Report from Copenhagen - DrupalCon 2010

Many greetings from Copenhagen! The technical team of Point Blank is now in the DrupalCon conference, following the advances in the open source content management system Drupal, the power behind most of our interactive solutions.

Today we are on the sixth and final day of the conference, in the final code sprint aiming to deal with the few lingering critical issues of the latest version of Drupal. The whole experience is amazing - 1200 attendees, from developers and designers to business people and managers have gathered in the Bella Center convention centre, exchanging knowledge and experience, while at the same time developers' workshops have enabled the technical community to network and continue with full strength the development of the technology.

DrupalCon CPH began on Sunday August 22nd, with the Core Developer Summit where the designers of Drupal 7 informed the community about the evolution of the new version. Drupal 7 is three years in development, with special emphasis on usability and enhanced functionality. The critical issues remaining until the first beta of Drupal 7 are at the low number of 24, with the intention to have them all resolved this fall.

On Monday August 23 we had the Unconference, where in a relaxed and friendly environment we discussed the evolution of content management systems (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal) as well as what the Drupal community can learn from its "competitors". Comparisons between the different platforms confirm the dominance of Drupal in issues of flexibility, speed and extensibility, though it is still a platform with a steep learning curve. A usability comparison of Drupal and WordPress indicates that Drupal 6 falls behind, though this topic is the major focus of the upcoming version of Drupal, version 7.

Let us not forget to mention the Foobar, the bar that was occupied by the Drupal community. The Danish organisers made sure to provide 6.000 "Drupal Awesomesauce" beers, which we enjoyed chatting loosely and getting to know the Drupalists till the early morning hours.

The three following days, from Tuesday to Thursday August 24-26 hosted the majority of the sessions (more than 130) that brought together the community on six tracks (Introduction, Design, Development, Customization, Business, Services). In a future update we will post more details on the most important sessions, but for now let us comment on the three Keynotes of the three main days:

The first keynote was hosted by Dries Buytaert, instigator and creator of the Drupal platform. Dries laid out the advances of Drupal during its 10 years of existence, as well as presented his dream on the next decade. The second day hosted Rasmus Lerdorf, author of the PHP programming language that (apart from being the language Drupal is based on) is the most important programming language on the internet right now. The third day's keynote was delivered by Jeremy Keith, web developer and author who detailed the design, goals and future steps of HTML5.

After the end of the sessions, the sixth and final day of the DrupalCon hosts a dynamic code sprint, where hundreds of developers unified their forces in a marathon development sprint to finalise, test and document Drupal 7. When the day comes to en end, the new version of Drupal will be closer to release than ever before.

The next international meeting of the community will be held on March 2011 in Chicago, USA.

As for us, we will soon be departing from Copenhagen to return to Thessaloniki, full of experiences, new ideas and enthusiasm.