A look back : Drupalcamp Spain

Monday.. That day when you feel you have an empty spot somewhere that cannot be completed. You feel there is something missing! That missing thing is Drupalcamp Spain. Since Friday until Sunday afternoon the days were packed with Drupal Drupal Drupal!

Friday 26 February 2010 - Day 1

Citilab to me is a regular place where I go to work together with the fantastic crew of Ateneatech. But that Friday everything changed, it changed into a big blue community place!

Starting with a session about SEO DRUPAL EXTRAVAGANZA! by koredeolawhich was for me quite interesting - the session started and ended very enthusiastic and if I need to build a SEO ‘optimized’ website (which in some extend I don’t believe is the most important if the content of your website is good to very good!) I will use the SEO checklist module!

The day ended nicely with a bit of unit testing by Javier. I think the conclusion is mainly that when you are making a module for a wider audience you should make simpletest code to test the functionality of your module. This will not only benefit you as a developer but also will increase your stability whenever you make changes in the future, will it be tomorrow or next year!

Saturday 27 February 2010 - Day 2

The Saturday started a bit later then planned because of some usual Drupal evenings..! But finally there I started with watching Siddharta’s session about Open Atrium. Since we, at Ateneatech, use this tool daily there were not too much surprises although some features of Open Atrium were unseen for me. Good that I have seen those features now!

A couple of delicious “tapas” were waiting to be eaten and of course I did not reject those! Look at my pictures to take a better look at the food that you missed if you were not there!

After the food and interesting chats it was time to go and concentrate again and look at add1sun’s session about the real power of Drupal. The session was good but I felt that a lot of people in the room didn’t fully comprehended what was said. Nevertheless everything that was said was true and cannot be forgotten. If you use Drupal professionally and you get a bit frustrated with something, stop for a moment and think that the developers of Drupal really don’t want to make your life miserable - in the end we are all just humans creating a platform for all of us to use ;-)

The afternoon had a lot of interesting goods to offer such as the OpenLayers session by zzolo. He showed us what was possible with the OpenLayers module and library and I must say I was amazed. It is an library that you can put on top of geographical data to create customizable maps. Enough with those ugly Googlemaps. If mapping is one of your major features, I insist that you take a look at this presentation and the module.

Finally, I skipped the last session to prepare the last bits for my session the next morning! Exciting. Unexpectedly I ended up again with some Drupal people in the middle of Barcelona - Plaça Real drinking Belgian Duvel. What an experience!

Sunday 28 February 2010 - Day 3

Exactly at 10.00AM I arrived in Citilab and was ready to give my presentation about Apache Solr. (info on drupalcamp.es) I was a bit nervous because it has been a while since I gave a long presentation but all went fine. I showed all kinds of Faceted Searches, advantages and a lot of other improvements above the normal Drupal Search. Also even dared to show some of the features of Views 3!

Oh, and also I will publish the demo website that I made to show people what Apache Solr is capable gives you and maybe even open it as a sandbox but that are future idea’s! If you wish to receive additional information about Apache Solr feel free to contact me!

After that I took a little break and did some “networking” with people. Even got surprised that there were so many Dutch speaking people that moved into Barcelona and do Drupal.

Finishing the drupalcamp with Upgrading Drupal by Florian Lorétan. Not an easy task but he did a really good job to make our upgrading life a bit easier. Upgrading from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 learned me that I really really should become addicted to Drush and so I did..! Let’s hope the friendship between me and Drush can last a bit longer then last time ;-)