The WGBH.org Development Blog

Filed by Phil at 8:52 pm under Drupal, Drupalcon

Today was Day 1 of Drupalcon 2008 here in Boston. Pete and I are attending, representing WGBH Online. It’s being held at the big, beautiful and publicly financed Boston Convention and Exposition Center. Your tax dollars (or, at least, mine) at work!

The location of the BCEC bought back memories for me, as it’s near one of my former places of employment. Visions of many past lunch destinations danced in my head.

Needless to say, the conference is nerd central which, sadly, includes me. Laptops, cell phones and XY chromosomes as far as the eye can see (organizers say attendees are 98% men).

Here now are the highlights of Day 1, as I saw them:

• Ran into an old friend - A former boss of mine (from here) who I hadn’t seen in a few years was there. We had a nice chance to catch up during lunch.
• Free coffee - I got one free cup before it ran out.
• Free long sleeve t-shirt -It’s got a dorky logo on it, but it’s a nice shade of navy and, hell, it’s free.
• Free lunch coupon - A $10 value!
• Some interesting Drupal info - More on this below

Now, the lowlights (again, just my opinion):

• Bad free coffee - Good thing it ran out or I would’ve drank more.
• Overpriced lunch - Does it count as overpriced if I didn’t have to pay for it? I guess not. But $10 for a weak turkey sandwich, chips, pickle (it was a good pickle) and a soda seems a bit much.
• Unreliable Wi-Fi - Couldn’t get a connection that worked most of the afternoon.

As for the actual conference, it started off a little slow, for me, but there were still some good nuggets of information. To wit (whatever that means):

The first session I attended was The Road from Newbie to Ninja: Drupal Tools and Techniques. This session covered a lot of basic Drupal developer information that I was already familiar with, but also some that I wasn’t't. I’ve already used the Devel module but mainly for gathering and displaying query information for each page. There’s a bunch of functionality that I haven’t tried yet, but will, like variable inspection and editing, clearing the cache, catching outgoing emails, and error backtracing.

I also learned more about the API and Coder modules, neither of which I’ve used. The former will generate documentation for core code, so that you can have a local copy (as opposed to relying on api.drupal.org) and can also generate documentation for contributed modules. The latter is a handy collection of developer tools, like a code reviewer and support for Drupal coding standards. I’ll be checking out both of these modules.

The keynote speech by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert was interesting, as he gave us a preview of the thinking behind Drupal 7, which is due to be released next year. Dries laid out his vision for Web 3.0 and the semantic web. The crowd seemed to eat it up. I, on the other hand, was preoccupied with thoughts of lunch.

The next session was Panels 2 and Nodequeue. Node Queue is a module that I hadn’t heard of before, but sounds potentially pretty useful, as it allows one to create queues or grouping of nodes. This can be used to allow content producers to more easily manage lists of feature stories or a lead story, that sort of thing. Sounds interesting! I was also inspired to get up to speed with the Panels module, which I’ve yet to really try out.

After finding a Starbucks in the adjacent hotel and loading up on caffeine, I finished the day by attending OpenID and Identity in Drupal: the future of user.module. Very interesting, also. OpenID is something else I really need to come up to speed on.

Tomorrow: Day 2! More information, more bad coffee, more excitement!