Bevan Rudge JavaScript and web technologist

Four years after the last DrupalSouth, and three fantastic Australasian Drupal conferences later, DrupalSouth returns!

DrupalSouth Wellington 14-16 February 2014 is setting up to be a great event! With an awesome venue, large capacity and amazing sponsors, things are well on track.

2010 has been a big year for the Drupal Association. Early in the year new members were brought on and the Board of Directors saw some changes. But most noteworthy is what the Drupal Association did for the Drupal community;

Drupal.org Redesign Completion

Drupal.org has a new look and feel. If you have not seen it (have you been under a rock!?) go check out Drupal.org right now!

It took a few years and many iterations and volunteers, and even that was not enough. This year the Drupal Association came to the party with funding to finish the job. Contracts went to tender and were won by Neil Drumm, Achieve Internet and 3281d Consulting.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the Drupal.org redesign for all your hard work and effort to pull this off. And especially thank you to the Drupal Association for funding the last several miles that could not be covered by volunteers alone.

Drupal.org will never be the same again! Find out what is next for Drupal.org.

DrupalCon San Francisco

Photo by Kathleen Murtagh

How could we ever forget? DrupalCon San Francisco, was epic. By all measures, it was the largest and most spectacular Drupal event yet.

The Drupal Association bootstrapped the funding and locked in critical contracts in order to secure the venue and other services. Many of the DrupalCon San Francisco committee members also serve the Drupal Association. The Drupal Association managed all the finances for the event and coordinated the local team and service providers with the rest of the Drupal community.

And that is just the beginning of what the Drupal Association did to make DrupalCon San Francisco a reality!

Git Migration

Sam Boyer. Photo by Fox

The Drupal Association recognized the urgency to update Drupal.org's version control system (currently CVS).

Drupal has an active, amazingly awesome and amiable community. One of the reasons for this, is that Drupal.org is our home. It has everything Drupal developers need, all in one place. However the last couple of years has seen a trend for contributions to be distributed elsewhere.

The Drupal Association realised that if Drupal.org did not offer modern version control and code-distribution tools, then Drupal.org would cease to be a central repository for contributed Drupal code. And that would ultimately be damaging to the community and the project.

So earlier this year, the Drupal Association hired Sam Boyer to work on detailed planning and foundation work in preparation for the migration of Drupal's gigantic CVS repository, including about 9000 contributed themes modules and other projects, to Git.

This work is underway and is making good progress, but has some way to go yet. Sam is leading the effort but the success of the project is highly dependent on volunteer effort too. You can get involved on g.d.o.

jQuery for Designers and Themers is a fun interactive session at DrupalCon San francisco on getting started with jQuery. It is targeted at designers and themers but is suitable for anyone with a decent understanding of HTML and CSS — no programming experience is necessary. It doesn't include any PHP, and only basic programming concepts are introduced.

The session is early on Tuesday 20 April in room 307 (Commerce guys) at DrupalCon SF at 8:30am.

jQuery for Designers and Themers is a fun interactive session on getting started with jQuery. It is targeted at designers and themers but is suitable for anyone with a decent understanding of HTML and CSS — no programming experience is necessary. It doesn't include any PHP, and only basic programming concepts are introduced.

If you want to see this session at DrupalCon San Francisco you'll need to vote on it here it is at 8:30am on Tuesday 20 April in room 307 (Commerce guys) at DrupalCon SF.

We are excited to announce the DrupalCon Asia-Pacific Organisers group. DCAPO intends to lay foundations that will facilitate international Drupal Conferences (DrupalCons) in the Asia-Pacific region.

CivicActions is in Paris, and we are running some great sessions at DrupalCon Paris 2009;

• Day 2, Wednesday 2 September;
  • How to contribute to Drupal by Stella Power and Bevan Rudge
• Day 3, Thursday 3 September;
  • Projets Multilingues, multilingual internationlized projects too! by Doug Green and others.
  • Hosting meetups, camps, and virtual classes: building the community that builds Drupal by Stella Power and others.
• Day 4, Friday 4 September;
  • jQuery for designers and themers by Bevan Rudge.

We won't be at the job fair this year, but please hunt us down at the conference (we'll be wearing CivicActions t-shirts) if you're looking for work or want to join a first-class international and virtual team of world-changing Drupal developers. You can also contact us through the website for more info or if you want to make sure you don't miss us.

I arrived in Boston yesterday afternoon, absolutely exhausted after Usability testing at UMN -- which was amazing. See the report at 9am on Monday to hear why. It was snowing heavily here this morning. Today I need to prepare for my presentation on Scalable Theming and my parts of the Usability presentation, and try open another US bank account.

Here's my photoblog to date:

I just heard on the lullabot podcast #53 that lullabot is going to Melbourne to run training sessions in April 2008.

With the Drupal Mini Conf after Linux Conference Australia, and Lonely Planet launching their drupal development in Melbourne, it seems like Melbourne is shaping up to be the “Drupal Capital” of the Southern hemisphere.

Please help me get to DrupalCon Boston! Funds will help improve usability in Drupal by allowing me to dedicate more time to various usability projects. Thank you for your support.

[Update: This had the wrong tag to get on Planet Drupal]
As others have noted, the DrupalCon Boston logo contest is closing soon, so you'd better get your votes in.

Here are my personal favourites;

1. About 3rd as far as user-votes go, with 36 points; DB8
   
2. LauraS only just submitted this one, so it's only got a few votes so far: BoSox style by Don Hajicek at pingVision