Conferences

Hello from Hungary!

Alex UA — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 04:49:00 -0500

Jody and I arrived in Hungary on Monday to attend and take part in this year's European DrupalCon, which is taking place in the lovely little city Szeged, near Hungary's southern border. We had a bumpy ride here, mostly due to the chaos that is Rome's airport, and we were a bit hampered by jet lag and a serious case of internet withdrawal on our way to Szeged. But things are going a lot better now that the conference has begun and our wireless cards are no longer starved for access. We've already drank two bars out of beer (with a lot of help from other thirsty Drupalers) and connected with a lot of friends we haven't seen in a while.

We're not only attending the conference though, we're taking part in a few ways. As I write this Jody is presenting on Node Templates in Drupal (pictured), and early Friday morning I'm scheduled to present John Snow's awesome new Embed Widgets module at the Google Summer of Code showcase. On Thursday night I am presenting a proposal (created in collaboration with Rock River Star) to the Drupal Association in an attempt to bring the next US DrupalCon (in Winter 2009) to Philadelphia.

On a logistical note: if you need to contact either Jody (until Sept 2nd) or myself (until Sept 8th) please either shoot us an e-mail or give me a call on my pre-paid Hungarian cell phone at 06 20 515 9286.

Higher Education Web Symposium at the University of Pennsylvania - July 15-16

Alex UA — Mon, 12 May 2008 08:43:05 -0500

On July 15th & 16th, the University of Pennsylvania will be holding a Higher Education Web Symposium, "the first and only web design conference for IT Professionals working in Higher Education." The conference focuses on a lot of issues that web developers and designers deal with on an everyday basis, such as usability and good css design, and features such notable speakers as CSS guru Eric Meyer and usability expert Jared Spool.

The conference will also feature two Drupal related sessions. First, fellow Philly Drupal evangelist, and head of the Philly Drupal Group, Nathan Gasser will be presenting as part of the panel Adopting Content Management Systems. Later that day Jody and I will have the privilege of evangelizing Drupal to the conference participants in our session HOWTO: A Drupal Demonstration.

If you're interested in the conference, you should register now, as space is filling up fast on what promises to be a great two-day conference!

DrupalCon Boston 2008 Wrap Up

Alex UA — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 18:01:48 -0600

Photo Credit: Matthew Saunders

Today was the last official day of DrupalCon Boston 2008, the latest official iteration of the biannual Drupal Conference (it alternates every six months between the U.S. and Europe). I had extremely high expectations for the week, and the conference still managed to exceed them. The power of bringing people together under one roof never ceases to amaze me, espescially when those people are used to collaborating online. I can't even begin to imagine what amazing new innovations and directions will emerge as a result of the last four days. I personally was involved in four initiatives:

There were two amazing media handling meetups, led by CivicActions' Arthur Foelsche, who is also the creator and maintainer of the truly awesome new family of modules that make up Media Mover and Roger Lopez who created and maintains the great Asset Module, by far the most promising file handler I've come across for Drupal. Also in attendance were Feed API's Alex Barth and Aaron Winborn who created the emfield module, which I help to maintain. I'm sure there will be a post covering the sessions in greater detail, but the biggest thing to come out of the session was that we all agreed to work together to make all of these modules work well together. We have already figured out the Feed API integration, which allows people to automatically create video, audio, and image nodes from the feeds of emfield supported providers, and Roger has already started implementing the integration of Asset and emfield, which should be done very soon (he already has two providers available, and more are coming). Tomorrow there is a big code sprint, and we're hoping to finish integrating these four amazing modules, which will be a huge step for Drupal's media handling capabilities (which happens to be Drupal's most requested improvement).