DrupalCamp Cologne, Germany

This weekend I attended the DrupalCamp in Cologne, Germany. It was again, like in DrupalConf in Szeged, Hungary, and opportunity to meet some very interesting people and to get some insights on Drupal scene in Germany. And to have some real fun too ;-) Around 222+ (this number is not a joke ;-) people have visited this DrupalCamp, and it was for everyone something to learn, – and do some coding: some very important work that affects whole Drupal Community has been done: this effort should push up the new Drupal.org design to Drupal.org a step more to reality. There were a lot of look-and-do-it-yourself sessions that should help newcomers to start with Drupal. Please check http://drupalcamp.de/2009/cologne/session , and drill down the subject of your interests – you will definitely find something for you. Some of the sessions was filmed, so expect to get also live material in short as well. If you have sleepless nights because of questions like "What in a world are the modules that I need", try Module Charts presentation. What could be interesting for some people who already have their first installation of Drupal behind them was for instance hilarious presentation of Drupal theming, or how to use CasheRouter to avoid the traps that default Drupal cashing mechanism can be for some projects. Very interesting Ubercart Training took place on 19 and 20. January (just after the DrupalCamp). Ubercart is the most versatile Drupal solution for e-shops, and on introductory presentation you could get a lot of background, even about some important legal issues about internet shopping solutions. Acquia was of course present (Dries Bytaert was there too). Besides interesting presentation of Integration of ApacheSolr with Drupal (see also http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr), Acquia also presented their support program for Drupal projects and business. Since my visit to DrupalConf in Szeged, Hungary, I was more then convinced that becoming an Acquia partner is crucial for anyone who would like to be involved in some interesting projects (and create commercial effects as well) with Drupal. Sneak preview: Drupal Media Camp in Bern (8-9. May 2009) should be hold in Bern, Switzerland, and should get people from media business and Drupal companies together. I find this an brilliant idea, and MontenaSoft will surely be there too! http://drupalmediacamp.ch/ should provide some more information about it, so check this site from time to time. PS: A note for CEOs around this world, for the case that your chief developer tells you "We have to make an effort to become Acquia partner". Try to think the situation from this angle: programmers usually love coding and bug fixing, this is the reason why they do this job. So try to remember: whenever your developers request something so obscene as giving money for external support company (and you think that they should do it themselves), they must have a very good reason for that. So be smart, listen and learn – you will get the point very fast.