presentation

Just over a week ago, I've been in New Orleans to talk about multilingual Drupal website building at the Do It With Drupal event organized by Lullabot. I've been happy to join fellow Acquians for a short time at the office and then at the Do It With Drupal seminar to represent the company. It was a fun experience to hook up with so many other people looking into using Drupal for the first time or even selling Drupal services already. It was a good mix, and was a very different target audience compared to Drupalcons. This event was more focused on the path seekers and the beginners with high detail and cross-discipline talks over four days. I've enjoyed several sessions, including Robert's session on Solr.

Unfortunately (for my enjoyment of the conference), my session was at one of the last slots, but it had a good turnout nonetheless. I've been prepared well in advance with a completely rethought line of thought (compared to previous, more developer focused events), and a slideshow done from the ground up. So despite talking about this topic before elsewhere, I needed to have a totally fresh look at the topic and present all the latest developments to date.

Since I do not have the permissions to upload my session to the website of the event, and the slides I sent in by email were not uploaded yet, I figured I'd better share them here with those eager to look into them soon. Happy holiday's reading if you are about to take time to learn more about multilingual Drupal solutions!

Some time ago, Szilveszter Farkas approached me to be one of the presenters of the Free Software Nights meetings, of which the first event happened to be yesterday in Nyitott műhely in Budapest. I was talking about the Drupal history, the community and business environment. But it also turned out early this week that I am going to help out with the Drupal security releases, which also happened to be yesterday evening (my local time). 

We organized Drupal Conference Hungary 2007 for this past weekend. After last fall's first local conference, this was our second big event in Hungary. The conference had more then 150 registrants, so we needed to close the registration in advance to let people have seats in the session room. Unfortunately this year we were not so close to the 90% show up percentage we had last year, so the room was not fully packed. However, this was the only negative point I was able to spot.

I am back home again from DrupalCon Barcelona 2007. I must say that it was a very exciting event. It was fantastic to meet people with whom I last met in person in 2005 in Antwerp (on the first famous meet-in-person developer meeting which was in a hotel basement). The Drupal community grew a lot since then. Dries mentions that last years Brussels conference had 150 people while this years Barcelona event had 450, which means the conference is three times bigger.

FrOSCon was a great conference. Lots of interesting people, lots of new information shared and discussions participated in. Although I did not have time to process and upload the photos yet, I found Bonn, Cologne and Sankt Augustin to be perfect places to stay in.

One of the best things about the conference was that all our sessions were recorded, so you can not only download my slides, you can also see me having my first mistakes with presenting on a Mac. After all, I am a recent convert, and I still use the Mac and my Ubuntu side by side. Pushing aside the issues caused by the first time I presented with a Mac, I think I did a fairly good job of giving an overview of all the hard work of people who contributed a huge amount of their work to make Drupal 6 work better in different languages.

We were happy to welcome Dries Buytaert in Hungary at our Drupal conference, around one month ago. We had Marcell Kiss-Tóth helping us with a video camera, and after his hard work with the editing, the conference session videos are now downloadable. You are most probably interested in Dries' presentation, since all other sessions were in Hungarian. The downloadable is very good in audio quality. You can download the video from drupalconf.amon.hu or alternatively from liktor.hu.

As a side note, after the conference, I also decided to publish my Drupal lego figure shots, which were used in my presentation. These are licensed under a Creative Commons license, so you can reuse them in your presentations or build upon them if you wish.