DrupalCamp Cologne will take place on January 17th and 18th, 2009, in Cologne, Germany. Here are pictures of the organization team (known internally as OrgaNicer - say it with a German accent and you’ll get the joke) planning the sessions. We’ve got around 50 sessions and 4 rooms. There are also 12 rooms for groups of 10 people that can be used for spontaneous sessions, lightning talks, BoFs etc.
What are you doing on January 17th and 18th? Hopefully you'll be coming to DrupalCamp Cologne and hanging out with Drupallers from all over the world! This is the first ever Drupal-specific camp or conference that Germany has ever seen, so it will be quite an event.
Dries Buytaert (Drupal founder and project lead, Acquia co-founder and CTO, Mollom co-founder) will be there to talk about Drupal and his latest projects. I'll be holding an Acquia Q&A session, as well as demonstrating the latest ApacheSolr improvements. Jeffrey McGuire (Acquia's documentation lead) will be there as well, ready to help you with your Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 upgrade problems, including those pesky Views 1 to Views 2 conversions. Also not to miss is the Drupal.org Upgrade and Redesign Hackathon - your chance to get your hands dirty with the big Drupal.org redesign project.
On January 19 and 20, 2009, in Cologne Germany, Commerce Guys and AF83 will be joining forces to offer Drupal Ubercart training (registration link). Drupal is a leading web content management system, and Ubercart is a full e-Commerce solution and shopping cart that is built on top of Drupal.
In the training you will learn how to build a web site for a rock band that features blogs, audio and video content, tour dates and an event calendar, fan forums, and an Ubercart-based store where fans can buy t-shirts and music downloads. The website will be based on Acquia Drupal so you will also get a glimpse into the Acquia Network and learn about the advantages of building your site with the support of Acquia. Everybody who attends will get a free Acquia Network subscription and some Acquia schwag.
The training takes place on the two days following DrupalCamp Cologne and will be held in the same venue as DrupalCamp. If you are already planning on attending DrupalCamp Cologne and want to learn even more, this is a great opportunity. If you weren't sure about making the trip for DrupalCamp Cologne, now you can get even more Drupal and Ubercart action out of your travels.
Commerce Guys are leading Ubercart specialists and were recently selected to build and run the official Drupal store on drupal.org. AF83 are Drupal site-building experts with much experience in providing Drupal training.
What are you doing on January 17th and 18th? Hopefully you'll be coming to DrupalCamp Cologne and hanging out with Drupallers from all over the world! This is the first ever Drupal-specific camp or conference that Germany has ever seen, so it will be quite an event.
Dries Buytaert (Drupal founder and project lead, Acquia co-founder and CTO, Mollom co-founder) will be there to talk about Drupal and his latest projects. I'll be holding an Acquia Q&A session, as well as demonstrating the latest ApacheSolr improvements. Jeffrey McGuire (Acquia's documentation lead) will be there as well, ready to help you with your Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 upgrade problems, including those pesky Views 1 to Views 2 conversions. Also not to miss is the Drupal.org Upgrade and Redesign Hackathon - your chance to get your hands dirty with the big Drupal.org redesign project.
Why should you come?
DrupalCamp Cologne will feature a wide range of sessions, brainstorms, and code sprints in German and English. It will be a rich mix of conference style presentations, ad-hoc groups, Bird-of-a-Feather (BoF) style discussions, and social networking.
If you are looking to hire Drupal developers, this is the right venue to be at. If you are looking for advice on how to build a Drupal site, this is the right venue to be at. If you've just heard about Drupal and want to learn more about what it is and what it can do, this is the right place for you.
Furthermore, Cologne is a great city to hang out and have fun. You'll be able to sample some of the local Kölsch while discussing the finer points of server infrastructure and Drupal deployment with superstars such as Gerhard Killesreiter (Drupal 4.7 core maintainer, Drupal Association Board Member, Drupal.org infrastructure lead).
Will it be fun?
Heck yeah! Morten, King of Denmark, is coming all the way from Copenhagen - you know it's going to be fun. Plus there will be a number of cool door prizes and other goodies for you to take home as mementos (T-Shirts, books, stickers and other schwag).
Where do I sign up?
On the DrupalCamp.de website. It's in German. If that's an obstacle just send a message using the DrupalCamp.de contact form. The DrupalCamp.de team will get you hooked up. There will be a €20 fee (to cover both days) that will be collected on the day of the camp. Students get a discount.
Where will the Camp take place?
