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Back from DrupalCamp Timisoara

lacisoft — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:40:00 +0000

We’ve just returned from DrupalCamp Timisoara, the first ever romanian DrupalCamp. Although most of the presentations were already familiar subjects to me, i’ve met some interesting people during these two days and learned a few new things too.

The event started friday evening with a social gathering at Club Porto Arte in Timisoara where we had a few beers and get to know each other. Saturday morning the first romanian DrupalCamp started with the opening session by Claudiu Cristea (president of Drupal Romania Association). I will make a short recap of all the sessions and my opinion on them:

OpenMap – OpenLayers and Drupal – presented by Mihai Fratu. It could have been a good presentation but i think it should have been more thorough. Still it was an interesting – especially because i’m interested in mapping applications of all kinds.
Eat your own dog food! Why you should use Open Atrium to manage your projects – presented by Kristof Van Tomme. I already saw this presentation at DrupalCamp Prague so it didn’t bring much novelty but i think it was a little bit different then the Prague presentation although i’m not sure. Kristof is one of the participants who knows how to make a presentation and how to focus the audience’s attention.
Building a Drupal module with Flex – presented by Mihai Corlan (platform evangelist at Adobe). It was one of the most controversial presentations with many, many questions. Obviously everyone came up with the regular questions: will HTML5 kill Flash, why Flash doesn’t run on the iPhone and such. But Mihai replied very well and made a good impression.
The Agile Road – presented by Maria Diaconu and Alexandru Bolboaca. I expected more from this presentation. It was in myy opinion superficial and touched only generalities.
Drupal for Higher Education and Virtual Learning – presented by Gabriel Dragomir. This was among the few things that were unknown to me and i learned about them in this DrupalCamp. Its quite interesting that Drupal became a tool in all kinds of areas, including academic insitutions and research.
Come for the software, stay for the community – how Drupal improves and evolves – presented by Gábor Hojtsy. This is a presentation that in some form or another i’ve remember seeing in Prague but not under this name. Its the usual community building and Drupal promoting presentation (as Gábor put it: making noise about what you do).
Drupal Search on steroids using Apache Solr - presented by Andrei Savu. This was too short of a presentation for such a good and interesting subject. I guess it could have been made a little bit more comprehensive and interesting.
Publish and Subscribe – presented by Alexandru Badiu. It was an interesting presentation. I was somewhat familiar with the concept but the author managed to enlighten me even more.

These were the presentations from the first day. In the evening people went to Club Porto Arte were a folk band entertained the drupelers and of course many beers were consumed. The second day’s presentations were:

Using Features – presented by Alexandru Badiu. Features was the most useful presentation for people working with constant changes on multiple servers (development – staging – live). And i think the presentation made a good case for using Features in every circumstance that requires such constant changes.
Tips and tricks for building Entreprise / Large web applications with Drupal – presented by Mihai Ceusan and one more guy (unfortunately i can’t remember the name and he isn’t in the schedule). This presentation was the one i expected the most. It was somewhat useful but i expected more from this one too. They presented their problems with deploying and changing a very high number of sites. I was expecting tips&tricks on how to fine tune a Drupal site to work under very heavy load.
What’s up with Drupal 7 – presented by Gábor Hojtsy. I saw this one too at Prague. I guess for people not familiar with Drupal 7 features it was quite interesting. Gábor is a good presenter and knows how to make people interested in something – in this case Drupal 7
DBTNG – presented by Tamás Demeter (unfortunately i missed this presentation due to objective reasons)
Ubercart-powered online concept store – presented by Vlad Socaciu. Ubercart is the solution for powering online stores in Drupal. The author tried to present the features of this great module but there were some minor technical glitches that prevented viewers to see the screen in good conditions. But still it was useful.
Drupal distributed architecture: the stuff that clouds are made off – presented by Kristof Van Tomme. Clouds are the buzzword of our era. Everyone wants in the cloud and as sites get bigger and bigger Drupal is heading into the cloud as well. Kristof’s presentation explained some of the notions involved and showed how Drupal can work in distributed environments.

There were two more presentations one about Building more active (euro) regional communities (by Radu Ticiu) and See you in Copenhagen but we had to leave for home as a long journey expected us.

Overall it was a good event, with lots of fun and lots of Drupal, also Timisoara is a great city so it certainly was a good experience.

