So, other than DrupalCon Szeged just generally being incredibly awesome (I have to admit that this was my favorite DrupalCon to date), I am particularly excited about the Doc sprint we had on the last day. We had a lot of people show up and we got so much stuff accomplished that it is impossible for me to list it all. My best effort is in a list of the top things that came to mind when I did a Doc team mail list brain dump. I do hope that others at the sprint will share their own experiences and thoughts, either in the comments here or in posts of their own. The biggest bummer for me is that I couldn't really manage to extend to the sprint into the evening which would have made it more possible for folks in the Americas to attend.

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Of all of the remixes of the Drupal Song, I think this may be my favorite. Kristof Van Tomme played this at DrupalCon Szeged. It's a hurdy gurdy, man!

Day 2 started out with the Awesome Testing Party, which consisted of a room full of people in pairs learning how to write automated tests. I had hoped for at least 10-20 people there. There were 80+ (!) and together we enjoyed delicious Hungarian pancakes and chocolate. I still have yet to thoroughly review the results, but as of this moment there are 24 of the testing issues bumped, several with patches that need review, and one that even got committed during the session! :)

I didn't make it to the Doc Sprint Planning BoF, but Addi tells me that we had some new faces there, and some great ideas for tasks during the Doc Sprint on Sunday. Should be a lot of fun! :)

Later in the day was the Drupal.org Redesign Panel, where Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt from Mark Boulton Design discussed their strategy and initial findings for the redesign of Drupal.org. It was a fantastic presentation and I think everyone left feeling really excited about things to come. Leisa shared some findings of her initial user research, which included tidbits such as Drupal.org users compensating for the IA problems by navigating the site by typing in URLs manually, which I totally do all the time. ;)

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Whew. So day 1 of Drupalcon Szeged was a whirlwind of fun. Szeged is a very cool town. Lots of things going on, easy to get around and the weather is awesome! I'm not a good note-taker at all but here are the highlights for my day:

During Dries' State of Drupal presentation, he announced that webchick is the new maintainer for Drupal 7. Of course, Angie rocks and is taking the year by storm. It has been so cool to see her recognized so much for all the amazing things she has done and continues to do. I'm so proud to be not only her co-worker, but also her friend. Inspiring to say to the least.

Right after that I headed off to give my Gentle introduction to Drupal coding presentation (a PDF of the slides is on that page too). This was the first time I'd done this presentation and I got lots of really good feedback from folks who attended. It was quite a bit of fun and I look forward to expanding on intro coding types of presentations in the future.

We had ourselves a tasty lunch and then headed back for the second keynote by Rasmus Lerdorf. He went through some very cool stuff about optimizing PHP code and ran some analysis of various frameworks (like Cake, Code Igniter, etc.) and Drupal. We didn't come out so well in the performance side compared to a lot, but Rasmus acknowledged that it wasn't an apples to apples comparison. The Q&A period afterwards was awesome.

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Each release of Drupal, Dries names one individual to share the responsibility of reviewing and committing code directly to the Drupal core.

During the opening presentation at DrupalCon Szeged (August 27, 2008), Dries named the Drupal 7 Co-maintainer: Angela "webchick" Byron! Lullabot is extremely proud to have Angie as a Lullabot, and we'll be doing everything individually and as a team to help Angie make Drupal 7 the most incredible version yet.

Congratulations Angie!

Photo credit: Dries Buytaert (original photo)

Lullabots Addison Berry, Angela Byron, and Nate Haug are headed up to sunny Szeged this afternoon. As usual, we'll be presenting at a bunch of sessions at Drupalcon, which are detailed down below. Looking forward to meeting you there! :)

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Join the team from Lullabot this fall in Portland, Oregon for a week of workshops!

Interested in making your Drupal site look not like a Drupal site? Check out our Theming and jQuery workshop to learn what you need to know to take control of your site's look and feel.

Is hacking PHP code more your speed? Then our Module Development and APIs workshop is for you. We will walk through the Drupal internals and show you how to add the features you need.

Of course we would love to have you with us for both workshops. Get your questions answered and learn the tips, tricks and best practices you need to be successful. Stay the full week and you will get a discount too!

Early bird pricing is in effect until August 22nd, 2008. Please contact us if you have any questions!

Jeff Robbins talks with Merlin Mann (43 Folders and You Look Nice Today), Jon Armstrong (Dooce®), and Ben Durbin about running their successful blogs on Drupal.

Study the techniques and technologies for building successful websites and online communities at the Do It With Drupal Seminar. Join us for Lullabot's largest event ever!

Lullabot is proud to present its first large-scale event, the Do It With Drupal seminar. This three-day event focuses on teaching examples, techniques, and best practices for building successful Drupal projects. Join us December 10 - 12 at the New Orleans Marriott Hotel, where you'll learn from top experts, both within and outside the Drupal community.

• Come to scenic New Orleans
• Examine and dissect successful Drupal sites
• Discover new site-building strategies
• Learn from Drupal's top developers
• Hear from community-building experts
• Connect with other Drupal professionals
• Expand your Drupal knowledge

We're really hoping to make our first large-scale event a success. Join the Facebook event, follow us on Twitter, and help spread the word!

Come learn Views tricks from its author, Earl Miles. Learn about CCK from maintainer Karen Stevenson, or Organic Groups from its creator, Moshe Weitzman. But of course, there's more to building a successful Drupal site than just understanding Drupal's inner workings. And Do It With Drupal focuses on this area, too. Learn about building and nourishing an online community from Flickr's community manager, Heather Champ. Learn about information architecture and usability from Razorfish founder, Karen McGrane. Learn about managing a successful Drupal project from Nicole Lind, project manager for Fast Company and Lifetime Television. And our speaker list continues to grow.

