DrupalCon2008

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).