DrupalCon

Session submissions are open for DrupalCon London, in case you hadn't heard. But what should we be talking about?

Once again, I'm going to solicit ideas from the community (that means you).

Naturally my main work these days is the Web Services and Context Core Initiative for Drupal 8. However, that probably won't be main-track session material by London, and I am already slated to present an update on that front as part of London's Core Conversations track.

In recent years, I've been developing an ongoing "Architecture Series" at DrupalCons. My intent is to help Drupalers around the world raise the bar in terms of software architecture and design. So far, I've covered:

I meant to post these to groups.drupal.org, but the file size limit over there won't let me. Attached are the slides from my "Drupal: The Next Generation" presentation at DrupalCon Copenhagen. A more complete summary is available over in the working group.

I'm still not aware of any video available, sadly. Supposedly that should be up eventually.

One Con down, one more to go. DrupalCon Copenhagen is already taking session proposals. Yoinks!

I've spoken at several DrupalCons by now. It's always an interesting question deciding what to submit for a session, knowing that only some will get picked but not knowing if I'm going to end up doing just one session I wasn't really interested in or 4 that I have to prepare (yoinks!). So this time I'm going to do something different. I'm going to ask you.

Well, it's been long enough after DrupalCon for me to survive another conference and a business trip, so I finally have time to reflect.

Oy!

(See below for slides from my sessions.)

Ah, the spring. So many things happen in the spring. Snow melts. Flowers bloom. The Easter Bunny sells cheap chocolate. People set their clocks ahead in an attempt to confuse their pets. It is also the start of conference season in the northern hemisphere, which means flying about the country talking about Drupal. This year is especially busy, with 10 presentations in 4 cities so far. (Possibly more to come.)

Here's where you'll be able to stalk Crell in the coming weeks:

DrupalCon Paris 2009 is now in the past. As usual there was last minute chaos, lots of people running around behind the scenes going insane, people hugging friends they see once every six months, presentations ranging from super-technical to light and fluffy, general geekery, and of course copious amounts of beer. (This time we didn't drink out any of the bars, but then it is Paris.)

But there was something else, too, that I saw as an undercurrent of much of the conference: Maturity. Not the "acting like boring, responsible adults instead of having fun in Paris" kind of maturity (may that never happen), but the "thinking about more than just being code ninjas" kind of maturity. Drupal, as a whole, is growing up.

Just when you thought it was safe to go to DrupalCon, here comes... schedule change!

It turns out there was a late cancellation, so the DrupalCon Paris team has asked me to fill in with Drupal Design Patterns on Wednesday afternoon.

If you write modules for Drupal, you want to be there. Although we'll be approaching the subject from a slightly theoretical slant, the main thrust will be how to write code that other developers will understand quickly, that they'll be able to extend, and how to not reinvent the wheel by leveraging existing solutions and approaches.

Are you all set for DrupalCon Paris?

Through the mysteries of scheduling, Paris ended up with not one, but two sessions on Views. The first, from Frédéric Marand, is a 4 hour workshop on Views 2 for coders on day 1. The second is yours truly in a 50 minute session on Views for Developers on day 2.

Sounds very similar, doesn't it? Yeah, we thought so too. Not to worry, though, as we've worked out how to keep both sessions distinct and interesting.

Here's how it will break down, so you can decide which session you want to go to (and you'll want to be at least in one of them; this is Views, after all):