I am interested in website development for quite some time and evaluated a number of open source content management systems in the past. Until I discovered Drupal. A little while ago a drupaller pointed me to this years Drupal conference in Barcelona, and I do not regret my decision to go there. During the roughly one year and a half that I am playing with Drupal I made a reasonably smooth transition from newbie to somewhere between the so called "I suck" and the "I kick ass" threshold in the drupal learning curve: I know a bit of template modifications and front page modification, understand most of taxonomy, menus and navigation. I discovered the power of CCK and views, and know how powerful they are in combination with the panels module. Time for me to cross the latter boundary, and DrupalCon Barcelona was the trigger that I needed to go further, dive into module development and hopefully contribute here and there.

So I like to share some of my thoughts about a few of the talks.

  • The first session that I attended was about the New York Observer web site. An interesting demonstration of how Drupal can be used to develop powerful newspaper sites with a great layout and clear user interface.
  • I followed the session on using Drupal with external data sources with great interest. Ken Rickard discussed how Drupal natively supports multiple database connections. He demonstrated this with a little module. I am loudly thinking about ways to build some kind of views on top of some of our molecular databases. He further showed how Drupal can interface with external xml sources and with Yahoo pipes. I think these are great opportunities for new drupal application niches.
  • Panels 2.0 is supercool, in particular for non-designers like me. It now supports arguments, information from third party modules and special relationships like nodereference, book relations and taxonomy. Earl Miles demonstrated some fabulous new features and showed some highly entertaining stuff, such as the minipanels that you can try out here.
  • An eye opener was the Social networks talk by Stéphane Corlosquet, which made a dive into the semantic web. The way we infer relationships between documents on the web based on links will drastically change once we are able to define the "meaning" of these relationships. Stéphane discussed how these meanings are defined by specific vocabularies in RDF files. Interlinking of multiple web communities using standards like SIOC (semantically Interlinked Communities), combined with standards like open ID (now supported by Drupal) is probably the solution to the ever growing number of (walled) communities / islands on the web, and give the power to control personal data back to the user. A great introduction to a field in which Drupal may have a strong future.
  • Drupal for educators and academics gave a great overview of applications and platforms for the academic world. I do believe there are some major requirements in this niche for which Drupal is perfectly suited. I experimented with quite a few of these and will maybe post some of my experiences in the future.
  • Peter Van Dijck talked about information architecture and internationalization. There are more differences between different world regions than the language, and it is important to take them into account when organizing information for a global audience. Good to realize for example that even categories should generally not be globally identical.
  • Dries gave his talk about "the state of drupal", which was largely based on a survey among drupal users. He touched some important issues such as the fact that there is a need to put additional energy in marketing and improving usability.

So far my short wrap-up. There were many more great talks but there are other sources to read about them.