Last weekend I jumped on a train to attend Drupalcamp UK in Manchester. I know a lot Drupallers from London, since we have regular meetings, but not that many from up north. I've chatted with many of them on the #drupal-uk IRC channel, but it was great putting names to faces and seeing some old friends. The event was held in the BBC in Manchester which was great and very comfortable, it even had a pub inside, which was sweet. Sadly I only could go for the first day and missed all the sessions on Sunday. Here is a summary of the sessions I attended:

Acquia: Who we are and what we do

Robert Douglass

Robert's Acquia presentation was great, he is a really approachable nice guy, and did a great job keeping everyone entertained for a whole hour. There where some issues at first with the projector, but we quickly moved to the bar area, which was great because it was a more relaxed atmosphere. There was a lot of interesting information about Acquia and about some of their new services, but my favorite part was definitely when the session got sidetracked into Drupal search. A lot of interesting issues where discussed in a friendly an open atmosphere.

It was good to learn about Acquia's support service and I think is great that you can get all these amazing developers that work on Acquia on the phone and that they support any kind of problem you might have on a Drupal 6 site. I will definitely be recommending this service to some of the companies I work with, clients will like to be offered enterprise grade support as an option in their quote. I am also really interested in their partner programs, but I didn't get a chance to speak to Robert about it because I went to see the other Robert's presentation. I'll definitely be looking more into this, and fill in my application.

Drupal For Education

Robert Castelo

Most of the modules mentioned in this talk where new to me. I was pleasently surprised at how many amazing tools Drupal had for education. The biblio module was a nice surprise. I guess its one of those rare very useful and active modules that I knew absolutely nothing about. This was generally a great presentation, with lots of useful information, and helpful visual aids and screenshots.

I got to see the other presentations Robert did that night on the train back to London. All his presentations had lots of really nice graphics, and he used the same set of icons on all his slides so they looked really slick and professional. It was nice to get Robert to do the presentations just for Mori and I in the train because it allowed us to discuss a lot of the stuff while the presentations were going on. You can see his Organic Groups presentation in HTML in the Code + website, along some other great resources.

Drupal and Scrum, an Agile Development Framework

Mori Sugimoto

I was really impressed by Mori's presentation. I knew he had been a bit nervous before giving the presentation but after attending it, I can't imagine why. The presentation was full of important information and lots of analogies to help you understand some of the concepts better, and with some funny comic relief moments. For me, this was one of the most informative sessions, because Scrum is the topic I knew the least about, compared to the rest of the more Drupally sessions. I knew the basics of Scrum and had worked in projects with an agile approach, but this session gave a great insight on Drupal projects using Scrum.

The presentation was so interesting that I actually took notes of most of the slides, well, except for the ones that showed squirrel burgers or funny slightly over weight guys with their top off, lol. I guess you'd have to see his slides to get that. Mori will also be doing a presentation on using Scrum for Drupal projects on DrupalCon Paris and I really can't wait to attend that session. Mori also blogged about Drupalcamp UK: http://diasporan.net/content/first-ever-drupalcamp-uk-was-great-event

My First Module

Tim Millwood

This was a really good presentation, it went through the process of developing your first module in a clear way that everyone could understand. Most of the modules I've done before had never needed an install file, since they were mostly front end or site-specific things, I am a themer after all. It was really good to hear a clear explanation of all the cool things you can do with install files in your modules. I was really happy to hear him talk about including template files so themers can easily modify how you module looks in their site. Tim also wrote a post about Drupalcamp on his blog.

Tim Millwood is a developer working on the Mark Boulton Design agency. For those who don't know, this company was hired to work on the D7UX project. I think their input will make Drupal more approachable to a lot more people, and they have put UX and design in the spotlight. This is really good because the Drupal usability community has been doing a lot of great work and its nice to see the D4D initiative picking up a lot of steam.

Dr Clonelove: How I learned to stop worrying and love the cloud

Peter Brownell

This was another amazing presentation that was enhanced by nice and often funny graphics, I loved the Star Wars theme. I have never worked on a site hosted on the cloud, so this was really interesting to me. Everything was explained in a clear manner, and a lot of the concerns that I had with hosting on the cloud where addressed. Peter was filling in for another presentation that was cancelled, and he did a great job. All of his diagrams of how SOE is setup were amazing, I highly suggest to download all the slides and go through them, there's lots of useful information and entertaining moments there.

It was cool to see how exactly a large Drupal site like SOE is setup, and Peter wasn't afraid of getting really technical and giving us all the juicy details of how their environment works, and how they have drills to see how would they manage if one of their machines went offline for some reason.

All the presentation in general where really good, this was a great experience for the whole Drupal UK community. I'd like to thank Dan Smith, James Panton and all the wonderful people that made this possible. A big shout out to the presenters for kindly letting me package some of their presentation in a zip file so you can download them from this post. Sadly one of our beloved fellow UK Drupallers, Fintan Darragh, passed away over a month ago. Fin was one of the nicest guys, some of the people on the Drupal UK community are volunteering to help finish the project he was working on with a NGO. Please go here to get involved, you will be dearly missed Fin.

The next Drupal UK event will be Drupal 4 NGOs, you can see some more information on this post, and remembert to check regularly on www.drupal.org.uk for any of the upcoming Drupal UK events.

Related posts from other bloggers:

• First ever Drupalcamp UK was great event
• Drupalcamp UK my sessions
• Drupalcamp success
• Drupalcamp day 1
• Drupalcamp day 2

Downloads

drupalcampuk_presentations.zip

6.03 MB