Drupalcon SF2010

This past week I attended my first ever Drupal conference in San Francisco. The conference was the official Drupal conference, Drupalcon, that is held bianually. The conferences are typically held once in the US and once in Europe each year. The conference was the biggest conference to date for the Drupal community with over 3000 attendees. The conference itself kept us pretty busy basically all day. We were in sessions from 8:30 to 6:30 with a lunch break in there.



A few of the things that I took away:

- Drupal 7 is going to be awesome. There are tons of new changes and improvements that should greatly improve the speed of a typical Drupal site. I guess that is what we get though with over 2 years of development on the platform. Awesome improvements in the FAPI, Token (now in core), and database layer.

- Drupal is becoming a very impressive platform and highly used. Over 1% of the sites on powered by Drupal now according to Dries Buytaert (Drupal founder). On top of that, there are a lot of high profile sites being powered by Drupal (i.e. whitehouse.gov).

- Drupal developers are some of the most sought after in the market. There are a lot of Drupal jobs out there even in the bad economy. There was a graph in the keynote by Dries Buytaert that showed how many more jobs there are for Drupal developers than for Wordpress or Joomla developers.

- I really enjoyed hearing the keynote from Tim O'Reilly (yes, that O'Reilly) on Tuesday. The internet and the cloud is a place that must be made by the strides of new innovations and developers. Very interesting presentation.

Overall, I quite enjoyed the conference and we are excited to start using D7.

On another note, San Francisco was a lot of fun. I got out a couple of times and ran along the bay. It was really pretty good weather the entire time that we were there and the area was pretty nice. Also, we ate out at several different restaurants, but probably my favorite overall was the Russian Cinderella Cafe (I mean obviously I love Russian food). There is obviously a pretty large Russian population in the area as there are several small such cafes in the area.

A big thanks out to all of those who helped out around here while I was away. I look forward to attending another Drupalcon again in the future.

Reading and More

Time sure flies. I haven't been very good at updating the blog here about what has been going on. So here is a quick glimpse of what's new and happening.

As most of you know, my wife has been going to school. That has kept her pretty busy and left me with lots of free time. Probably my new favorite hobby is to read. When we moved into our home about a year ago I started to read again and with my new Kindle I usually read a couple hours or more a day. I keep track of all my reading and books on Goodreads(post devoted to Goodreads to come).

With reading, our TV doesn't get much use. In fact, we usually turn the TV on for 2 hours a week. Typically on Sunday evening we will watch Extreme Makeover and Desparate Housewives. That is it. I don't even turn the TV on to watch sports (instead I tend to use a site like justin.tv). We don't have cable and some of our channels don't work. Whenever I see an awesome deal on TVs (Slickdeals) I have to remind myself that this would be the most pointless purchase. We just don't use the TV.

The time that I do watch TV is in the morning. I have been getting up every morning and going over to our clubhouse that has a pretty nice workout facility. I run 3 times a week and usually turn on Sportscenter while I am there. However, I have started listening to a lot of audio books now on my phone and so I don't watch a whole lot. I do turn it on though.

I went to the theater for the first time in almost a year last week to see Avatar. We saw it in 3D and it was alright. I quite enjoyed the film itself and the graphics were absolutely awesome. 3D technology, however, has a long way to go. The glasses are pretty limited and hurt my eyes. They also make it so the colors aren't as bright in the film. If I was going to see it again, I probably wouldn't go to the 3D version of it. I would definitely see it in the theater though as I am sure the film just won't be the same on DVD. My wife didn't really like the movie. I would give it 8 out of 10. And yes, it's better than Titanic in my opinion. I am laughing at the difference between those movie sites. Clearly, times have changed.

I have been trying to come up with good food ideas. With Anya going back to school, I typically get to make the food. I like to make homemade bread, lasagna, and chicken enchilada casserole. If you have a favorite recipe, leave it here. I will post a more detailed post about preparing food at some point.

Work is going good. Still using and working with Drupal. In fact, there is a group meetup coming up next Tuesday in our offices downtown, if anyone is interested.

I know this post was all over the place, but I wanted to get caught up.

Save the Date

If you've been waiting to start learning Drupal or if you haven't really thought about it, but you want to learn to build your own website quickly then you will definitely want to schedule April 21 on your calendar as busy. The Utah Drupal group is meeting on April 21 at 7 pm to complete a website marathon where we are going to build an entire site for a non-profit company, For Every Child, in about 2 hours. This is going to be an excellent exercise for brand new Drupalers up to seasoned veterans (I am far from being a seasoned Drupaler).

The other great part about this event is that it is going to be held right downtown in the Walker Center! No driving down to Orem or Provo this time! This event is sure to be one of the best meetings, if not the best meeting, of all times for the Utah Drupal group.

We are going to step through the entire process from start to finish including initial setup, what modules you want/need to get started, and how it all works. You can see the full agenda on the Utah Drupal group's website. Make sure you save the date because you don't want to miss this event.

Drupal Install

Recently I was at my parent's house and my Dad asked me about setting up Drupal. He had read my Nimfahtography post and was wondering what it took. Since I use Drupal almost everyday, I suppose I take this for granted. Here is the easiest way that I have found in setting up Drupal on Windows XP. This setup will be similar on other systems as well.

1) Setup a LAMP server (Apache, PHP, MySQL). The easiest way to do this is to grab a pre-bundled version of all of these using WAMP. Run through the install and the standard setup should be fine.

2) Create a MySQL DB. Once you have WAMP up and running, you can create a new database by visiting http://localhost/phpmyadmin. Your best option is to probably create a new user.

This will aid your setup when installing Drupal. Remember the username and password.

I usually like the above options when creating a new user in MySQL.

3) Download the lastest version of Drupal. Unzip it and put it in your root directory (if you used the WAMP defaults, then this should be C:\wamp\www) under a directory called "drupal". Just to make this clear, once you have the files there, you should see index.php inside the "drupal" directory. There will also be several other files.

4) If everything was done correctly, you should now be able to visit http://localhost/drupal/install.php to install Drupal. You will need the username and password for the MySQL db that you setup above.

5) That should be all you need. You should have a basic Drupal Install with all of the defaults.

6) From there, I would recommend a few modules. Admin Menu, SMTP, CCK, and Views. Make sure to put these modules under the following "drupal\sites\all\modules\contrib". Likely all these directories don't exist, but be sure to create them. You can install the modules at http://localhost/drupal/admin/build/modules.

7) Play around from there. I will post more later. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them here and I will try to answer them. You can also search Google for your questions.

Nimfahtography

I recently redid the Nimfahtography site for my wife's photography using Drupal. If you haven't seen the new site, check it out. If you want to see all of the technical details of how I did it and why I did it, you can see the write up here. This is just one example of something you can build in Drupal in less than a week (working a couple hours a day on it).

Drupal Tank

I attended my first Drupal Tank meeting this past Tuesday. For those of you don't know, the company I work for uses Drupal for their website, and thus I am very involved in the Drupal community. This meeting was for all of the Utah Drupal users. We had a good meeting, although there was a period where we spent way too much time deciding what we will talk about next time. All the same, some of the good resources I came away with:

• Drupal Modules, Disambiguity, Got Drupal


• CCK should be used always when possible


• One of the users showed a site he manages with Drupal

There were several other things gone over as well, and overall a very good and useful for meeting.

If you haven't heard of Drupal, you have probably used it. There are thousands of sites using Drupal, and lots of really big names using it as well (The Onion, Sony, and many more). You can find a good looking list here. Pretty impressive.