DrupalCon 2011 - London, My Experience

August 22nd – 26th August, 2011. I was fortunate enough to be part of the biggest DrupalCon so far. 1,751 Drupalistas were there, attending a total of 73 sessions, participating in code sprints, making friends and having a good time. This was my first DrupalCon and it did not disappoint. There were some great sessions by very talented presenters and I thoroughly enjoyed them. The best aspect of DrupalCon for me was the real sense of community. Drupal is, after all, as much about the community as it is about the technology.

(Group photo clicked on first day of DrupalCon, 23rd Aug 2011) 

Keynote: The first keynote was by Dries Buytaert, Drupal's founder and project lead. He took us through the findings of the State of Drupal survey, which contains some very interesting stats. 44% drupal sites are being developed in Europe, 41% in North America and remaining percent in rest of the world. One important trend is that a lot of bigger organisations are standardising on Drupal as a platform,  especially in the media industry. In other words, rather than using many different platforms (Wordpress for blogging, phpBB for forums etc), Drupal is being used as a single platform meeting many requirements. Adoption is increasing in not only media, but also finance, government, high tech and academic industries. Dries described the adoption of Drupal as a global phenomenon. And he mentioned about three projects/modules workbench (http://drupal.org/project/workbench), commerce (http://drupal.org/project/commerce) and media (http://drupal.org/project/media) they are working on. These may come as inbuilt in Drupal 8.

After the keynote presentation Mr. Dries answered only two questions in Q & A session due to scheduled other programs. One of them is mine, what are the major sites running on D7?

He has given two examples:

http://www.house.gov/ and

http://www.bristol.gov.uk/

Few sessions I’ve attended:

Why Royal Mail and UK Government are shifting towards open source and Drupal: 

This session was presented by Sam Lowe from Capgemini. Drupal is successful because it has enterprise-class capabilities and qualities. Things to be considered about drupal are internationalization, scalability & Reliability, Security & Control and Flexibility & Modularity. They are currently working on few government’s drupal projects.

http://www.postoffice.co.uk/

http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/

http://www.bristol.gov.uk/ - D7

This Code Stinks!

This session was presented by by Larry Garfield. Larry talked about 7 common types of code smells in Drupal projects, how to detect them and how to address them. Larry was an energetic and engaging presenter who really brought the topic alive. This session was funny and good.  Bounty.com – Performance and Scalability Jonathan Anthony, former CTO of Bounty, presented the adoption of Drupal for bounty.com, which is the second biggest Drupal Web site in the UK. He addressed the issues around performance and scalability. This is one of the best sessions I’ve attended. He discussed about some modules, tools, caching, and points to be considered for the improvement of website performance.

Jon’s session documents hosted on his personal website http://www.adappt.co.uk/drupalspeed.

The future of social media – A historical perspective

Tom Standage, who presented this session, is digital editor at The Economist, overseeing the magazine’s website, Economist.com, and its mobile-phone, tablet and e-reader editions. Tom has been a thought leader on social networks and contends the notion of the social network ranging from likes, favorites, forwards, attachments, and flame wars range back far beyond 200 years ago. For the last couple centuries, these kinds of networks have been suppressed by mass media. The Internet has revived these kinds of communication. He also posits that the idea of Open Source was invented several hundred years ago.

Node.js and Drupal

Howard Tyson, a senior developer in Zivtech presented this session with his colleagues. This was a very exciting session as it deals with the real time notifications in drupal. In a nutshell, it is server side Javascript using Google's super fast V8 engine. The Node.js and Drupal talk was a nice introduction to node.js and how and why to use it with Drupal. One of the presenters, Justin Randell, is using Node.js for the new version of the chat room module and this was used as a great example of why node.js is useful for Drupal.

Damn Quick Drupal: How to Make Drupal Perform and Scale Like a Rockstar!

This session is presented by Michael Cooper from Acquia. This is one of the more anticipated sessions here at DrupalCon. One of the criticisms is that Drupal doesn’t scale and that it can get very slow. To give you an idea about how big this issue is – the hall is absolutely packed. There are actually more people in here than that morning’s keynote. The main issue discussed in this session, as title suggests, is “Why are many Drupal sites so slow?” And the answer is “Cache”.

 How drupal cache works, how drupal uses database for cache, tools, terms, MySQL caching, APC module, site optimization tips and front end optimization and lot more topics discussed in this session. This was a very good technical session.

Other interesting sessions I’ve attended are:

•  Multilingual Drupal Solutions: Use Cases and Modules 
• Drupal as Base System For Your iPhone Android iPad Apps 
• Data Migration into Drupal 
• Bridging the Gap Between Desktop and Mobile Publishing with Drupal 
• Designing the Sustainable Web 
• OG7 - This Time It's On! 
• Drush Deploy 

Finally – DrupalCon was great. I’ve got lots of information and inspiration. Very active Drupal Community – every major city has a Drupal meet up.

The next DrupalCon is in Denver 2012 (March). The focus will be on collaborative design for mobile (should be amazing). It will be at the Colorado Convention Center.

The next European DrupalCon will be August 20-23, 2012 in Munich, Germany. The Westin Grand will be the venue. Built for the 1972 Olympic Games… renovated 2 years ago. Definitely I will plan for this.

You can watch the videos of some sessions here http://blip.tv/drupalcon and read the presentations here http://www.4shared.com/file/beIjTVsV/DrupalCon2011-presentations.html.