Back in the day when I was a college student, I was participating in "technology roadshow" events around the country presenting Drupal to various people. At one occasion, I presented to primary school and high school teachers and surprisingly, one of the teachers from my old high school was there, interested in the topic. We explained with my co-presenter István Palócz, that Drupal is free (as in speech and in beer), and that they can just install that for their school (as István did at that time), and use as an intranet or their public facing site.
Drupal Design Camp Prague is coming up in Prague on the 6th and 7th of November, 2010. The event is targeted at the international audience interested in Drupal design, building Drupal themes, implementing HTML 5, doing tricky Javascript, and so on. It is in some ways the European counterpart to the Drupal Design Camps from Boston.
1. It is being held in Prague. If you have never been in Prague, you should not miss it! A very charming city with towers, and towers, and towers... And of course a gorgeous castle, peaceful walking streets, and a welcoming atmosphere. And the organizers secured a very stylish venue to boot!
2. Meet with people you know from drupal.org and always wanted to chat with. Morten.dk of mothership (and of course Drupalcon Copenhagen and Awesomesauce) fame, Marek, the author of RootCandy, Bojhan, one of the leaders in Drupal usability, just to name a few people. This is an event focused on design and there is plenty of space to make a name for yourself too.
4. Three hours of free training included! My Acquia collegue, Heather James is going to hold three hours of training with Marek Sotak on the innards of the theme system, hook_theme, and altering markup. Yes, that is still in the above mentioned price. Can you say awesome?!
5. Oh, and yours truly will be there. If that helps in your (positive) decision. I'm planning to at least talk about Drupal 7 in general, and help with the trainings.
I've been involved with Drupal localization since the early times I'm with Drupal and was looking at ways to keep improving language and translation setup. Still, if you need to install Drupal 6 localized, you need to download Drupal 6 in English and when prompted in the installer, go and grab a package for your language. That has a structure resembling Drupal core itself, and if you extract it to the right directory, each translation file will fall into place. Then if you go back to install Drupal, it will go localized.
While many people learned the tricks of the trade, this is not entirely easy. Extracting packages to the same directory as Drupal core is not easy on the Mac, where this ends up by directory overwrites by default. It is a confusing experience for newcomers on various operating systems, because merging two packages by extracting to the same directory is a (clever but) foreign concept. But if you think of it, we tell you to download a file from a well known place, let Drupal know about it and then import it. Why wouldn't the installer download the file and import it for us? With the advancement of http://localize.drupal.org/, the contributed module and theme translations are also decoupled from the projects, so there is even more user effort in obtaining translations for them, while this could all be automated.
This thinking drove to the birth of the Localized Drupal install profile, which is now available in proof-of-concept form for Drupal 6 and 7. The user interface for the installation could definitely use some polish as we need to let you choose from the 70 languages available on localize.drupal.org, but honestly, localized installations should not be harder then this. Let's take it for a spin!
Installing Localized Drupal 7.x-dev
In both versions, you'll be presented with a "Localized Drupal" selection among the install profiles. You need to select this to take advantage of the automation provided. This is due to the architecture of installation profiles. A library component is planned for this profile, so that other distributions can include the code needed to start installations off in a foreign language, but for plain Drupal core installation, you'll need to choose this separate profile.
You'll need to choose your language of course, but you should not be required to do anything else beyond that. This is it.
Localized Drupal 7.x-dev just installed
While this might provide immediate installation simplicity, for contributed modules to provide similar ease of localization installation and updates, Jose Reyero is hard at work on the Localization update module. Think of this as the install and update module for localizations. The Localized Drupal install profile is moving towards including and utilizing Localization update for an overall pleasant localized software experience. As soon as you add a couple contributed modules and a theme, you'll find it much easier to manage interface localizations with Localization update compared to trying to make it work manually. Oh and it works with Drush too.
Feedback on the install profile as well as the update module and the concepts and approaches is welcome.
It is that phase of my life! I'm just turning 30 in a month, working with Drupal for 7 years and just had my third Acquia anniversary a week ago. Time to look back and evaluate how things went, all the good and bad things; even better if the wisdom can be shared with others. This was part of my thinking when I submitted the session titled "Come for the software, stay for the community" for Drupalcon Copenhagen.
Anders Høeg Nissen from Harddisken, the P1 Danish Radio show was out at Drupalcon Copenhagen to report and interview people about Drupal and just generally spread the news. P1 is part of one of the oldest and largest media empires in Denmark, its parent company was founded in 1925 as a public service organization.
As Drupal events grow around the world, more and more people find meetups and conferences closer to themselves. However, traveling to bigger events like Drupalcons can still be a financial problem for many. One of the solutions for this is couch surfing, where you could take a couch from someone who has it available in the host city for an event. Of course sleeping at an unknown person's place can be problematic.
Earlier this year, for DrupalCon San Francisco, we introduced the new concept of the Core developer summit, which reaches back to the original Drupal developer meetups allowing for planning, problem solving and coding for Drupal core developers. It makes it possible to get together in one space to plan ahead and solve problems at hand.
Ever since Drupal uses major versions for compatibility changes and minor versions for bugfix and security updates (since Drupal 5), it was most often the case that a new minor Drupal release included bugfixes and security fixes packaged into one update.
To aid you in voting for your favourite sessions at Drupalcon Copenhagen and thereby help in the selection process, I decided to gather a topical list of sessions for the coder track. While we are in constant contact with some speakers and track chairs to define which track fits their session best (so you don't end up in a session purely discussing module configuration if you intended to see hard-core coding), the current list of coder sessions is already impressive.
Last week, the organizers posted detailed descriptions of the conference tracks for Drupalcon Copenhagen. As was announced, I'm helping to chair the code and development track, which is all about core and contributed modules, APIs, new technologies, databases and data stores, web services, JavaScript wizardry, security, etc, etc. Basically whatever makes the developer geek heart's warm.
To make this Drupalcon yet another developers paradise, I was starting off by looking at the existing session proposals and initiating contact with many session submitters. In some cases, I believe site building sessions crept into the track, so we are working to straighten out some session descriptions and placements. It is generally a good idea to include a good description of yourself with your prior experience explained as well as write up a decent session description so we can get a feel for what are you planning to cover in how much detail.
Trends with the presently submitted sessions seem to be mobile development/deployment, video management, the command line, best practices for coding, extending up and coming major contributed modules (Group, Ubercart on Drupal 7, Views 3) and learning from worst practices even.
It is not at all late to grow this list with exciting sessions. There are certainly some topics missing here getting people ready for some crucial new things in Drupal 7, like the new database layer or fields in core; an update of where the drupal.org git migration is standing, and so on. I'm trying to do my best to contact expert speakers in these areas, but would be extremely open to suggestions on what are you missing from the suggested list of sessions for the track. Let me know in the comments (or via my contact form), so I can do my best to get the content you'd like to see. It's one thing that you'll be able to vote on session proposals but your requested topics are also highly valued.
