further expansion coming really soon. Second session for me was Maureen Lyons' excellent theme development tutorial. I was pleased with that but found it to be more for the beginner in theme development. A wonderful perspective nonetheless. Thanks Maureen! The third and fourth sessions I went to were utter crap... corporate showboating of sites that weren't even built on Drupal! I was pissed but it won't do me any good to complain so I won't. After the sessions I went to a couple social events and got to network a bit. Further proof that Drupal people are freakin' awesome. My hat is off to you, the people of the Drupal community.

Ok. Really. Enough about the conference now. It's wonderful and enjoyable and maybe could be better. Overall a great experience. Sorry people, but I had to get it out. :)

So what I inferred yesterday that might possibly be something useful is the idea that maybe some beginning Drupalers are getting mixed messages or are confused at some point early on in their Drupal experience. Do I use 5 or 6? What modules should I use that are tried and true if I want X, Y, and Z functionality? Are there some themes that validate cleaner than others or are more user friendly? What do I do now that I've got a Drupal install? Options to turn on that aren't default but are very useful?

I'm going to answer these questions in detail to the best of my ability in my upcoming series of posts. Keep an eye out for this starting before the end of the week!

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In other news, I am starting development on my first module - Publish Content. This will add an access control of Publish Nodetype Content that will add another layer leveraging Drupal's built in access control and moderation options. Stay tuned... I should have a rough version up hopefully before the middle of the month.