Drupalcamp

I just got back from Drupalcamp Stockholm 2011, which was an action-packed two days for me to say the least. Due to a busy schedule, I was only able to arrive last minute the night before and leave just right after my sessions on the second day. Once again I decided to do a multilingual session all over again starting from the drawing board. There are lots of new things happening plus I think I'm developing better models to explain the components involved, so I think it was a good idea to build a new presentation. I've also presented on Drupal Security on behalf of the security team, which I hope turned out to be a very informative introduction to some of the most important things to look for when securing sites.

Drupalcamp Stockholm is coming up shortly in just 3 weeks on May 6-7, 2011.

I'll be there with my collegue Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire. While Jam will tell you how to accelerate your business with Drupal Gardens and Drupal Commons, I'll provide a fresh look at Drupal multilingual site building including latest developments with the git migration and localize.drupal.org and present you great tips and a framework for thinking about Drupal security best practices.

See you there!

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 - how Drupal improves and evolves

"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.

What's up with Drupal 7?

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.

At the Hungarian community, we are organizing yearly local Drupal conferences ever since 2006 under the "Drupal Conference" and "Drupal Weekend" names. We've also just had our 22nd monthly meetup in a row. We've hosted Drupalcon Szeged 2008. Over these years, we've found that naming for all these events is tricky, and nowadays, the "Drupalcamp" name is sticky for local Drupal conferences. However István Palócz of the Hungarian community had a different dream around camps.

This year, we're gonna have the first Drupal Summer Camp in Hungary (and by the looks of Google search results maybe the first Drupal Summer Camp ever). Unfortunately (at least for my non-Hungarian speaking audience), the event is all in Hungarian (except all the jargon thrown around that is :).

The camp is on from the 23th of June to the 26th and is organized with community participation in mind. People can get experience translating interfaces and sharing their translations, look into drupal.org project maintainership aspects, work with the issue queues to get problems solved, etc. By the nature of being together for four consecutive days (with a complete dormitory floor rented for cost-concious and/or community addicted attendees), lots of hands-on experience can be gathered.

Széchenyi tér, Pécs by István Csuhai

And continuing our good tradition of organizing events with side parties (remember SZIN from Szeged?), this summer camp will take place in Pécs, which is 2010's European Capital of Culture with a vast number of options for chilling out. (Check out more photos of Pécs on Flickr).

I'm looking forward to how this model works out, and am happy to share experiences with anybody looking to make actual summer camps in the future.

Drupalcamps are growing like mushrooms around this region of Europe. While we've had one day Drupal conferences in Hungary for several years now, the Czechs joined the ranks last year and now Slovaks and Romanians will enjoy a gathering of like-minden drupalers this year. The next event coming up is Drupalcamp Bratislava on Feb 27th and 28th, 2010.

As it turns out, the honored Jakub Suchy will not be able to present at this Drupalcamp about Drupal security, so I was approached to step in. I was more than happy to participate and continue spreading awareness of security best practices. I hope to pack a good amount of tips for site maintainers and module/theme developers at the same time.

As it currently looks like, Drupalcamp Bratislava is full, but you can still sign up for the waiting list in case not all registered attendees will be able to come.

If you can't make it to Bratislava, or you are looking to attend a full-English-speaking event, Drupalcamp Romania comes up in the summer - June 5th and 6th, 2010.

I remember how skeptical I was looking at some presenters traveling around to multiple conferences with "the same" presentation a decade or so ago. Having been a course instructor for years and being a presenter for even longer, it looks completely different now. It's not that the topics you cover under the same looking umbrella can be quite different, you also find much better ways to express whatever you want to tell your audience as you experience feedback.

Of course the best would be to present your story crystal clear from the start, but despite being an enthusiastic follower of Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte, you'll undoubtedly need lots of time anyway to take a relaxed look on your story and distill to the level needed to form a great presentation. I've actually found it quite hard to refine my slides without actually showing/presenting them to an audience. The faces, questions, smiles and sometimes plain staring expressions you get tell you how you'd done and you can derive ways of how can you improve.

Two interesting examples are my slides on Drupal 7 and localize.drupal.org.