Drupal Summit and Camp Atlanta 2011

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend drupal camp atlanta over the weekend. It was great! I was also able to attend the drupal business summit as well as drupal camp. They were both awesome and I learned quite a bit more than I expected to. Here are some of the highlights for me:

Keynotes

Morning Keynote: The Drupal Revolution – Keiran Lal

Keiran discussed the revolution side of drupal, how it’s played a hand in the world revolutions of late with the help of social media. It is great to see the drupal community making open technology possible to the world.

How Drupal is Transforming the United States Government – Jeff Walpole

This one was perhaps my favorite keynote presentation of the weekend, although it wasn’t all new to me. I was aware of the recent push of gov sites being built in drupal, especially the white house site. It’s a great case study to say, yes, open source is stable and secure and can be used effectively. This talk was interesting in that Jeff discussed drupal positioning and how gov clients are beginning to see the power of open source and developing components and contributing them back to the community. So for example, Georgia could have a site for the state congress and develop a certain functionality, they would then release it back to the community and with a bit of extra work, New York state could implement the same component on their site with little effort. That is a beautiful thing in these days of budget cuts. He is an expert on the topic as well and has written quite a few articles about drupal and .gov sites: Drupal: The New Gov 2.0 Site Builder? and 5 government sites using Drupal effectively for open government initiatives and even State of Georgia Making the Move to Drupal Using OpenPublic

International Collaboration on Drupal Commerce 1.0 – Ryan Szrama

Ryan discussed more the process he and his international team have gone through to progress on this project. He has his roots with UberCart, and with this new venture he’s focusing more on an ecommerce drupal framework for ultra flexibility rather than every option out-of-the-box. Very impressive so far! E-commerce is one area from my experience where there really is no great solution in the Open Source Software world. Magento? e-commerce plugin for WordPress? meh.

Sessions

Image credits to tmgstudio

Think Like a Drupal Developer – Erik Webb – A great way to start the day, getting insight into the why’s of drupal helped me understand other issues throughout the day. Erik set us up with a good base to jump from.

Introduction to Views and Panels. Or, How views and panels will change your life. – Jason Smith – A great insight into the power of views and then panels, code reuse is a marvelous thing.

Tame Your Wild WYSIWYG Editor. – Doug Vann – Very entertaining presentation. Working through live bugs with style and teaching at the same time!

One Theme to Rule Them All! – Geoff Maxey – This was a presentation about having one theme for desktop and mobile viewers. Using responsive web design techniques to adjust the layout depending on the screen size. A little trouble with the demo, but those things happen.

Beginning Drupal 7 Theming Using Omega – Ben Hosmer, JP McNeal – These guys introducted me to Omega, a great base/blank theme to begin sites from. A bonus is this parent theme already has responsive web design technique built in!