At the London Drupalcon 2011, Acquia announced a new set of components for its web services, which are applications, support and tools to help all Drupal developers, from novice to expert skill levels.
Acquia was founded in 2007 by Dries Buytaert and Jay Batson, and offers products and support for Drupal. It offers its network, hosting, Drupal Gardens, software, and training services.
These new tools are Insight, SEO Grader, Blitz and Drupalize.me.
A few weeks ago, CMS Report was asked to become a media sponsor for this month's DrupalCon in Copenhagen. Between the late invitation and my decrease in Internet activity this month, I have some doubts there is much time to "complete the deal". Promoting last Spring's San Francisco DrupalCon was a lot of fun and is an example of how less involved folks like me can help give back to the Drupal community. So, regardless, of whether this site is a media sponsor or not for this conference, I still want to do my part in helping promote DrupalCon Copenhagen.
DrupalCon is the twice-yearly gathering of Drupal developers and users to learn about, discuss, and contribute to Drupal, networking with other Drupal community members in the process. At almost every DrupalCon, you will have the opportunity to meet Drupal community leaders, top developers, your favorite module maintainers, dojo trainers, members of the Drupal Association, potential business partners, and future employees. If you attend a DrupalCon, I promise you that there is plenty to do and see at the conference.
Keynote speakers for DrupalCon Copenhagen include Dries Buytaert (Drupal Project Lead), Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP Project Founder), and Jeremy Keith (Author of "HTML5 For Web Designers"). What's interesting is you'll find an appreciation for the keynote speakers that are not fully embedded in the Drupal community. As much as I enjoyed Dries' "The State of Drupal" speech at DrupalConSF, the awesome talks given by Tim O'Reilly, David H. Cole, and and Andrew Hoppin still whispers in my head today. Attending a DrupalCon just doesn't improve your game with Drupal but DrupalCon can also help improve yourself as a well-rounded IT professional.
If you're in Europe this August and have a chance to stop by Copenhagen, it would be one foolish move on your part to not attend DrupalCon Copenhagen. It's definitely not too late to buy your tickets for DrupalCon CPH. You better hurry though, because all indication are that those ticket prices are going to go up on August 16th.
Guidelight Business Solutions, a custom software and web strategy company based in Texas, has put together a little video highlighting their experience at last month's DrupalCon in San Francisco. The video does a good job in capturing the fun, scale, and pace of a Drupal conference. At the start of the video, you'll also see a snip of video of me taken during an interview while we were waiting for one of the keynote speakers to come on stage. I'm honored to be included in a video among so many of the other talented faces that were there for DrupalCon.
You can check out the video either below or at the website of Guidelight Business Solutions.
Joe Bachana of DPCI gives his take on what made Drupalcon SF 2010 such a success.
While I was at DrupalCon last week, Chris Pliakas sent a tweet out that he used screenshots from CMS Report in his Apache Lucene presentation. I'm always flattered when this site gets noticed for something we're apparently doing right. In this particular case, we're using the contributed Drupal module Search Lucene API for our search engine as well as for faceted search and content recommendations (recommended links).
If you had talked to me a few years ago, I would have told you that the Search module that comes with the Drupal CMS is all a site like mine needs. After I became a beta tester for the Acquia Network along with their implementation of Apache Solr called Acquia Search, my opinion quickly changed. I'm now convinced that an enterprise quality search engine is truly something that can make or break your website. If you're a smaller Drupal site that feels like Solr or Acquia Search is overkill or not in your cost range, Search Lucene API may be the answer you've been looking for all this time.
The actual name of Chris' DrupalCon presentation is: Build a Powerful Site Search with the User-Friendly, Easy-to-Install Search Lucene API Module Suite. The video of his presentation can be viewed at Archive.org and has been embedded above. Screenshots from CMSReport.com can be seen in the time frame from 19 minutes to 21 minutes.
Tim O'Reilly is the Tuesday keynote speaker at DrupalCon 2010. His talk was on open source in the cloud era. I had some WiFi issues that slowed my typing down so I've embedded the his slide presentation at the end of this post.
2:30 PM: What is wrong with government? "We need to do more than shake the vending machine." O'Reilly is giving examples of people doing things themselves. Do it yourself on a civic scale...the heart of Gov 2.0. Drupal is an example of do it yourself spirit. O'Reilly's putting Drupal back into the speech on how people come together to build something better.
Technology is going to push past the web we know, but also going to call us to be creative and doing it ourselves. Work on stuff that matters.
2:20 PM: Open data movement is going to be just as big as the open source movements. Talking about corporate data sharing.
