OpenSourcery

1400 Drupalers on the stairs - photo by Chrys

Having been back from Drupalcon DC for over a week now, I've had a chance to distill a few of my favorite sessions. Below is a list of my favorites, with video and links to more videos. Of course, all the videos are available on Archive.org, thanks to the wonderful work done by the videographers during the conference who worked tirelessly to capture 98 hours (and counting) of footage.

Why I Hate Drupal

James Walker (walkah) promised to take a good, hard look at everything that's wrong with Drupal. Of course all this was a little hard to take at 9:00am on a Friday, but this session nailed some very important points about the drupal way and why it isn't always the best way.

 All videos for this presentation available on Archive.org

A Paradigm for Reusable Drupal Features

The good folks at Development Seed have been developing the idea of Context and Spaces for some time. One very nice thing that falls out of all that work is a way to programatically package and reuse feature sets in Drupal. The session covered the fairly basic idea of a blog, but the potential for this idea is huge, and will have lasting effects on the way we develop Drupal applications.

All videos for this presentation available on Archive.org

More than search; how Apache Solr changes the way you build websites

You may have noticed that search works again on Drupal.org. Thanks to Apache Solr, and Acquia's new search service, any Drupal site can quickly have functional search that doesn't need to be hidden away in the footer, or camaflouged into the theme so nobody actually uses it.

All videos for this presentation available on Archive.org

Practical Semantic Web and Why You Should Care

The semantic web is already here. The W3C made RDFa an XHTML recommendation back in October. Any Drupal site can now be made into a semantic document, and with Drupal 7, this will be even easier. It's a fascinating and down-to-earth tour of the present and future of the semantic web by Boris Mann.

No embedded video available, but all videos for this presentation available on Archive.org