We are receiving generous sponsorship from the GFU Cyrus AG who is providing excellent space for us. Since they are a technical training center they know what a group like ours needs. More details about the location can be found on the DrupalCamp.de site. Here's a direct link to the Google map. The red dot is the venue and the blue dots are hotels.
Presenters still needed
Do you have something cool that you'd like to show to your fellow Drupalheads? Sign up to do a presentation (you'll need to log in). You can also propose BoF sessions, code sprints or round-table discussions. There will also be room for spontaneous working groups and meetings on the days of the events.
Our sponsors
This DrupalCamp is only possible because of generous sponsorship from companies and groups dedicated to promoting open source software. We are still looking for sponsors. If you would be interested in contributing to the success of this DrupalCamp, please contact the organizers via the contact form.
I don't speak German. Should I still come?
Heck yeah! I'll talk to you ;-) There will be presentations in both English and German, and there will be plenty of people there who will be happy to help you out if you run into trouble deciding which door, "Frauen" or "Herren", is the right one for you to use.
There has been a lot of hand waving about the semantic web, RDF, and Drupal. This is good, and it is important for there to be excitement about the possibilities that this opens to us. Now the first concrete plans are being laid and the first patches are being written and evaluated. If you’ve ever wondered about this semantic web business, or if you thought microformats were a good idea, or if you’ve been secretly (or publicly) coding your own RDF tools for Drupal you’ll want to be a part of this conversation.
A lot of hard issues will have to be solved. XHTML document designers (ie web application builders and Drupal developers) are not accustomed to working with XML namespaces. The inclusion of RDFa is wholly dependent on the theme layer so it is important to build tools that handle this without further burdening Drupal themers. The basic data storage mechanisms in Drupal are all based on relational databases, not RDF, thus it will fall on tool builders and module authors to ascribe semantic meaning to data and to actively use the new tools to generate RDFa markup.
Furthermore, the addition of RDFa and supporting technologies like GRDDL introduce very new and somewhat complex workflows that greatly depart from the server->browser lifecycle of our current XHTML documents. Drupallers will have to learn about this in order to understand and utilize the potential benefits that RDFa can bring.
Here are some places to watch and participate in the coming months as Drupal makes this very important transition:
It's nice to see hard work, persistence, team effort, and collaboration pay off. This year three Packt Publishing awards went to Drupal. First, Earl Miles (merlinofchaos, father of Views) was honored as Most Valued Person for the Drupal project, a title he sure has earned. Then, on Wednesday, Packt announced that Drupal had won the award for Best PHP Based Open Source CMS. This comes with a $2,000 prize that the Drupal Association will be sure to put to good use. Now, today, Drupallers can smile happy because Drupal also won the Best Overall Open Source CMS category, along with $5,000 in prize money. Wow! Two years in a row for that one.
See below for the code to put a Digg widget (for the Drupal.org story) on your site:
On December 12, 2008, I'll be in New Orleans to talk about the exciting world of Drupal Search. In a first-of-its-kind event, the Lullabots have organized a "large-scale, 3-day learning event" that will bring together some of Drupal's most sought after speakers, as well as a number of other prominent internet personalities and luminaries. I'm looking forward to meeting some of the speakers who aren't necessarily known as Drupal rockstars (meaning they did something else to get famous):
- Chris Pirillo (Gnomedex, Lockergnome.com)
- Tara Hunt (Citizen Agency, HorsePigCow)
- Brian Oberkirch (Brianoberkirch.com)
- Lane Becker (GetSatisfaction.com)
- Heather Champ (Director of Community at Flickr)
My session will focus on practical solutions for common problems encountered when building Drupal sites. I'll look at core search as well as some of the other solutions available (like the ApacheSolr module), and explain why we can expect more (and get it!) from Drupal search. If you're going to be there, and have any requests or questions, I'd love to hear those as well.
Many thanks to my employer, Acquia, for being a sponsor of Do it with Drupal, and for sending me and my colleague Gábor Hojtsy as speakers.
Drupal people: get some coffee, grab a seat, log out of IRC, and find 16 minutes to watch this video. Wordpress is leading the way in terms of posting and administering content, and we'd better be taking notes. The bits that I'm particularly jonesing over are the drag and drop widgets, the content administration dashboard, and the instant installation of plugins and themes.
My favorite quote from the video:
I think that people ... downloading things to their computer and uploading them to a server is completely worthless. You're a fake bottleneck.
Drupalcon Szeged was a huge success. This shot gives a feel for the room during Dries' keynote.
I've been having fun making panorama shots lately. I use a program called Calico to stitch several photos together. Check out the full size version for more detail.
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