Discussion now leading into government 2.0 discussions. Of course O'Reilly mentions whitehouse.gov, a well known drupal site.
Open data and open government. Discussing "open government data" principles. Going to have to look for the URL on this one. Also, take a look at data.gov.
215 PM: Competition and freedom needs to be present. Tim O'Reilly is now discussing who owns what...and interestingly an observation that companies that are open sourcing are often open sourcing their competition's niche.
200 PM: Conversation still going on regarding devices and O'Reilly now taking a look at Google voice recognition on mobile devices. Devices such as these depend on cooperating cloud data services.
1:55 PM: The world of the web is "kinda getting old". What is the next big thing? O'Reilly is hinting the focus is on devices...lots of devices providing us a "sensor platform". Processing is being done in the cloud. Definately a different world.
Discussion now leading into "augmented reality" and using Yelp as an example. Also the barcode apps on iPhone (and Bryan thinks also Android).
Dries Buytaert, Drupal Project Lead, will give his bi-annual State of Drupal talk in the beginning of DrupalCon SF, where he’ll discuss where Drupal is and where it is going. In particular, he’ll discuss Drupal 7, usability, the Drupal.org redesign, and other developments to Drupal.
CMS Report is here live at Drupal Con and we'll be blogging about the presentation as we hear it.
Edited: Video from the keynote speech has also been embedded at the end of this post. This video can also be found at archive.org.
2:30 PM: Dries finishing his speech with a pep rally cry. Drupal is growing up and Drupal 7 will bring in more users. As Drupal grow, Dries sees we need to stick to the culture...sharing and contributing, show passion, and innovating. Lastly it needs to stay a culture of fun. All together "awesome happens".
2:25 PM: Drupal as it follows the market to stay relevant but the desire is to also still needs to serve the low end of the market. This is why distributions will need to be utilized to serve both high end and low end of the market.
To succeed Drupal needs to focus on missing features. To succeed in the low end, Drupal needs to focus on creating better experiences. Both missions do overlap.
215 PM: Consolidation = One Big Winner. Lots of CMS runner ups...and very few winners. Drupal needs to be a winner. Winners have richness and reach to be successful.
Trend: Cloud computing and SaaS is hot. "Computing is transforming from an innovation to a service." How does Drupal stay relevant? Dries is talking about Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma. The dilemma is the innovation makes room for a lower-end product often causing the original product to fail.
205 PM: Dries bring up some Drupal related statistics. According to Dries, Drupal now powers 1 percent of the Web.
I spent Sunday flying to San Francisco for this year's DrupalCon. Attending this Drupal conference is a first for me. For the past few years. I've wanted to attend the conference but either personal or professional distractions came up that prevented me from attending the conference. This year is my year for DrupalCon and I'm anxious to get to know the Drupal community better than I have in the past.
While I do plan to do live blog updates during the Keynote addresses, I'm attending this conference less as a reporter and more as an attendee in a crowd of 3000 people. I spend way too much of my time through the year either leading IT discussions or managing the IT discussions that I rarely get a chance to just observe and listen. There are a lot of smart Drupal people and content management folks at this conference that I would be a fool to not take the opportunity and learn from the experts.
So this week you can expect a lot of Drupal talk. If you don't want to hear about Drupal this week, I suggest you submit an article focused on your favorite CMS. I have a feeling I'm only going to be writing about Drupal this week...
Drupal's "premier conference" is quickly approaching. This Drupal conference is known as DrupalCon and will be held in San Francisco from April 19-21, 2010. As with previous years, the unofficial theme of the conference is to "learn about all things Drupal". If the conference sessions aren't enough, the schedule is also packed with plenty of development, documentation, and training events that are being held the days prior to and following the conference.
Presently over 1500 people have signed up to attend the conference. The price of attending a DrupalCon has always been reasonably priced which is one of the reasons this conference always sees a high turnout rate. If you plan on attending the conference, I would urge you to buy your tickets to DrupalCon now. Procrastinators like me have been known to wait too long to register for this conference only to find out that the maximum number of available tickets for the conference has already been reached.
Also, CMS Report is proud to be a media sponsor for DrupalCon - San Francisco 2010. This is our first time we have sponsored a DrupalCon event and we're excited to be helping out by promoting this event. While you can learn quite a bit about Drupal at this conference, the conference also gives you a chance to see and hear directly from the the open source community that is supporting Drupal. As a user of Drupal, it's not just about the software that sparks our interest in DrupalCon but also the people in Drupal's community we have come to know and appreciate.
