Living in a totally drupalized world for 4 days is something I had never experienced before: drupalCon Barcelona 2007 was my first DrupalCon, and it was a really amazing and enriching experience.

Venue: citilab, an old factory newly refurbished, which looks really modern and well designed. I really like the wood color inside the building, which gives it a natural warm and enjoyable atmosphere. We were actually used as guinea pigs: Drupalcon was the first conference in this venue, and it was a success!

Day 1

The event introduction by Bert was really fun and entertaining. Picktek room - the main room - was packed with the 400+ attendees, many people had to remain standing.

In the morning, I didn't really attend any talk. Instead, I met webchick and we talked about a few things. The patch I was working on which needed some review. We also talked about the drupal community in general, as I was wondering how to get some visibility in these long issue queues. Webchick has been very helpful and I must say she is a great mentor! No wonder why she is involved in the Google Summer of Code. I even got mentionned in the Drupalcon podcast and her wrap-up in drupal.org: yes, I'm scor, the timid new core contributer she talks about ;)

The FormAPI 3 session in the afternoon was the first time I heard Jeff Eaton doing a presentation. It's worth the experience, even if you are not a drupaler, you can be sure you'll be entertained! Beside the expressive cats, robots and other dancing ewolks, the presentation was very informative. FormAPI 3 brings loads of new possibilities in Drupal 6 which will make Drupal developper's life easier.

The drupal Summer of Code Showcase held by webchick and some students was full of new cool features. They all presented the project they worked on during the summer. I won't describe them all here, but one of the most amazing was the Taxonomy Manager by Matthias Hutterer. I also found the RCS abstraction for the Project module by jpetso quite promising: Drupal could be used to managed the repository of any Open Source project, whether its on CVS, SVN or any other RCS. Add the book module for the documentation, and the current project node UI redesign, and Drupal can manage your Open Source project!

Day 2

Earl Miles presented the new Panels 2 in the morning. Now, not only does it look prettier out of the box, but it also offers much more flexibility when it comes to create your panels...
In the afternoon, I joined the project User Interface redesign BoF. This came originally from a post dww wrote. webchick, add1sun, jpetso, hunmonk and myself listed every single elements of the current Project UI on Drupal.org. We planned to meet the next day, same time, same location, for the actual new plan for redesign the UI.

The day ended by the drupal and SimpleXML session, where James Walker explained the improvment PHP5 brings when it comes to parse or generate XML. He demonstrated that what previously required 20 lines of code in PHP4, can now be reduced to 2 lines by using the SimpleXML.

Day 3: Semantic Web day 1

I spent some time in the morning polishing my talk. I enjoyed giving my talk, and people enjoyed it too! I wrote another post about it: Great success of the Semantic Web at Drupalcon.

During the afternoon, the same group plus some other people met up again to actually draw the project node UI redesign. This is what we came up with, bearing in mind that the project module could be used for general purpose, not only for software related projects. Thanks to Angie for putting together the ideas and drawing this nice mock-up. Feel free to contribute too.

Day 4: Semantic Web day 2

The day started by the speech of the mayor of Cornellá de Llobregat, which is the town next to Barcelona where the conference was actually taking place. Dries followed with his talk about the state of Drupal. Lots of fun, general information and statistics which mostly came from the survey he organized before the conference. Some of the results are available on Dries' blog.

Another hit was the CCK 6.x and beyond session which was held is one of the small rooms, too small for the audience. Yched and KarenS talked about their great plans for improving CCK in Drupal 6 and integrating it in the core of Drupal 7. They got lots of feedback from the audience, including Alan Burke, webchick and Jeff Eaton who joined them to talk about the advantages that FormAPI will bring in CCK.

Then I attended the session I had been looking forward for a while: Jonathan Hendler presenting his Semantic Search module on Drupal. I blogged about this previously in the Great success of the Semantic Web at Drupalcon post.

Of course, beside the sessions, there was lots of hacking and socializing. I met loads of people including kkaefer, wundo (one of the CAPTCHA folks), Eric (Development Seed), Kristoff, Fen, Vincent, and many more...

In a nutshell, I think you've clearly understood it, this drupalcon was a blast! Special thanks to the Barcelona Drupal team who did a great job organizing the event.