At DrupalCamp Timisoara

lacisoft — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 06:58:05 +0000

I’m currently in Timisoara at the first romanian DrupalCamp. Presentations just started with an OpenMap demo by Mihai Fratu. For those interested the whole DrupalCamp can be watched live on http://drupalcamp.ro/ , the event being streamed live.

Also you can stay updated by following my twitter account http://twitter.com/lacisoft or the official hashtag for DrupalCamp http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23drupalro

DrupalCamp.ro schedule published

lacisoft — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 08:49:07 +0000

This weekend the first ever romanian DrupalCamp is taking place in Timisoara. The schedule has been published and there are quite a few interesting subjects. I’m looking forward to see especially the presentations on Drupal & Apache Solr and Drupal Distributed Architecture but the other ones are interesting too. If you didn’t yet sign up to this event you still can as there are 29 places left out of 250 as of this moment.

See you in Timisoara this weekend!

The website of the first romanian DrupalCamp is live

lacisoft — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:21:31 +0000

As you probably know already between 5 and 6 June 2010 the first romanian DrupalCamp will be organized in Timisoara, Romania. But you might not know that the website of the event went live yesterday and registrations are open now.

There are already a few people who registered to the event and sometime soon the organizers will start accepting session proposals.

So go ahead and register if you want to participate to a historic event for the Romanian Drupal community.

Back from DrupalCamp Prague

lacisoft — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:00:12 +0000

Last night we’ve returned from DrupalCamp Prague, a two day event with a lots of interesting presentations about Drupal and related technologies. The schedule had some interesting presentations and i attended to almost all of those. The ones i liked most were Search is sexy by Robert Douglass and Using Features by Andrew Burcin. Also an interesting session was the case study held by Jakub Suchy, Using Drupal for your bussines.

But these DrupalCamps are not only about the sessions, socializing is also an important thing and we did exactly that, lots of beers were consumed while talking about Drupal and other topics. I must say that the first social event was held at the U Medvidku restaurant, where the strongest beer in the world is brewed and obviously we tried this beer. Its good, very good.

Bye the way. Prague is a very very beautiful city and has a unique atmosphere and charm. I intend to return here for a more thorough visit. But until then i will have a few nice pictures and lots of memories from there.

Romania was represented at DrupalCamp Prague by eight drupalers: Alina Fleser (alinafleser), Maria Mihaela Cîmpean, Diana Precup (dianaprecup), Andreea Ungureanu, Igor Ştirbu (igor.stirbu), Gabriel Ungureanu (gabrielu), Claudiu Cristea (claudiu.cristea) and myself (Bodor László (lacisoft)).

The most important thing is that while talking about Drupal and Romania we reached to the conclusion that we should organize a DrupalCamp next year in Romania to further promote Drupal and to involve more people in the Drupal community. We started the planning but have nothing to announce at this time. But i can say that if everything goes fine next year there will be a DrupalCamp in Romania!

Leaving for DrupalCamp Prague

lacisoft — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:37:56 +0000

I’m going to DrupalCamp Prague tomorrow. I’m going there to learn new things and meet new people from the Drupal world.

I’ve only started working with Drupal a year and a few months ago. Meantime i learned to use it, to extend it and i started to like it. Initially i hated it because i was used to hard things and always tried to do things the hard way and couldn’t even think that there is a simple solution to a problem. Like installing a module from Drupal.org. Meantime i learned that Drupal can be very simple, but very powerful

Also Drupal has gained a lot of adoption lately. At least from what i see, more and more people adopt Drupal. This is partly because Drupal is easy and has lots of modules. Modules for almost everything. A basic site in Drupal can be set up in a few minutes and customized in a few hours or less.

I’ve read on Dries Buytaert’s blog that even the White House started using Drupal for whitehouse.gov. This is a great proof that open source software can be as good as proprietary or even better. And major companies must not fear adopting and using open source software and open technologies. If the White House can use it then i guess everyone can.

I hope that while in Prague i will learn more about Drupal. I’m curious for example what novelties does Drupal 7 brings us. Also security matters and scaling of Drupal for large sites are subjects of interests for me. And the schedule promises to deliver these things.

And if i’m in Prague i will also visit this wonderful city. I’ve heard many good things about Prague and i will certainly invest a few hours daily into visiting the city. If you know some good places to eat or drink, or you have some recommendations then post them in a comment.

And if you’re in Prague too for DrupalCamp drop me an email to laci [at] lacisoft [dot] ro and we can go out drink a beer or something.