At least 12 of us from OSU will be at DrupalCon next week in Portland. This is an exciting opportunity for us to connect with people from all over the world who are involved with Drupal. This year DrupalCon is offering a new track for Government, Non-Profit, and Education. For the first time at DrupalCon there will be sessions devoted to the unique challenges we face as a university, as well as sessions that showcase what some of our peers are doing with Drupal at other institutions. I have the honor of presenting the first of these sessions in which I will discuss how we’ve managed to support such a large scale Drupal environment, and some of the interesting things we are working on. My session has been selected as a featured session – http://portland2013.drupal.org/program/sessions/featured . This really puts the spotlight on OSU as a leader in the Drupal higher-ed community, and extra pressure on me to represent the university in the best possible light. This is a great honor for me and I’ve been working hard to make sure I have a good presentation and that I’m well prepared to give it.

One of the challenges we always face at DrupalCon is to make sure we stay focused on the issues we need to solve here at OSU. This year there will be a lot of sessions devoted to the upcoming release of Drupal 8. Of course we are hard at work on Drupal 7 and still have a long way to go getting our sites onto that version. We know we have to balance our need to stay current and make sure we understand the new things that Drupal 8 brings to the table, with our need to find solutions to the things we’re encountering everyday as we move further into Drupal 7. Fortunately there will be a good mix of sessions that should allow us to do that, and even though there will be much buzz about Drupal 8, we know it will not see wide spread usage for at least two more years.

This will be a busy week, packed with lot’s of learning opportunities, and meetups with people doing the same things we are using Drupal. A couple of us may try and do some blog posts during the week so stay tuned to this spot for updates.

—
Paul Lieberman
Central Web Services