Last month the Drupal development community converged on Copenhagen for three days of learning and sharing. The organizers provided users with various venues to present and comment on each other’s work: keynote sessions; presentations; panel discussions; birds of a feather groups; the core developer summit where users could share ideas directly with Drupal’s main contributors; and the coding lounge. Taken together, these sessions allow for a three day Drupal intensive.
The speakers for the formal sessions reveal more than just the program for the conference. Their corporate affiliations include some of the largest and most sophisticated web businesses on the planet. The keynote speakers came from the leading Drupal organizations worldwide. Dries Buyaert, the founder and lead developer for Drupal.org presented first. Buyaert not only invented Drupal, but he also leads one of the foremost Drupal development firms in the world, Acquia. Buyaert’s talk focused on the current state of Drupal.
Rasmus Lerdorf presented the second keynote on Drupal performance topics. Lerdorf, well known within the open source community for leading the PHP project, held a senior position at Yahoo! before joining WePay earlier this year. Finally, the third keynote belonged to Jeremy Keith, who spoke on HTML5 for web developers. Keith has not only written several books on web development, but he also works with a prominent web consultancy, Clearleft.
Beyond the keynote speakers, the rest of the sessions showcased professionals from some of the world’s most influential companies. Microsoft sent a representative, Mark Brown and Acquia had more than a few staff members among the presenters and panelists. Several Drupal consulting organizations occupied high profile space at the conference, including Four Kitchens, ProPeople, NodeOne and Palantir.net. These participants testify to the growth and strength of Drupal as a global development platform.
