The McCormick & Winter team is on the road to recovery from three intense days of Drupalcon San Francisco. Though we hope to share more of what we discovered on this blog in the coming weeks, the highlights that come immediately to mind are these:
Dries Buytaert
Obviously, we already knew about Dries, but you can only know so much about someone without actually ever seeing them. We were briefly puzzled by why Dries chose two dwarfs to introduce him until we realized that, in fact, they were both normal height – it’s just that the founder of Drupal is over seven feet tall!
Aside from his impressive stature, we were blown away by how competent Dries seems. For someone who obviously knows his programming, he’s a great speaker and seems to have an incredible grasp on the direction that Drupal is headed. All in all, we’re quite happy to have him at the helm.
Drush and Drush Make
Thanks in part to 14-year-old presenter Dmitri Gaskin, we’re going to be using these MUCH more for Drupal setup and administration. Both Drush and Drush Make are substantially more powerful that we had guessed and we hope to make daily use of both tools at the M&W office from here on out. The talk itself was, alas, not online as of this writing (though we're hoping it will get posted here at some point). If you can't find it, check out Greg Harvey's blog post How Drush Make Just Changed My Life.
Several Ways to Make Drupal Easier for Clients
We’re totally sold on the Admin 2 module as well as the Rubik theme for the admin side of our websites from now on. We also think the Advanced Help Injection module (which allows you to add more detailed descriptions of what things do on the backend) will be a huge breakthrough in terms of letting our clients know what in tarnation is going on when they go to edit their sites.
Lots About Running a Web Business
Actually, it was reassuring to discover that, at least on the grand scheme of web developer business practices, we’re doing most of the right things. Still, there were some incredible talks about how to improve, the most memorable of which was Corey Smith’s “Going Vertical”. Corey said he wasn’t going to post his slides afterward because the information was just too good to share with just anybody, but it looks like it made it on the Drupalcon website somehow anyway. Don’t miss it!
We’re Not the Only Drupal Geeks on the Planet
And that, friends, is an understatement of vast proportions. Being surrounded by so many Drupal fanatics was inspiring, humbling, encouraging, and about a hundred more adjectives that we won’t bore you with here. Suffice to say, we’re glad we were able to make it!
