Drupalcon Barcelona 2007: Post your wrap-up here!

Drupalcon Barcelona 2007 was a totally awesome experience, a great venue, tons of stuff to do and people to see, and was clearly the biggest and best Drupalcon ever! :) However, unfortunately, only about 430 of us could come! :( So everyone who attended, please post a reply here to let us know what your thoughts/impressions were, a wrap-up of the sessions you attended, and anything else to help the folks who couldn't attend feel like they were there!

Also, please note that there is a section in the handbook for presentations and notes (or videos!) from any sessions you presented/attended: http://drupal.org/node/177855. Please help fill it out!

Also! There will be a Dojo session on Saturday, Sept. 29 for any Barcelona attendees to come and debrief the rest of the community on how it went. More info is available here: http://drupaldojo.com/lesson/30

With that said, I'll go ahead and start...

Day 0

The night before the event, a bunch of people met at a bar and had drinks. There were both old friends there, like chx, Crell, and Heine, and I also met some new folks like Victor Kane. Pretty laid back and fun, although we had to split half-way through to eat some dinner. :)

Day 1

Walking up to the venue and seeing the big Drupalcon Barcelona banner, the excitement was just unbelievable. :) We got our t-shirts and swag bags, and then scurried off to mingle.

Bert's welcoming presentation was hilarious, and we got to learn a bit about the venue. This was the first event ever held there, so we were all basically "beta testing" the venue, which I felt was strangely appropriate. ;)

After that I went to James Walker's OpenID presentation, which gave some great background information on the hows and whys of OpenID.

After that I kind of socialized with some people. I met Paco, one of the organizers, who was totally awesome, friendly, and funny. :) I'm totally bummed that I didn't get a picture with you. :( Hopefully someone can Photoshop us together ;), or I get to Europe again someday soon! I also met Stephane/scor, a new contributor who was a little timid on how to get started. We brainstormed about a couple patches he had submitted, and I tried to convey the fact that we're all a bunch of dorks and nothing to be scared of. ;)

After lunch, I headed over to Jeff Eaton's FAPI 3 presentation which was completely hilarious, as well as informative. It covered the changes between 5.x and 6.x form code, and also had dancing ewoks. ;)

Then I spent some time in the room with chx, Crell, and a few others discussing strategies for utilizing PHP5 features in Drupal 7. It was generally agreed that we want to tread very carefully transitioning core code to objects, and that it's best to start with one part of core before we do any others. I suggested data API, but it sounds like the general consensus was the file system, since that is an area that couldn't be made *much* worse, and to a large extent it mirrors the type of complexity we'd see with the node system.

Finally, at the end of the day, we had the SoC showcase session, which involved all of the SoC students (and a couple mentors) who were in attendance standing up in front of a room and showing off their projects. Two hits were Matthias Hunterer's Taxonomy Manager and the Project Metrics stuff from Andrew Morton, but everyone did a fantastic job!

Day 2

The next day I was sick so I missed the whole morning. Sorry. :(

Over lunch, we had a meeting of the "7% club", where a bunch of the Drupalchix got together just to kind of introduce ourselves to one another and talk about how we can help get more women involved in Drupal. It was pretty short and sweet, but it was awesome to see some new faces there and talk about our varied backgrounds and stuff. Over half of those in attendance were those I hadn't met before, so thanks a lot to robino for organizing this!

After that a few of us gathered in a BoF session to come up with ideas around redesigning the project module's node UI. At the end of this day we hadn't done any mocks, but mostly just identifying target audience, relevant/irrelevant information, and those types of things. It was still really valuable though, and we agreed to meet again the next day to actually start drawing.

Finally, I went to the "Creating a Drupal Specific QA Team" presentation, where greggles showed off some of the various tools that are available to help with things like testing, automation, etc. I had never dinked around with Selenium before, and that was neat to see. We also discussed some of the challenges of getting QA to be at the forefront of Drupal's value system, and how to make it more "fun/exciting." A couple of good suggestions that came out of this session were to add some sort of an indicator to projects that contain a set of unit tests, and to organize "bug hunt" days and have all the local user groups participating. Anyone interested in further discussing these kinds of issues should join the new QA group: http://groups.drupal.org/quality-assurance

Day 3

This day started off with me and Jeff Eaton presenting the How to contribute to Drupal session. We ran a bit short on time because of missing the train by 15 minutes, but I think people got some useful information out of it nonetheless (or at least I hope! :)). My point was to drive home that absolutely anyone, whether they're a total newbie or a super ninja, has skills that they can provide to make Drupal better.

After that we did the Drupalcon Barcelona podcast, which was a lot of fun. Dries and Gabor shared their impressions about 6.x and the direction of 7.x, and everyone talked about their general impressions of Drupalcon, etc. Fun stuff!

We then had the Drupal Association Panel, where the members of the Association who were present talked a bit about what the Association was, what we've been doing for the past year, and what each individual wants to focus on for the next year. We followed this up with a dinner on Saturday night where we tried to plan out our next moves as the Association, now that the two most pressing issues (keeping drupal.org running and helping to organize Drupalcon Barcelona) are in hand.

During the afternoon, we re-convened doing the project UI redesign, and this time put some stuff down on paper. If you'd like to see the results, and also lend feedback, the place to do so is http://drupal.org/node/177878.

I'm sure I did other stuff this day, but I was kind of in a fog after the morning of presentations, so I'm having a hard time remembering. :P

Day 4

The final day of Drupalcon started off with Dries's totally awesome State of Drupal presentation. It was extremely informative, and also entertaining. The short version is we should all collectively focus on user-facing improvements, as well as some API clean-up.

I also saw the CCK 6.x and beyond presentation, which was phenomenally awesome. KarenS and yched have great plans to take CCK to the next level, and prepare it for inclusion in core for 7.x. The main thing that concerns me is funding... I'm hoping that we can rally support from the major Drupal shops to power these improvements, because we can't very well expect people to migrate to 6.x without this critical module. :)

In the afternoon, we had a BoF around unit testing and how to integrate this as a core development process. We laid out a list of concrete steps that need to occur in order to get this to happen, and worked on securing resources. Now Public will be allocating 50% of Rok Zlender's time for this, which will just be absolutely fantastic. Then later, chx demoed his Simpletest automator tool, which essentially creates simpletests automatically as you click through. We discussed possible improvements to the tool, and how we could use it to get more people involved in the testing process.

That was about it. The rest was meeting some people, doing a bit of hacking, and the other stuff you do at Drupalcons. :) Hopefully other people were able to go to more sessions and have more useful feedback on that than I do.

Anyway, it was wonderful to meet you all, and thank you SO much to the local Barcelona team for the BEST Drupalcon EVER!! :D