Do It With Drupal

Just over a week ago, I've been in New Orleans to talk about multilingual Drupal website building at the Do It With Drupal event organized by Lullabot. I've been happy to join fellow Acquians for a short time at the office and then at the Do It With Drupal seminar to represent the company. It was a fun experience to hook up with so many other people looking into using Drupal for the first time or even selling Drupal services already. It was a good mix, and was a very different target audience compared to Drupalcons. This event was more focused on the path seekers and the beginners with high detail and cross-discipline talks over four days. I've enjoyed several sessions, including Robert's session on Solr.

Unfortunately (for my enjoyment of the conference), my session was at one of the last slots, but it had a good turnout nonetheless. I've been prepared well in advance with a completely rethought line of thought (compared to previous, more developer focused events), and a slideshow done from the ground up. So despite talking about this topic before elsewhere, I needed to have a totally fresh look at the topic and present all the latest developments to date.

Since I do not have the permissions to upload my session to the website of the event, and the slides I sent in by email were not uploaded yet, I figured I'd better share them here with those eager to look into them soon. Happy holiday's reading if you are about to take time to learn more about multilingual Drupal solutions!

A little bit before Drupalcon Szeged 2008, I was invited to take part in Lullabot's event, called Do It With Drupal. Being a co-lead for Drupalcon Szeged, I was completely overwhelmed with organization stuff there, but now that it was well done, I can move over to planning for future events.

Do It With Drupal is going to be held in New Orleans, mid-December this year, and is basically a three day training event. Or as the FAQ puts it, it "is an expansion on the Lullabot workshops. Attendees can get much more in-depth and topic-specific information [compared to] the workshops. [...] Do It With Drupal is a very learning-focused event." I was invited to speak about multilanguage solutions, and I am going to again join the company of speakers such as Earl Miles, Karen Stevenson, Ryan Szrama, Moshe Weitzman, John VanDyk, just to name a few.

This event is quite a bit different to a Drupalcon, Do It With Drupal works with invited speakers whose hotel rooms and some of the travel costs are covered, and this is offset by having quite a bit higher entrance fees for attendees (starting at $795) on the other end. While Drupalcon's are characterized by anyone being able to be involved via BoFs and adhoc meetings, this event is about cherry-picking mainstream topics and closing in on them, so you get a different and very tight focus. This is the first event of this kind, and I am excited to see how this model works out. I am looking forward to be there and be involved.