Drupal Association

It’s amazing to see the outpouring of support among people during this uncertain time. Whether it’s helping an elderly neighbor with getting groceries or supporting small businesses, people around the world are showcasing a “we are in this together” mentality. 

When preparing to present to your local drupal group, a drupalcon, or code group, the first decision to make is to decide what you want to talk about. It is likely that anything that you would consider presenting to others is something that you are interested in and passionate about. This is good.

With the last week's release of Drupal 7 and a steady stream of large enterprise sites continuing to migrate onto the content management platform, excitement abounds in the Drupal community. While celebrating all that is new, however, let's not forget about some of the early adopters that helped pave the way for all of the brand-name companies now hopping on board.

Chicago here we come! Mediacurrent has submitted a cross-section of 7 sessions for Drupalcon that we are looking forward to sharing with the Drupal community. This is always a special time to network, swap stories with our partners, and get educated.

Here are the titles of what we would like to present on and discuss -- for a detailed description, please click on any of the links and cast your vote if these sessions are of particular interest:

Last weekend was the first ever Drupalcamp Atlanta, and I am proud to report that things went really well. As I write this, we've had 11 straight days of downpours in metro Atlanta and flooding throughout the city. As a result, we had a higher percentage of no-shows than we would have liked, but about 200 Drupal'ers braved the weather and made it out.

We are now less than a week to go and final plans are being ironed out for the inaugural Drupalcamp Atlanta happening this Saturday, September 19th. We have coordinated what we think will be an informative, exciting, and fun event with lots of opportunities to network with your peers. For those who can’t make it, we are trying to provide as much video footage as possible.

Whenever a group organizes a conference for the first-time there are a lot of unknowns – the phrase "if you build it will they come" is always in the back of your mind. However, I am happy to report that the response so far to the inaugural Drupalcamp Atlanta has been just awesome – as I write this, we have 158 attendees, 15 sessions, 9 sponsors, 2 keynote speakers with strong Drupal credentials, and a passionate organizing committee.

We recently completed a relatively small, but really cool Drupal v6 microsite that exemplifies to me how open-source is impacting traditional advertising channels (i.e. print, TV, radio, etc.). Unfortunately, the website (Neurowebcast.com) is for invite only guests, but works similarly to other messaging chats you have probably seen online.

There was some little reported financial news that came out of Wall Street last month that did not make much traction in the Drupalsphere, but it should – particularly to our partner Acquia and those of us in the open source world. The news was that the darling of commercial open-source business models, Red-Hat, reported that business is good, very good, despite the global economic recession.

We recently launched a new website for In-Fisherman, a division of publishing powerhouse InterMedia Outdoors (IMO). This is a really robust, feature-filled Drupal site that we are profoundly excited about. In a nutshell, IMO is recognized as one of the strongest brands in the outdoor sportsman industry.