a reportback from DrupalCon Barcelona 2007

Here are some reports from DrupalCon Barcelona!

• We had representatives of uk/nl, hungary, be, indybay & beirut imc present -- the conference as a whole had almost 450 people. of course we also met up with local barcelona techies who do use drupal -- they were just too busy to make it to drupalcon so we met up at a hacklab ;)

• The new Drupal 6, CCK, Views, FormAPI, Panels, etc. will be awesome -- but not without your help ;) as always you can help with user interface suggestions, documentation, testing, etc. etc.

• We had a small BoF session where we talked about our own experiences building indymedia drupal sites. indymedia.be for example has setup their front page with a number of views blocks, using taxonomy to put their features in different places on the front page. I suggested nodequeue module as a good replacement for this type of setup -- create a nodequeue view for each area on your frontpage.

• there was no amazing breakthrough on media asset management (images/audio/video & files in general) at our BoF or drupalcon as a whole. However, the in-development Asset Manager module looks very promising. See http://drupal.org/project/am I missed this session so maybe someone can fill us in..

• Some drupal news sites were reviewed including nyobserver.com, which has an innovative "Edition" content type which they use to build, preview and publish each edition of the front page and other section pages. This type of setup could be useful for indymedia sites that want more control over previewing and publishing their features. There was an entire session on "Drupal and the future of news" http://barcelona2007.drupalcon.org/node/423

• There were good sessions on PHP5 and object-oriented programming (incl. PDO and SimpleXML). Drupal 7 will finally be built on PHP5!

• Some new/in-development drupal sites were demoed with various features that indymedia sites may need, such as a theme that supports both LTR and RTL text. supposedly this will be even easier in Drupal 6..

• Some cool drupal site management tools were presented, for example, AutoPilot, a web-based interface where you have an internal drupal site that manages deployments/upgrades/etc. on other sites. And Drool, a python-based tool that can do all sorts of random things from the command line, even build a theme (hard to explain.. u'll have to watch the session..)

• In the off hours, it was the Festes de la Merce -- the biggest street festival of the year in barcelona ;)

• Indymedia install profile.. ok it doesn't exist yet. But we have a lot of useful tools in place:

  • hidden module provides transparent editorial process for both
    newswire and comments
  • nodequeue module can be used to separate newswire, features, etc.
  • panels and views can be used to build the various pages.
  • content translation should be taken care of by i18n module?
  • The main area to work on will be integrating something like Asset Manager or whatever is "the" solution for building content types with support for attaching and managing media files.

Going forward hopefully we can have some IRC meetings to coordinate work on install profile etc. which, at this point i suppose might be built on Drupal 6..

I don't think the next DrupalCon has been announced yet but stay tuned..

I am posting videos of the sessions I attended at http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=subject:%22drupalconbarcelona200... I didn't by any means attend all the best sessions, as there was already a webcam in the main room (I still have some more videos to upload...)