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A DrupalCon Review

By Ronald Ashri - Friday, 11th of September - 2009
Community
Drupal
drupalcon

Back home after my first Drupal conference and it was a great experience. I was obviously excited about Drupal's prospects before going, but the conference has renewed my confidence in the future of Drupal that is looking brighter than ever.

As a means to crystalize my thoughts I will try to sum up my experience of the conference and provide my own input on how I see (would like to see) the future of Drupal shaping up. The whole things is quite long so I broke it down to three parts - the community, the designers vs developers challenges and the small core movement.

The Community

Joining any established open source community is always complicated and potentially daunting for newbies. Joining a community while it is in the throes of also transforming itself and about to release a new version of its software is even harder.

So it is a true testament to Drupalites that despite everything going on they found the time to sit down and explain things to relative newbies to the process. Special thanks to add1sun and scor for taking the time to walk me through the Documentation and RDF efforts, respectively. Also thanks to Ori for bringing energy and enthusiasm to the whole event that was contagious.

Any complicated effort requires great leadership and Dries offers that. He leads by example, explains choices clearly and is open to change, even at the cost of alienating some of the older members of the community. After Dries's keynote I was relieved. This guy had all that is required to lead Drupal to the next level.

Overall, a great community and a great leader - so far so good. Let's move on to Drupal itself and it's moment of transformation.

Two overarching issues seemed to occupy debates - designers (user interface/ graphic design) vs developers and small core vs big core (or not small core, I guess).

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