Our sessions will assume very little knowledge of Drupal (so it's perfect for those new to Drupal, or companies currently evaluating Drupal as a solution), but they will still have a lot to offer for those experienced with Drupal who want to learn more about the techniques that the pros are using to execute their projects. Come and ask your questions! Additionally, we'll have lots of social opportunities for attendees and speakers to connect, network, and generally hang out.

Registration for Do It With Drupal opens on Tuesday is open and the first 100 registrants get a big discount off the normal rates.

Go to http://www.doitwithdrupal.com for complete information about the event.

We look forward to seeing you in New Orleans!

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Take your design to Drupal. With the right tools, you can control every aspect of Drupal's display. Join us and we'll show you how!

Interested in extending Drupal to do what you need it to do? Want to learn best practices for doing your development? Spend two days in this interactive workshop and learn all the tricks of the trade.

If you're interested in learning more about how to take full advantage of all of the power and flexibility you've heard Drupal has to offer, then join us for an exciting week in the Pacific Northwest. We'll help you gain the insight you need to make Drupal do exactly what you want.

A lot of energy in the Drupal world goes towards solving complex problems: giving administrators ways to build publishing workflows without writing code, integrating with cool new APIs, automatically translating site content into Klingon... You know. The usual.

With all of that energy focused on complex architectural problems, it's easy to lose sight of the simple solutions that Drupal provides for really common "classic" web problems. This really hit home the other week as I sifted through an old Zip disk with archives of sites I'd built for clients in the heady days of the late 90s. One by one, I started ticking off requests my clients had made that today's site-builders can solve in minutes with Drupal modules -- no wacky configuration, no complicated recipes. Just a simple, "Yes!" when a client says, "Can you...?"

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Jeff Eaton, John VanDyk, James Walker, and Jeff Robbins discuss the web APIs, mashups, and (to a small extent) how all of this relates to Drupal.

On Tuesday night at OSCON, Lullabot's Angie Byron was inducted into the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Hall of Fame for Best Contributor. It's great to see Angie's contributions be recognized not just within the Drupal community, but the larger mindshare of the Open Source community as well. When Leslie Hawthorn, Google's OS Team Manager, stood at the podium to introduce the award, she said: "The recipient of this award is always a source of inspiration". And she is right. If you've ever uttered the words "How do I contribute?" to Angie, you see a wave of excitement come over her as she moves in a little closer, cracks open her laptop and before you know it you're writing your first patch, your first documentation, your first simpletest. It goes on and on.

Angie is a Best Contributor because she inspires countless others to take that jump into Drupal when the first step is otherwise feeling too scary to take. Congrats Angie, you totally deserve it.

The Understanding Drupal DVDs are pressed and we have received them at our shipping facility! All pre-ordered DVDs have been shipped out and should be arriving this week. You can choose between a DVD, a High-Definition digital download, or the "Grab 'em both" option, which gives you both the immediacy of the HD download and a physical DVD that you can use to introduce Drupal to clients, friends, and family. You can order your copy today from the Lullabot store.

Understanding Drupal is designed to serve as a fundamental foundation to people new to Drupal by providing an introduction to Drupal's concepts, capabilities and terminology. It's the first video in the Lullabot Learning Series. Future tutorials will cover topics such as Administering Drupal, and intensives on the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views modules, Theming, Drupal APIs, and more.

And for those of you have yet to acquire a Lullabot t-shirt, we're also selling shirts in the store. Pick one up and wear it while you watch your DVD. The DVD will make you smart. The t-shirt will make you sexy!

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PostgreSQL (often called Postgres) is the Other Major Database for Drupal. It has one of the same strange characteristics that Drupal does: its adherents swear that it is the best thing since sliced bread. In this article, we'll examine how to get PostgreSQL installed, then get a Drupal 6 installation running on top of it.

Assumptions: XCode Tools from your Mac OS X DVD (also available from Apple Developer Connection) are installed. Your copy of PHP has support for Postgres (I used MAMP and it worked out of the box).

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Now that CCK and Views have release candidates for Drupal 6, it's the perfect time to start hammering down on the list of modules that haven't been ported yet. This video demonstrates how anyone with basic copy/paste/modify PHP skills can help port Drupal modules. Really! It's not nearly as bad as you think. :)

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With the release candidates of CCK and Views now available for Drupal 6, the assorted 'Bots are busy updating several chapters of the upcoming Drupal Jumpstart book with the UI and subtle functionality changes in Drupal 6. I'm currently putting the finishing touches on Chapter 8 -- it will walk readers through building a product reviews web site. Along the way, we've decided to use a different contrib theme for each chapter's sample site, to provide some visual flare and help readers quickly spot which site is which when thumbing through screenshots in the book.

For the Product Reviews chapter, I stumbled across an awesome new Drupal 6 theme named Nitobe. It was designed by Shannon Lucas of Four Kitchens Studios, and it's a clean, attractive theme with a lot of potential for customization. Among other things, it offers quick-and-easy selection of custom banner images at the top of the blog. While the release of the Garland theme with Drupal 5 brought us color customization, not many themes have made it easy for users to pick custom header images without doing their own CSS tweaks. Now I want to use it on all of my random sites...