After some organization around travel and accommodation (which is still in flux to some degree), looks like there is nothing in the way for me to attend Drupalcamp Timisoara 2010 and contribute some content to the session schedule as well. Fun! This Drupalcamp is taking place in the Politehnic University of Timisoara in one month on June 5th and 6th, and is primarily English. I'm spotting others coming from as far as Belgium, Serbia, Moldova, Hungary, Austria and Germany.
The two sessions I've submitted for the schedule are the following:
"Come for the software, stay for the community" could become Drupal's new slogan (see the discussion), so what better title to use to explain what Drupal is about? In this session I intend to provide a brief overview of what Drupal is and instead of delving into technical details, focus more on how the different avenues to improve Drupal work. Systems like distributions, localizations, issue queues, the core and contributed modules repositories, the security team, automated testing and so on. How can you collaborate with the community and make money on the way?
This session is aimed at beginners or those who could use a good high level overview of different areas of Drupal.
Drupal 7 is about to be released sometime later this year. We don't yet know when, but it is steadily marching towards in its release cycle. As always, this new version of Drupal comes with all kinds of bells and whistles promising to improve our lives. What's even better is that many contributed modules are pledged to release on the day of Drupal 7's release. Automated testing is now the norm and Drupal Gardens is doing an immense deployment of beta testing on a Drupal 7 based service so no Drupal release will be as well tested as this one. Come see the improvements coming up in this release and see why the Drupal 6 maintainer is envious.
I've intended to announce this development at Drupalcon San Francisco but unfortunately the session on this was merged with a more general i18n session which was coupled by the ash cloud above Europe, so I could not go. Evidently, collaborative software translation is not a mainstream topic. On the other hand, I keep receiving requests of the general applicability of the tools Drupal.org uses about every two weeks, and this interest always amazes me. While the localization server tool used on localize.drupal.org grew out of needs of the Drupal community, the solutions were architected to be useful in a general purpose software translation environment. While the architecture was there, it was lacking useful UI controls to just run it as a generic software translation tool.
Existing non-Drupal users like the Gallery 2/3 project and the Musescore desktop app utilize custom data connector modules, which the localization server nicely supports, allowing for custom code to gather data for translation. Gallery even uses a custom Localization client port for clients to submit translations to the server, even though their software is not Drupal based. However, translating arbitrary software without writing your custom connector code was not possible earlier.
