I have been to REMIX 07 today, which was basically a rehash of some of the Microsoft MIX conference topics and presentations for a road show stop in Budapest, Hungary. Although I use much less Microsoft technology then I actually go to the conferences, I mostly enjoy going because it inspires me. I see cool new stuff which of course escalates into cool new stuff I would like to implement with my tool set.

This year, for the first time, a big two day Drupal event is going to be organized in Sankt Augustin, Germany as part of the FrOSCon 2007 conference (25th-26th August, 2007). Robert Douglass has more to say on this on the dedicated Drupal group, looking for speakers and sponsors for the event. The call for papers deadline of FrOSCon is closing up, you only have one week to propose a session on Drupal (or any other FrOSCon fitting topic) for the conference! Update: The Drupal session submission deadline for FrOSCon was extended to 1st July!

In the meantime, the organizers of Drupalcon Barcelona 2007 (19th-22nd September, 2007) are going forward too. The web registration is already open, which allows you to send a session proposal to the organizers. Although it is not clearly communicated whether the so-called "web registration" actually means a conference attendance registration too. The session description field also sports a limited WYSIWYG editor, which I don't think was a very good idea, but anyway, let those sessions go in! On a related note, Drupalcon Barcelona also has a design contest for the conference logo, which will be printed on t-shirts, name tags, leaflets and so on. This design contest dealine is even closer, only three days left to participate! The design contest deadline was extended until June 10th, and some nice proposals are already in!

Being an organizer of several conferences here in Hungary, I very much appreciate the work that goes into organizing these great events, and I can't wait to be there to meet some Drupal developers I did not meet for some time now (or even not at all)!

Lately I have been poking around workflows to better support translators. The localizer module suite has no built in workflow support, and i18n module suite has a very simple and limited built-in workflow, so for complex workflow requirements, people need to look elsewhere. Luckily, respected members of the community maintain the workflow and actions modules, which allow for setup of more complex workflows.

I received my signed copy of Pro Drupal Development around an hour ago from John K. VanDyk, and immediately rushed to the 18th chapter (on localization), to see how it shaped up at the end. I was helping out with reading the manuscripts of that chapter to help readers get the most realistic view of how locale module helps their life, what are the culprits, possibly bad routes to avoid, as well as side effects of some settings. It was a pleasure to help out on the book, and (as a result) a long time waiting for the book arriving at my house.

I thought I can beat Dries with posting Dries-style photos of the book (evil grin), but just found that he published his usual photo shoot pieces earlier today. Anyway, my photos are up on Flickr for more sharing pleasure.

Being a visual type, I would ensure you that the visuals (flow charts, figures) in the book are very informative, and help a great deal in understanding how things work in Drupal 5. This is a must have book for aspiring professional Drupal developers! To quote Dries' foreword: "... there is nothing that stops you from becoming the best Drupal developer in the world. The only limitation is your willingness to learn."

Well, back in 2003 when I joined the Drupal developer community (got my welcome mail from the drupal-devel list on September 15, 2003), I haven't thought I will be that involved with the system a few years down the road. It was (and is) a rather cool tool for a big Hungarian web development community website I was migrating from some ugly CMS... Now I do so many things around Drupal that it is not easy to track: