DrupalCon, day 2
More of the same, really, except that some of it I did myself. After the big night out and the motel room crash last night, I was feeling pretty wasted; but I managed to get through the day, and to pull off my presentation reasonably well.
Here's what I did and saw today at DrupalCon:
Scott Trudeau: Drupal install profiles
Great presentation about how to roll-yer-own Drupal 5.x install profile, and become the author of a whole new Drupal distro. Install profiles still need a few little rough bits ironed out for Drupal 6, but basically, they're ready to go and they're very cool.
Dries Buytaert: the state of Drupal
Dries's big address to the masses. Lots of cheering about what we've done so far, and lots of ideas about what we've got left to do for Drupal 6 and beyond. Dries put forward "structuring pages hierarchically" as a big todo for Drupal 6, along with "data API". Both of these are things that I've been heavily involved in (with the category module, and with the importexportapi module), and hopefully they're things that I'll be able to help get into core soon.
Dries presenting.
Karen Stevenson (and co): Date and Calendar modules
Very nice presentation and demo of these two new modules, that are set to replace the ageing event module. Date provides a CCK field for calendar dates, and calendar provides a view type for presenting dates. It's the way of the future, and it's very powerful.
Lunch
Free pizza provided by Yahoo!, and an interesting chat with a number of people, including one of the few developers left with the dot-com baby boomer site ThirdAge, which (I've now learnt) is in the process of moving to Drupal.
Steven Wittens: jQuery intro
Seeing as I've already played with jQuery a fair bit, there wasn't that much stuff in this presentation that was new to me. But it was interesting, and very well-presented, nonetheless. Nice to be told by the expert about just what jQuery can do, and about how you should use it right.
Myself: site structuring and navigation
Considering that it was my first proper presentation ever, I think this went pretty well! Not a very technical crowd, but hey, I was trying to keep the discussion focused on the non-technical, user experience side of things anyway. I got plenty of audience participation happening, regarding ideas on what Drupal's not doing perfectly at the moment, and regarding how to make Drupal handle structuring and navigation better in the future.