I attended Drupal Camp Vienna last week on Saturday, November 28, 2009. Sessions started on Friday, but I had just gotten off the night train from Strasbourg that day and since I wasn’t so very much into any of the sessions, I skipped (however the presentations on Rules would’ve been really nice).

All in all, I must say Drupal Camp Vienna was really well put together. I attended seven sessions on Saturday, and really got something out of four of them. That means it was definitely worth the trip. Personally I felt a little out of place, as the camp was clearly directed to members of the Austrian Drupal community. To quote the website, the target audience is "Drupal developers and users from Austria and neighbouring countries." Well the US isn’t that far off… right? Even though the primary language of the camp was said to be English, I can’t really imagine having been there without knowing German. But I don’t see anything wrong with that- I mean it is in a German-speaking country right? I was surprised that the primary language was English to begin with. Interestingly enough, two of the sessions I went to that were originally supposed to be in English were done in German, as everyone in the room understood German. I’m gonna talk about the four sessions that really left a mark on me:

Gábor Hojtsy: What’s up with Drupal 7?

This was the first presentation on Saturday, and it was really a great one. I highly recommend you check out this very well done slideshow. Gábor, the Drupal 6 maintainer, talked about new things we will see in Drupal 7; new features like the shortcut bar, the new theme Seven, vertical tabs, CCK integration into core (now it’s called Fields), and image support in core (with ImageCache as well). Drupal 7 is basically going to be awesome… when it’s ready of course.

Gottfried Nindl, Graham Patterson: Migrating osce.org to Drupal

This is the first time I’ve been to a case study presentation, and I can definitely say it will not be my last. Get the slides if you’re interested. I enjoyed the tandem of Gottfried, the developer and Graham, the user-centered usability guy. This particular case study was really interesting to me because they talked about how they dealt with their information architecture, which seems to mainly use Nodequeue and Rules. Rules just keeps popping up around me, I really need to take a look at it… they also introduced a module, Nodereference Explorer which is basically a user interface for referencing nodes (AWESOME). I am definitely going to look into using it.

Christophe Galli : JQuery: Little Library, Big effects

This was the session I was most looking forward to. An introduction to JQuery from square 0. To me, jQuery has always just been some scary variant of JavaScript that I’ve imagined myself never understanding nor being able to properly implement. Since the session was in German, I didn’t get as much out of it as if it had been in English, but nonetheless, I learned about basic implementation. I think lots of effects are loaded with a document.ready function so they become available when the page has loaded. We looked at manipulating the DOM and how jQuery used in conjunction with CSS can bring some awesome results. I am going to do some more digging into jQuery (this presentation gave me the confidence that it could be a fruitful endeavor) so I’ll be posting more up here about that.

Lena Doppel : Version Management with Subversion for Designers

This was a great presentation about what version control means and how it can be useful. I have never used a version control system in my life, but now I find myself tinkering around with a Subversion client for Windows, TortoiseSVN. I am in the process of writing about my experiences and observations so I’ll get more into this topic in a future post. Basically version management is a way to create a “time machine" for your projects so you can trace a project’s development and revert to a previous version if problems come up. Plus much more. You can check out the slides over here.

Yay for Drupal!