Wow! DrupalCon San Francisco is proving to be the biggest one yet. With over 3000 in attendance, this mark more than doubles the attendance at last year’s North American Drupal convention, held in Washington, D.C. (Just for the record, Drupal conventions are held bi-annually – the North American convention is typically held in the spring and the European convention is held in the fall. With around 850 in attendance at Paris last year, DrupalConSF participation is bigger than both of last year’s conventions combined!)
Today, Sunday, is actually a day of training that’s made available before the convention even begins. A mighty long list of different training opportunities have been provided – from ground level beginner workshops all the way up to topics such as advanced module development and Drupal systems administration. So, yours truly spent the day with a great gang of guys from Growing Venture Solutions (Carl, Ezra, and Steve), and 31 beginning Drupalistas in the Intro to Site Building: Hands On training event.
My goal today wasn’t as much to learn about how to build a Drupal site as it was to observe different methods used by different instructors and to see if there may possibly be some additional items I could add to our OSU Drupal 6 training program. I’m happy to report that the folks at GVS didn’t disappoint. They unveiled a nifty – and thrifty – way of creating an “approval” based workflow to sites without the need to add any additional modules. It was pretty darn slick and I hope to be sharing it soon with our OSU Drupal troopers.
This class covered an enormous amount of ground in only 8 hours: from how to install a Drupal site on a local computer using the Acquia Drupal installation profile and DAMP solution stack, to basic Drupal content editing, some general theme configuration, brief primers on CCK and Views, and some fun extra stuff like how to use the Fivestar voting module. Additionally, the instructors included some very insightful information about the Drupal community in general. Needless to say, by the end of the day, there were quite a few heads swimming around in the Drupal pool.
And the convention hasn’t even started yet!! Stay tuned over the next few days as Ken and I keep you posted on the many and varied activities occurring here at DrupalCon San Francisco.
